I respectfully, but completely disagree. Right now with sonnet 3.5 + cursor ide, I'm not writing that much of my own code at my FAANG job. I am generating a ton, passing in documentation from internal libraries, iterating on the result. Most of the time, I just accept its changes.
This is going to rapidly happen. All we need are a few more model releases, not even a step function improvement
Not everyone has the same experience with the replaceability of their job role as you do. I've tried pretty hard and it just doesn't work for me. Admittedly I'm in compilers which makes it a bit harder, but just in general there are a lot of engineers who are in the same relative position.
> I'm not writing that much of my own code at my FAANG job.
> Most of the time, I just accept its changes.
This speaks more about the problems at FAANG, other companies, etc than AI vs a human developer. And AI isn't the real fix.
Are we just repeating things 100x a day or is it still so chaotic and immature? Or are we implying that AI is at a point where it's writing Google Spanner from scratch and you're able to review and confirm it passes transactional tests?
Right - "most of my work can be done by Sonnet 3.5" doesn't exactly conjure up an image of a high level or challenging job. It seems the challenge with FAANG companies is getting hired, not the actual work most people do there.
We went from "it's useless because..." - "it outputs gibberish" to "it just copypastes" to "it only works for simple things" to "it can't make Google Spanner from scratch".
1. Let's assume it was smart and can update a field spanning 1000s of microservices to deliver this new feature. Is this really something you should celebrate? I'd say no. At this point there should have been better tooling and infrastructure in place.
2. Is there really infinite CRUD to add after >10 years? In the same organization where you need >100s of developers all the time? 1s where you'd ignore code reviews and "just accept its changes"? Whether I write code or my colleagues etc I'd have a meaningful discussion about the proposed changes, the impacts and most likely suggest changes because nothing is perfect.
So again, it's about the environment, the organization or at least this individual case where coding isn't just about adding some lines to a file. And that's with AI or not.
I can easily make Claude freak out and run into limits. Claude is amazing but it only works at the abstraction level you ask of it, so if you ask it to write code to solve a problem it'll only solve that immediate problem, it doesn't have awareness of any larger refactorings or design improvements that could be made to improve what solution is even possible.
Don't you still have to explain your requirement really well to it, in a lot of detail? In a terse language like Python, I might as well just write the code. In a verbose language like Java, perhaps there is more of a value in detailing the requirement.
If you're writing something specific to your particular problem, or thinking through how to structure your data, or even working on something tough to describe in words like UI design, it probably is easier to just code it yourself in most high-level languages. On the other hand, if you're just trying to get a framework or library to do something and you don't want to spend a bunch of time reading the docs to remember the special incantations needed to just make it do the thing you already know it can do, the AI speeds things up considerably.
Not really, most of the changes are straightforward. Also, alot of the time it writes better syntax than i would. Sometimes I write a bunch of psuedo code and hsave it fill in the detials, then write the tests
I use the same workflow. It’s taking a while for me to learn to sense when it’s getting off track and I need to start a new chat session in general it’s pretty amazing if given very clear guidance at the right moments.
How would you characterize the type of applications/code you are working on? Can you give an example? How much of your work is architecture/design (software engineering), and how much more like grunt work or systems integration just coding stuff up ?
This is going to rapidly happen. All we need are a few more model releases, not even a step function improvement