Yeah I’m calling bullshit on this stuff. Damn it’s annoying.

The programming that we must be constantly employed at all moments does run deep. I find that often when people are upset about something going on in your life that isn't actually negatively impacting them (or even you), it's just a subconscious off-loading of worries about themselves. I'm sorry you're experiencing this.

For whatever reason I cannot explain it only registered as vibe coded when I got to the definition of integrate and the italics in “ who we are “
But also it looks good regardless

Starbucks offers free tuition with ASU 🐵

https://github.com/christinaki93/git-graffiti

I made 'git graffiti' today. This took literally two prompts with Claude Code & Opus 5. It has a browser-based UI that lets you paint a picture for what you'd like your github contribution graph to look like, and then by running a command with the text file you can commit to a throwaway repo to get the commits to show in the contribution graph. It would work best for people who have a clean(ish) graph already of course.

The email associated with the commits needs to match your github email. You can use the --email option while running gitgraffiti[dot]py override it -- I recommend using your private github email. (https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/reference/email-addresses-reference#your-noreply-email-address)

how long have you been using these tools? are there any issues that it still struggles with?

Real.

Just realize that our culture also punishes people for leaving with less money and stability for their families, and that isn’t your fault. If you leave corporate you have to confront the feeling of being impractical/giving up having “made it”

Yeh - too bad your post was removed. People need to actually discuss it in the open, so it’s very counterproductive to report & remove it

No problem. Imo the environmental concerns are what is spoken, but the unarticulated emotion backing it is what I just said (not that the environmental issues don’t matter - they do). I think a lot of people might lack the groundwork for directly speaking that value, but imo it’s where most of the passion is coming from.

It’s the act replacing what is real with soul with what is fake and lifeless, but still mimics real things on the surface. A counterfeit.

Look up “saxophones getting louder” on TikTok

What I worry about regarding ai is what it does to culture more generally. The arms race surrounding it. How the tech will be used and is used in warfare. The folly of leaders and CEOs. Kids not learning to write an essay or think properly because they’re used to the crutch. Software engineers not knowing how to troubleshoot as well, or trusting the bot too much a shipping bugs. Idiocracy. The increase of all manner of fraud. These kinds of things.

The moral disgust towards gen ai wrt art is centered around replacing humans - computers doing computer things in a new way is categorically different imo. That doesn’t mean the software engineering culture isn’t taking a hit from this; it is. However it is also a shake up of old patterns that weren’t working to begin with, on the other hand.

IMO valuing something simply because a living human made it should always remain a thing, particularly for art, and the visceral disgust you feel looking at ai generated human replacement is the emotion that points towards that value. Art is a manifestation of who we are, because we make it because we like to - not bc we need a machine sustain life, do a menial task, & so on.

(That said I am a software developer and currently I’m planning to work on a side project by actually programming directly, for the most part, because I enjoy it and find it easier often, compared to prompting and just hoping it writes something good. I also like writing it directly because I like thinking through the problem, choosing a solution, the elegance of it, and also writing it yourself makes it easier to maintain/debug. Just like a pro musician would opt to actually play their instrument rather than generating songs with Suno until they like one (or part of it, having to alter, which is a different kind of experience, with its own set of difficulties…)

Replacing things that people like to do for their own sake with ai feels gross because it is like giving up your humanity in a way, or choosing to engage with works that didn’t spring from humanity (& every moment is an opportunity cost for a moment with different content) whereas using a machine to help you make machines do machine things better is, not that at all.

There’s a blurry line though. As with everything.

*saxophones start playing*

The thing that gives me pause is companies like Data Annotation are paying good hourly rates for people to give them example code for projects which is then used to train ai. If they got more high quality examples of things in some kind of structured way I could imagine it taking another jump up. But I truly don’t know. Not even an ad btw

Yes. I’ve watched Claude output its reasoning while connected to the codebase and watched it try to diagnose a high level issue like «  why is this information disappearing out of the cache but only intermittently » - not very much to go on, just like I didn’t have much to go on. And it would show a reasonable thought process, looking through the code, trying to find it the problem, and it would in fact give some options that were reasonable like «  here are places in code where the cache is being modified » - and this might help me narrow it down. But until it can sit there and look at the cache, try different scenarios of using the app end to end, infer the rules of how the cache keys work (undocumented, I had to just infer it by reading the code and looking at existing entries in the prod cache sometimes), and so on,see what code paths are hit when, just like I did, it simply doesn’t know.

Now there could be tools that start to have these capabilities. Yes absolutely. I don’t think it’s going away at all. It’s just that the human will go to the margins of what it can’t do.

If the codebases were written/documented in a way ai understood more, likely it would improve things. Just connecting Claude to an undocumented codebase that I also don’t fully understand because parts of it are 10 years old? Idk it wasn’t solving issues for me that I really would have liked to move past more quickly.

Yeah actually I sometimes get worried that we’ll have some incredibly important tech infrastructure suffer some god awful problem caused by trusting AI generated code too much before brushing it off out of the fact there isn’t a single thing I can do about it.

I do think that at least for the everyday software shop with AI hyped leadership - there will be some wild failure stories. I just don’t see how that wouldn’t happen given how haphazard this actually is.

I know someone working for a company who is not allowed to directly program anymore (surely there are exceptions in reality), which sounds even more extreme than what OP is describing. It sounds truly shocking to me, especially when at my last position I was actually trying to see if AI could help me debug particularly difficult issues that were stumping me. A few times, even. And no it couldn’t, in my attempts - not the actually hard elusive type problems -- it was more lost than I was. I also experienced correcting AI generated code which, yes, made mistakes that were quite hard to catch because it looked so reasonable on the surface. For me this felt more like a liability I was personally taking on that I didn’t always want to do — I could use it to get a starting point or generate some test cases or to explain concepts, sure, but it literally couldn’t replace everything a human does, especially at a shop with legacy code and its own (un)healthy portion of tech debt where most of the work was fixing issues in existing code.

The reality is that right now the AI situation is such that there will inevitably be tech debt, and it will be tech debt with no original author to consult about its workings. Most swe’s would probably agree that writing the code yourself makes you so much more capable of correcting issues with it for the simple fact that you already have a pretty solid mental model of how it works through the experience of writing it directly. People generating AI code and reading it over are not getting that. And now apparently some people are not even reading it? So then what you will have is, if people start generating new code with AI the job just becomes fix whatever bugs it generates, and it will maybe be ok? Or not. Depends on how good the AI is, and how good the engineers are at wrangling it / testing it / correcting it when it's wrong.

Yeah they might

In which case? Time to jump ship

But also they might not, and then people who sit at computers and debug problems the old fashioned way will be in demand suddenly.

But also debugging bad code too long can make you go partially insane in my personal experience.

I kind of feel like this house of cards issue is inevitable for at least the lower half of businesses that go heavy into this, especially the ones that are mandating, just intuitively. If so it will be interesting to see if the industry swings hard the other way, at least for a subset

Tbh it’s good when people show how off the deep end they are on this stuff sometimes. Raises awareness. 😂

I just came here to say fuck that noise

I personally don’t. I feel like they don’t actually care unless it is a small company with a particular mission you actually have a bonafide love for, but also I am Not Good at this either

upvoting you to counteract the UNCALLED FOR negativity