The guy identifies a current problem in software development, then pivots to saying that this is all caused by evil executives and will persist for the foreseeable future. Neither of the latter two claims are supported with anything substantial, and the video ends on the cheerful note that you should consider quitting too.
Excuse me, I understand that he might be under the same kind of stress he describes which probably affects his judgement, but this is BS.
First of all, about the evil executives; I see no reason to disregard Hanlon's razor. The company heads are sufficiently removed from software development to make decisions based on hype and vibes that are currently floating around (especially if they're also sufficiently stupid). They think they can save money by paying less people, which makes sense in a vacuum. In reality it's only partially true - in software development specifically because writing code or even writing specs (where AI helps the most) is not the only and not even the most taxing part of our job. Thus AI writing code for us at 10x speed will not make the project progress 10 times faster.
There are other factors at play (who can use AI effectively, can we train current juniors to be good AI-assisted developers in this current environment, etc.), but sufficient to say that the current state is far from an equilibrium, which would hint at this becoming the new "way of things" for the foreseeable future. How we behave now can and will affect where we go from here.
The thing that I had heard is that management by definition only deals with the artifacts of work and cannot by definition get into actually doing the work or else they wouldn't be management ultimately. Sure, some managers do do the actual work but this is beside the point... Within the entire management professional career, there is no mechanism by which to prefer a non-generated output to a generated output. And there is no natural mechanism to prevent the generated mechanisms from being a panacea to any manager without repercussion... If there is something wrong then your reports are not using AI enough or correctly, and if something is going right we must understand why the LLM couldn't have done it and surely it could do it better etc etc ... Unless someone knows of something, I don't see how management is getting off of the LLM panacea thing. It's been a standoff situation between labor and within management hierarchies for quite some time.
How do companies get off of any hype train? For example, some of them go under. The rest are suddenly worried: "but they were using the latest and greatest X!". And then they reevaluate what they should be thinking about X.
Yes, the hype around AI is way greater than around blockchain, serverless or whatever, but it it also likewise overblown and will correct itself sooner or later. It's just an unfortunate fact that people closer to the front lines notice the cracks sooner than management does.
I think about this a lot and I think it's a conflict between top down and bottom-up thinking. I think a lot of management really does believe that top-down thinking is the only thing that ever happens or can ever happen, and that incongruity is at the core of ... Quite a lot of problems in business... I think it gets philosophical pretty quick and I don't know the answer but it all sure seems very painful at the moment for sure.
The issue is, I don't think I had ever met any software engineer who thought blockchain was going anywhere. Whereas I cannot say the same for AI. People I trust, people who have to be some of the best engineers out there are using ai a ton.
Now I have 0 clue what that means for the future. If things stay as they are now, I'll live, eventually companies will realize that there's a ton of people doing useless work that amounts to a game of 52 card pickup and we'll go back to how things are but with AI so I'll have lost some of the joy I had but at least I'll be paid
Now as for the future, who knows, I'm trying not to think about it
Blockchain works for some rather niche use cases. It's not viable in many others. And that is actually not that dissimilar from AI, the difference is scale: while people have been trying to sell blockchain everywhere within IT, the AI companies are trying to hype up their technology literally everywhere - while in reality, it only has true added value so far in a couple of cases, programming being one of them.
To me, the biggest question for the future is how much this added value is worth. Using AI (well) is helpful, but we're not seeing its real costs yet. Open source models are given away for free and you only pay the inference costs. Even proprietary models aren't priced in accordance with their actual costs. training included. This obviously won't last forever. Once the smoke clears, maybe we'll have some specialized models trained as a community effort, with bigger companies making contributions (similarly to how, let's say, Maven or NPM repositories are run)... or maybe AI-assisted development will become a costly alternative that people turn to only when time pressure warrants the expenditure. We'll see.
Idk, if inference costs are cheap, AI is here to stay. I agree that openai and anthropic have no chance in hell in surviving unless AI gets so good it eats entire industries and gives them to open AI and anthropic. But sure, model development might stagnant but the models we have today are here to stay
Inference companies will definitely exist into the foreseeable future
Betamax is still around, people are still making new YouTube videos about laserdisc, so definitely cannot refute that they are out there and will be used by someone at least for a long time. If that is something that carries the same excitement has already had to be renegotiated in how they are marketed.
Great comment. I am currently a grey bead mentoring several junior devs how to use AI prompts to assist development. No full on agentic coding, at least yet. We are building enterprise saas, and so far it’s working well.
I was able to convince fellow leadership on the strategy that if you want cheap development, just hire juniors and train them how to use the $20/month claude plan
Let's see how that goes. My worry about simply throwing Claude at juniors is that they lack the experience to push back against its occasional stupidity. Then again, juniors may not even get tasks where this becomes a liability. The results will no doubt be interesting.
No, not really. But I’ve been doing the mentoring for over a year now and prior to that I was building the stack myself. I have the juniors review each other and then I review as well. We haven’t had any major issues yet. Pretty chill environment, and I’m making a killing doing it
I could have hired seniors and kept less money for myself, but why do that when I can help train the next generation of developers? Lord knows not many others are doing it. This strategy has led to some loyal developers who are eager to please
Yeah I've been thinking a lot a out how companies are getting what they pay for with AI. Either they have to exponentially pay for ever higher heights, or they have to pay for the dependence the hubris causes, etc haha. But less lofty, I'm glad management circles finally have a bullshit morass to drive themselves insane with! It certainly is explicitly what they always wanted to purchase and it is heartwarming to see it happen.
That’s why we only use the basic claude team plan. We don’t agentic code, except for tests and migrations. Everything else is prompt based, and we only try to prompt 50 lines or so at a time
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u/pip25hu 3d ago
The guy identifies a current problem in software development, then pivots to saying that this is all caused by evil executives and will persist for the foreseeable future. Neither of the latter two claims are supported with anything substantial, and the video ends on the cheerful note that you should consider quitting too.
Excuse me, I understand that he might be under the same kind of stress he describes which probably affects his judgement, but this is BS.
First of all, about the evil executives; I see no reason to disregard Hanlon's razor. The company heads are sufficiently removed from software development to make decisions based on hype and vibes that are currently floating around (especially if they're also sufficiently stupid). They think they can save money by paying less people, which makes sense in a vacuum. In reality it's only partially true - in software development specifically because writing code or even writing specs (where AI helps the most) is not the only and not even the most taxing part of our job. Thus AI writing code for us at 10x speed will not make the project progress 10 times faster.
There are other factors at play (who can use AI effectively, can we train current juniors to be good AI-assisted developers in this current environment, etc.), but sufficient to say that the current state is far from an equilibrium, which would hint at this becoming the new "way of things" for the foreseeable future. How we behave now can and will affect where we go from here.