Lots of my colleagues in SWE use full blown AI development tools.

We all use full blown AI development tools. Before that we had other tricks that did the same thing.

We must beware mistaking the instrument for the musician, or we get sold a broken old instrument that doesn’t perform miracles outside it’s master’s hand.

I even used Claude AI to write an entire C# application, I did ZERO coding, yes, literally nothing! I have NEVER coded in C# before, I gave it all requirements, worked with it like a project manager… it created a full blown working application that was beyond my expectations.

I achieved the same in 2000 with a home grown framework, and again in 2006 with Ruby on Rails.

Astonishingly fast prototyping is a quarter of a centrury old.

• How are you enjoying maintaining this app in production? (Or is it not there yet, because it’s just very nice for a prototype?)
• How did Claude AI do at deploying it?
• Are you satisfied with Claude AIs answers to your boss’ traffic analytics and load balancing questions?
• When will Claude AI let you know how the A/B tests proved out for optimizing sales?
• Or doesn’t it do those things yet?

Computers are replacing us. They’ve been at it since their inception.

Keep learning the trade and you’ll find there’s a metric ton more that computers cannot help with, than that they can help with. That will get better. I’m working at making it get better.

I figure that my learning how to train the computers is job security. I didn’t count on it being a harsh lesson in how long it’s going to be before computers get not stupid.

I do have a plan for when I automate myself out of a job. It’s just not a plan I’m really counting on, because I’ve been trying for decades and I only have so many decades left of doing this.

I’ve been constantly advised to have an exit plan, for when the computers replaced me, for the entirety of those same decades.

Most often by the same people who want me to charge less.

Funny thing, that. Take care who you listen to on this topic, and that their motives are.

My motive is to (continue to) charge the rest of you a shit ton of money before the AI finally replace us.

It does help me if you all don’t buy into the bullshit that CEOs have been spouting about replacing us all.

We’ve all been undercharging for about 3 years due to it.

AI hasn’t accomplished jack shit, but a lot of you have accepted lower pay than you probably should.

I make very good money, but I can’t help but notice that it would be a bit more of the rest of you would wise to the scam and raise your own prices.

Some days, all I do is code.

So your instincts are correct. You need to learn the rest of the job, before the part you are doing is replaced by robots.

Homemade pornography, obviously.

But actually, I’ll limit myself to fixing deployment pipelines, correcting business specification mistakes, helping business leaders understand how computers work at all, mitigating moderate security issues, and finding a new job when the unmitigated severe security issues drive my employer bankrupt.

So essentially, exactly how I spend my day today, but with less typing.

And more nude photography, of course.

Oof. I’m anxious that folks are going to get the wrong idea here.

While OCI does provide security benefits, it is not a part of a healthly security architecture.

If you see containers advertised on a security architecture diagram, be alarmed.

If a malicious user gets terminal access inside a container, it is nice that there’s a decent chance that they won’t get further.

But OCI was not designed to prevent malicious actors from escaping containers.

It is not safe to assume that a malicious actor inside a container will be unable to break out.

Don’t get me wrong, your point stands: Security loves it when we use containers.

I just wish folks would stop treating containers as “load bearing” in their security plans.

It amused me that the votes on your comment (a simple factual statement) reflect how many people here vote without knowing what the fuck they’re talking about.

Lol. Yeah. Your point stands.I’m not disagreeing with or trying to correct you. Sorry if my comment came across that way.

I’m just trying to commiserate that cowboying changes into production is so common that it is some folk’s work reality, even on well run teams - i.e. when their peer’s teams are poorly run.

They’re referring to the tendency to reload the dev environment from production a couple times each year, while production is being tweaked daily without any record of changes applied.

Remember, however bad our own shop is, someone out there puts up with crap that even our own team doesn’t have to put up with.

Yeah. Warning - uninvited poetic waxing on feature flags and leadership choices, incoming…

We all agree we inevitably do some live testing at our customers risk, because no test environment is perfect.

