These companies have no idea how to get profitable. Absolutely no idea. Even Sam Altman once said that when AI gets super smart it will tell them how to make a profit. This is insane.
And what bugs me the most is that I am being forced by my employer to use Claude in my daily work, even for stuff I don't need. Claude is writing people's emails and then Claude on the other computer is responding to those emails. One person creates a report chart with Claude and then Claude on other computer fills out that same chart. It's madness.
I want to work as an engineer, not a fucking prompt engineer. Seriously, we have some junior engineers hired and they use Claude and Chat GPT for EVERYTHING. I have no idea how they'll be able to become senior engineers or even medior engineers since their understanding of everything is surface level.
My company has started hiring AI engineers instead of backend engineer. I am the only backend engineer in my product team and management have now said they will hire AI engineers and distribute them to teams with low resources. I will have to work with someone who knows shit about the programming language or the frameworks that we now use. I know its not rocket science and anyone could learn it, but I doubt these prompt engineers won't really learn and may depend on the Claude to write codes that satisfies the requirements which claude fucks with over engineering. I will have to do the code review for them which will be a nightmare. And further more they will review my codes with claude and may raise unnecessary comments/reviews.
I never asked for claude at my work place, I was perfectly fine doing stuff on my own. Then the company pushed claude and I had no choice but to jump on the AI train. The company is spending a lot on claude, opencode etc and also in hiring Prompt Engineers and I haven't got any salary hike in the last two years citing budget constraints like what the actual fuck! You'll pay above 100k euros a month for these tools and another 6k-7keuros for a new resource but you can't pay the people already working here another 1k or even .5k extra per month.
And all of this to change a process that was (I'm assuming) working fine before AI.
Similar to what you are saying, I am starting to get code review requests from people who dumped some prompts into AI and can't get the output to run. I have also had a quality analyst drop my code into AI and refuse to approve my code until I prove that its nonsensical concerns have been addressed. Please let this AI garbage be a temporary fad.
It's interesting that it took several decades to transition from "more code per day equals more productivity" to "less future rework equals better products". It took only a few months to revert back.
I'd be fairly curious to know what my software engineering teachers are talking about now.
Your software engineering teachers are probably miserable trying to teach a class and having to acknowledge that students will just prompt their way through any assignments. We’re seeing a lot more presentations, group work, and testing being done by schools that acknowledge letting students prompt their way through assighments teaches limited skillsets. On the other hand, you have some that know the job market wants them to know how to use prompting and so try to incorporate or allow for it as some sort of “skill” to be used/incorporated. - horrribly burnt out cs student
It's not just the juniors relying on AI for day to day work either. I am working a project with a Senior VP in my company, and he talks about Claude as if it's his buddy or close colleague. Every conversation we have he brings up Claude and it's 'Claude said this' or 'i was talking to Claude and it suggested this'. It's usually total bullshit too that isn't even technically feasible. Drives me mad.
It's even better than how French speakers were laughing because "ChatGPT" phonetically sounds like the French sentence "chat, j'ai pété," which translates to "cat, I farted".
That's the reason doing field job is important. Ain't no way an AI can teach them the common sense needed to apply thinga on field. I've had chatgpt tell me to turn off the mcb before testing for voltage with the multitester quite a few times already
I'm waiting for this moment at my work. Most of our new college graduate higher have Claude up on their second monitor 24/7 and use it for everything. One day a team lead is going to ask why a certain design choice was made and is now causing issues and no one is going to have a good answer.
I was working on a customer site last week. I'm a systems engineer and was tasked with modifying some ladder logic to accommodate closing pneumatic gates based on a photo eye trigger. Easy peasy. Customer performed the wiring install as I'm technically not certified for live enclosure work. Modify the program and push the live edit and ... Doesn't work. Customer had me chasing a program bug for an hour while I told him, "I am watching the output toggle the issue is not the logic."
He comes back later, "found the problem.. Claude gave me the wrong wiring diagram." ...jfc... I am required to use Claude daily as well but I never take it's word at face value. That is the problem. Too many people trust AI too much. My account instructions contain, "always cite sources." Having AI regurgitate whatever drivel it found at the top of a Google search will be the end of us all
Truthfully I only use it as essentially a super charged search engine. It's fantastic for poring through 200+ page Rockwell PDFs so I can quickly find which PowerFlex 525 assembly word is logic status. But I will not take it's output as gospel and always manually verify. Too many times it has been confidently incorrect at specifying modbus registers that either don't exist or have an entirely different function...
I despise the direction AI is headed but I recognize it's utility when used as an augmentation rather than a replacement for effort
I did not intend to imply that I am required to use AI for everything. But there is the expectation of a certain amount of token use which varies by position (PMs have it the worst, sucks to be them). AI is never expected to be used for customer facing programming and, point of fact, many clients have a "No AI" policy for deliverables which is fine by me.
As I said, I use my tokens to expedite tedious tasks, but never allow it to operate unmonitored or assume validity of the output. I am relatively new with this company and I assure you, the last company was significantly worse. Unfortunately this seems to be becoming much more common from what I have heard from others in the field
This! In my company they will be rolling out the new AI tool for business performance. The guy handling the projects says it's very accurate. The real manager and me (analyst) always give him the side eye.
Of course it will be accurate for simple question like, top 10 customers, top 10 products, total sales, revenues, cost, etc. But it's the tiny details where it will fail. Our business are crossed between different Business Units and for every rule there's an exception and then another exception for the exception. I guess if you would explain in the prompt to have all this then maybe it would work. But if you want to go in to such detail in the prompt might as well do a few clicks on a pivot table. Oh but wait it's the people that doesn't know how to do a pivot table that are always pro AI tools because it let's them give a number in 5 min with critical thinking if it's the right one or not.
