Readit NewsDeleted Comment
me the first time my boss forced me to unit test my code
...
The best thing you can do is listen to your gut and try to act as rationally as you can.
Talk with trusted mentors if you've got them. Don't listen to me and for the love of god don't listen to people on HN or reddit or Youtube or any other social media.
Nobody knows what they're talking about and they certainly don't know how it'll impact you.
If somebody is making you feel afraid, left behind/out, inferior -- they're trying to sell you shit. Don't listen to the bullies and con artists.
You're entitled to your opinion. If you think AI output is crap, it's crap. Don't be pressured to conform. This is supposed to be hackernews after all. There are plenty of companies using java 8 today. You won't be unhireable.
But suppose you're right, it's 60% as good as "stackoverflow copy-pasting programmers". Isn't that a pretty insanely impressive milestone to just dismiss?
And why would it just get to this point, and then stop? Like, we can all see AIs continuously beating the benchmarks, and the progress feels very fast in terms of experience of using it as a user.
I'd need to hear a pretty compelling argument to believe that it'll suddenly stop, something more compelling than "well, it's not very good yet, therefore it won't be any better", or "Sam Altman is lying to us because incentives".
Sure, it can slow down somewhat because of the exponentially increasing compute costs, but that's assuming no more algorithmic progress, no more compute progress, and no more increases in the capital that flows into this field (I find that hard to believe).
I use Claude every day. It is definitely impressive, but in my experience only marginally more impressive than ChatGPT was a few years ago. It hallucinates less and compiles more reliably, but still produces really poor designs. It really is an overconfident junior developer.
The real risk, and what I am seeing daily, is colleagues falling for the "if you aren't using Cursor you're going to be left behind" FUD. So they learn Cursor, discover that it's an easy way to close tickets without using your brain, and end up polluting the codebase with very questionable designs.
It's nowhere near as good as someone actually building and maintaining systems. It's barely able to vomit out an MVP and it's almost never capable of making a meaningful change to that MVP.
If your experiences have been different that's fine, but in my day job I am spending more and more time just fixing crappy LLM code produced and merged by STAFF engineers. I really don't see that changing any time soon.
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Book: Code Complete - Steve McConnell
https://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Cons...
A bit dated maybe, but still very informative!
The Pragmatic Programmer and Code Complete were integral on my first job.