Somewhere in the last year, a bunch of us who hadn’t shipped real code in years quietly started shipping again. Not reviewing it. Not architecting it in a doc and handing it off. Actually building it. And loving it.
I lead software for a living. That means my days are meetings, roadmaps, hiring, unblocking people, and saying “no” a lot. The last time “writing code” was my actual job was a long time ago. I never stopped being able to code — I stopped having the time to code. At least in my day job. There’s a difference, and every engineering leader reading this feels it in their bones.
Great. The “why don’t you just…” idiots are “writing” code again and not reviewing it.
What could go wrong?
Who needs human review, the AI can do that? Who needs human coding, the AI can do that? Who needs human testing, the AI can do that? Who needs human requirements engineering, the AI can do that.
80% uptime. How did this happen?
The AI agents need to sleep, too, so the downtime is expected
Still five nines of uptime — 79.9999%.
Yeah, I thought the blog post was gonna be about horror stories, because even the greatest senior/architect/whatever will push absolute garbage into your codebase, if they don’t have the time to familiarize themselves with how the code actually works.
Even if it’s some isolated component, if they implement it without explaining the what and why to others, then no one else can maintain or debug that. And you do not want to rely on your super important guy to have the time to fix things when production grinds to a halt.
At this point I think we’re moving past maintaining projects. Tech debt is no longer going to be paid off; management will just suggest a complete rewrite using AI as soon as issues get too complex for a junior dev with Copilot to figure out. It’s going to be a mess.
I
feelfear the same. Problem is, when it’s too complex to maintain for a junior dev/intern with AI, it’s probably also too complex for a rewrite/redesign with AI…Could you qualify what you mean by “idiots”? The author and the examples he gives - Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Garry Tan - are all very experienced software engineers.
By idiots I mean the people who haven’t engineered in years.
The subject of the article.
Seems self-evident.
Well that depends on how quickly you believe that engineering skills atrophy without use.
Though, I’d argue programming is like riding a bike. Even after a long break, it’s not difficult to get back into it, as the fundamentals for programming haven’t changed.
If they’ve stopped engineering, then they probably weren’t good in the first place, what skills they had are rusty, and their knowledge is out of date.
I’d argue programming languages are like natural languages. Use it or lose it.
I don’t mind writing code and having copilot review it. I can tell a clanker to fuck off in satisfying ways that I couldn’t with a junior dev.
…and there’s the one time in 10 when it sees something and I can make a minor improvement.
Still, the “Oh crap, my code actually is broken” monents are few and far between.