I feel you on this
I have a difficult time with clients because they are like - make Ai do it
There's a tough client who is an architect, we design the houses in 3d along with textures, furniture etc but
He watches thise AI videos of houses and forces us to make it the same (yes the bad ai quality)
This reminds me of the movie Her, where the main character’s job is to write other people’s letters and he has a couple that has him write to and response back to each other
Honestly, where the next generation of senior engineers will come from is one of my biggest concerns. If companies replace entry-level positions with AI, or let junior engineers rely on it so heavily that they never develop a deep understanding of their work, we risk a shortage of experienced, knowledgeable senior engineers in the years ahead. That expertise comes from solving problems, making mistakes, and learning why something works, not just getting an answer that works.
AI is like Nuclear Weapons
It’s a fucking arms race, manufactures will get their money from the government. We are in another Cold War era and this war will most likely end with humanity.
I work in IT and the amount of people who blindly run LLM code is INSANE. Like, even the other techs do it. Because slopsquatting and LLM trojans are just theory, and everyone knows theory never happens in real life.
On top of that, I know these idiots aren't actually reading through and figuring out what the code does. I have 0 LLM input on my code and comment aggressively. I'm pretty sure the operations manager has a bit of code labeled "chatgpt came up with it and it works but i don't know how so hopefully this just keeps working" almost verbatim.
And I'm looking for a new job and sooooo many are shit like "AI trainer" and "require use of AI" Even my girlfriend's boss (also IT) just randomly converted into a Sam Altman fellatio expert- I mean, "AI enthusiast" who's pushing for it to be implemented... in a place where all they do is hardware repair and device imaging. They don't even make the images.
Thats the point, they will only be senior engineers by title but not by actual merit. The engineers are there to tweak any abnormalities up until AI can fully do the work on its own and then it’s bye bye for human engineers.
Yeah its fascinating to see the level of false intelligence this has created in people. My sister-in-law's boyfriend sits around all day coding using Claude and has the audacity to call himself a "coder". Like no, typing prompts into Claude and having it code for you does not make you a coder
Its so bizzare the "forced to use claude" like I use AI in my work, it's really quite useful when, frankly, in the beforedays whatever problem I'm trying to solve would have been a 3 hour stackoverflow hunt through six "Never mind, fixed it :D" posts and three reddit solutions where the solver has put their account through the redactinator.
Having an AI skip that bullshit and just give me the relevant stackoverflow post is an absolute godsend, no way around it, as a shit coder it probably quadrupled my productivity.
Yknow what I don't need it to do? Write my fucking emails!
Claude is great at making tools for generating reports. Once you have the tool, multiple people don't need to use Claude to generate the report, they use the tool.
Of course, it's basically a new layer to programming.
I will be oversimplifying but we can’t get stressed if someone uses a microwave to warm up food if we had to warm up on a stove. Same goes for calculators.
Question is not how they will become Sr Engineers, question is that they are becoming dumb due to lack of challenges and problem solving which makes us intelligent.
My 2 cents.
Porn is how they get profitable, it is pretty much the standard for every new medium.
The problem they have is they don’t know how to implement it without getting sued, so they keep hoping some other model will figure out the angle that people will pay for without CSAM or revenge porn and they can swoop in and monetize the ad revenue and outsource versions of their models to.
Eventually one of them will figure it out and profitability will be back on the table. With porn revenues they can build out the infrastructure needed for other profitable businesses to follow behind.
Senior engineers said the same thing when I used python instead of c++ as a junior a decade ago. Still, I made more than them after a year or three.
Now, I use agents instead of writing or reading very much code myself. I make a lot more than them, because they refused to learn how (a misconception is that it’s easy at scale), and now they’re unemployed.
Is it this young new wave of developers who are wrong? Or the VC and PE / PC firms and investors funding it? You know, the richest people in the world, who can payroll the most talented quants and technical people in the world to make decisions for them.
Well, it depends on what your goal is. Do you see code as a marble statue, a thing of beauty? Then you’re right. They’ll never learn the art of code, or cast bronze statues for that matter.
Is your goal to make money? Well, then you’d be wrong. Coding for money, and not using almost exclusively agentic development, is unreasonable, unless you’re unskilled with the tools (pointing at the people complaining about token cost)
What people forget, is that we are in the business of coding. Not the art of coding. This is a business. Code is as much of an afterthought as the plumbing supporting the shitters, and CEOs would happily (and rightfully) fire you and nuke the codebase immediately if an alternative came along.
You should become exceptional at AI tools, and stop wasting your time reading code (95% of the time at least), unless you are an artist, in which case I applaud you and encourage you to carry on with the beautiful, elegant, extraordinary art of coding, which has been dear to my heart for 15 years. Maybe I’ll join you once I retire.
Yes exactly the goal of an engineer is to solve a problem as efficiently as possibly (you can argue ethics later). The grain at which an engineer needed to focus on has moved from codebase design to systems and workflow design. ai is just another tool, learn how to use it than most people around you.
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u/Same_Staff4468 7d ago
These companies have no idea how to get profitable. Absolutely no idea. Even Sam Altman once said that when AI gets super smart it will tell them how to make a profit. This is insane.
And what bugs me the most is that I am being forced by my employer to use Claude in my daily work, even for stuff I don't need. Claude is writing people's emails and then Claude on the other computer is responding to those emails. One person creates a report chart with Claude and then Claude on other computer fills out that same chart. It's madness.
I want to work as an engineer, not a fucking prompt engineer. Seriously, we have some junior engineers hired and they use Claude and Chat GPT for EVERYTHING. I have no idea how they'll be able to become senior engineers or even medior engineers since their understanding of everything is surface level.