> I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.
This is going to be a net negative on software quality for people who take this up, in my opinion.
I call out Boris but I also don't think he's being malicious. He's at the center of an important technological revolution and it would be hard not to get excited. I just wished he advocated for a more balanced and a realistic perspective.
The sad part is that this technology is incredible. It’s us choosing to turn it into a slop cannon (and the labs sure seem to encourage this).
I want to leave the industry as soon as I can.
The worst part is that I'm not exhausted from my work, I've been through a heavy burnout before and had to adapt my ways of working to not fall into that kind of exhaustion again. This is different, it's not a pressure to deliver anything specifically, no stupid deadlines, it's so much more vague than any other kind of work pressure I've been through in the past 20+ years that it makes it much harder to find ways to keep my head straight.
It's exhausting to be reviewing boatloads of PRs of very varied quality. I have relegated myself to block merges at the first sign of a bad/weird design instead of trying to understand why it might have needed a compromise in the design, many times people couldn't even explain to me why something was written the way it was... After many "it was Claude that decided this way" it became so tiring that I don't even ask anymore, I just leave a comment on the first blocker I find and reject the PR. If people are not putting any effort to review it before throwing it at me I will just return the favour.
The journey was as important as the destination if not more because it gave confidence in oneself, it made us grow. I mean to suggest, coding for the sake of coding
"I wish to code for myself, nothing else": (I had written this somewhere else on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609962
If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company and have somewhat say in it. Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it? I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.
It is my opinion that there's more hidden power in engineers that even we fail to realize and instead some of us like you are wanting to leave the industry, what a sad tail of tragic events, when the tech behind AI is good and could be helpful but oh holy, we are butchering it up so badly in some/so many regards perhaps even under the influence of AI companies and their messaging surrounding it.
We've tried it where I work at. People put effort to compile studies, to collect testimonials, catalog and organise the strengths and weaknesses based on engineers' experiences with the tooling.
The result was the person driving this effort getting asked by HR, their manager, and their skip manager to stop with the anti-AI rhetoric, that AI is the future of the industry and if not rolled out in this way we will be left behind.
> I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.
The C-level doesn't seem to care, they believe to be in an existential risk where any price paid to rollout these tools as wide and broadly as possible across the whole org is small compared to being left behind.
It's all fueled by executives and investors anxieties, there's very little left for reason when fear takes over.
Because it’s being pushed by the c-suite and board, so most people aren’t in a position to push back. And it’s a quasi-religion now, so even pushing back at all can result in being branded as a “skeptic”.
People do raise concerns, though. And the responses aren’t very satisfactory. For example, the biggest concern that has been raised thus far is open PRs, and the answer has always been that all we need is AI code review.
Oh, AI is so good but it is so bad!
You guys got some severe personality split you'd better hurry up fixing.
From a market perspective, he's acting completely rationally in his own interests. Bottom line is that these companies need to do whatever they can to keep growing token consumption because that's their goal.
If the nation's drinking skyrocketed, we wouldn't be sitting here wondering why the CEO of Budweiser isn't advocating for temperance. His job is to move kegs, just like Boris' job is to move tokens.
That is, in fact, an important thing to do. It turns those externalities into public perception, which turns into market forces that adjust the behavior, if you want to think purely in market terms.
The analogy with Budweiser is not a good one. This would be the CEO of Budweiser actively pushing more drinking while the nation's drinking was increasing. And yes, people would be right, and effective, to oppose this (see Oxycontin).
As soon as you open up the externalities discussion, the wider question of increasing electricity prices and turbocharging global warming comes up, not to mention RAM prices. AI is a machine for turning negative externalities into stock prices.
The point is, blaming them is pointless, if it wasn't them it would be someone else. How do we react?
[Edit: was thinking of the ‘CEO’. This doesn’t apply as cleanly to Boris.]
I suspect that the reason Anthropic is generating such developer-negative, toxic, insensitive influencer sentiments like these from Boris has to do with Dario being a fantasy-fiction-reading quasi-mascot who thinks it's his job to tell scary stories, who is being allowed to do just that by a sibling who perhaps prefers he's not involved in the day-to-day.
But we would start to wonder if the CEO of Budweiser started advocating binge drinking.
However, I think I once was a pretty good dev, and AI use is slowly turning me into a slop cannon. The temptation to use AI in place of real understanding is too strong.
I'm sure you'll say I was always dead weight, but I just want you to consider the possibility that AI might erode the capacity for good devs to handle discomfort, turning them into bad devs.
Previously, everyone was limited in their blast radius but now AI has levelled the playing field where even a single slop cannon be the bottleneck of PR reviews or even the company itself if not right now, then later, as the codebase turns sloppified which will have its ramifications later on.
Everyone might suggest with the diagram to be the turbo brains but I believe that we also need to reduce the metrics that slop cannon is achieving (surprisingly LOC which is a pretty bad indicator) and to be more reasonable throughout in realizing such bottlenecks and to follow good security practices throughout.
And I don't think it's smug or dickish. I like AI and I encourage even inexperienced software developers to use it. There's just no denying that the slop cannon phenomenon is still a very real phenomenon.
I feel like this is the actual problem, but it's not being talked about enough.
Logically, it shouldn't matter how a piece of code was written. It either meets our engineering standards or it doesn't. That's what code review is for.
But what has actually happened is that, because we have AI now, many organizations have normalized practices that weren't normal before, like submitting 10000-line PRs. And just, in general, submitting code that you yourself don't seem to fully understand.
If management doesn't push back on such things (or will even push back against people who try to do so), then reviewers have basically no incentive to push back either. Before I left my last job (for unrelated reasons), I had entered this mode, wherein I decided I couldn't really carefully review these monstrous AI PRs, while also getting my own work done, while also not burning out. So I chose the latter two.
Mostly nobody now worry about binaries or instructions because those are for the compilers, even undefined behavior are mostly ignored.
You can either tailor the development pattern for LLM, or have LLM come write for the same old development pattern. I think there is going to be a difference.
Burnout can be so all-encompassing that it can ruin your life. It can make you feel like you are losing your mind and your basic abilities. A lot of that is coming for a lot of people who are currently stressed but excited.
I fully agree with what you say regarding Boris, but I would emphasize that I don't think he has malicious intention either. He still is doing his job, to showcase the features their product offers.
I don't like the framing of this, but I suppose it's inevitable given how every other political issue has been framed to date.
There are many camps in between the two being described. There are those who use maybe $20 worth of unsubsidized tokens per month to accelerate their work. Full-time human in the loop, every LOC still reviewed by hand. Also, the developer who still does copy-paste in and out of ChatGPT. Those tribes exist too and are way more typical than these extremes.
I can't speak for all orgs but at the end of the day, the only metric that my org cares about is how AI is improving our work. Holding the line for quality is definitely a good thing, but when your org doesn't care about the pressure on PR reviewers, and the effort it took to fix those PR mistakes or their repeat, those reviews are only helping the loop case and that AI is without flaws. I am not saying AI is a bad thing all together, but when the org ignores those metrics, I am only contributing and helping to prove that the other side is right.
The silver lining appears to be that long term most people won't be able to afford producing slop at current rates.