With feature flags, we’re able to negotiate how many of our customers to test on, at a time.

But some of us prefer to forgo feature flags and risk our entire customer base on every change. It saves money, at least for a little while.

I’m not exactly fun at executive leadership meetings, but somehow I keep getting invited to them. Heh.

Absolutely.

My environment sucks almost as much as the next one. It just pays better and we get to be angry at difficult real problems caused by the previous people, instead of stupid self-inflicted problems caused by our own shortsightedness.

Edit: I mean, there’s still some problems caused by our own shortsightedness, obviously.

And technically I didn’t say you would like my answer, just that I’ll pay more because you asked. Lol.

Why does my Xbox video game account have better security than my money?

One is designed to securely collect and keep as much of our money as possible, and the other is just a bank.

you want domain admin access to every computer/server you touch as well?

Heh. I’ve had it. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. And I didn’t even get one of those humorous “all I got was this lousy T-shirt” shirts.

Asking questions like that can cause hiring managers like myself to have no choice but to offer you higher pay grades, because that question is a strong signal of experience.

Can I get a browser built entirely on Electron?

Yes. COBOL can be excused because it was the first time anyone was going down that path.

Yeah. And a lot of non-programmers became programmers thanks to Cobol.

I think we’re seeing this effect with AI code copilots, as well. It can’t replace a programmer, but it can elevate a potential programmer to proficient (in at least some tasks) faster than was possible before.

I know it theoretically means I earn less than I might have, but for my whole career there’s been so much more to be done than there are of us to do it, anyway.

Everything that comes later, less so.

Yeah. They really need to get off my lawn with this nonsense. We’ve seen this enough times to know that it’ll be great, but still won’t solve all our problems.

Damn, sounds like a a good time to start a consulting firm.

Yeah. I did it for one do the previous go-rounds of this pattern. It was lucrative, but it also meant I was constantly soothing the egos of assholes.

Assholes make great customers, because everyone else is charging them 4x to 12x the going rate, as well.

But eventually there’s been enough money to pay off my student loans and car loans and I just wanted my daily work to be with intelligent compassionate people, instead.

The requirements of other companies that you follow xyz audits to do business with them etc(which can be a good thing, it’s just very costly to a business).

I secretly enjoyed getting on the phone (one-on-one) to explain this one to leaders.

“Previous decisions have made us a complete laughing stock among our peers. How would you like me to write that up for the audit report? Okay. I’ll use my judgement.”

Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.

Oh yeah. I remember it well. Ugh. It’s why I’m such a loud mouth here sometimes - if I can save one team from that guy, all my soap box shouting will have been worth it.

As a manager of developers - that’s not all I do…

But I mean…yeah. That might be the most important thing I do - at least before my team was fully remote…

My mother is currently like, AI will eliminate all junior jobs

There’s a little truth to it.

The junior jobs did dry up, due to speculation by ignorant leaders, about three years ago.

But now everyone who didn’t hire then has progressed through awkwardness then worry toward outright panic, as AI can’t deliver everything they were promised. AI still might deliver what they need someday, but it now even the CEO can see that it clearly won’t be in time to save the CEO’s next bonus.

In my past experience, three years is about as long as most companies can get away with not hiring developer talent - before unfixed problems turn into crisis.

Sure enough, we’re starting to see the leading edge of the panic hiring, now.

Things could still calm back down - due to more speculation, or another coordinated effort by CEOs to suppress developer salaries. I’m not a time traveler.

But the junior jobs will come roaring back with a vengeance one way or another.

My money is on this year.

That’s actually literal, in my case.

I successfully made a case to spent some extra on developer bonuses this year to hopefully proactively avoid having to do any backfills during 2025 - when I, personally, expect developer hires to be particularly expensive (relative to inflation).

I’ve also spent the last three years building up some internal non-developer staff toward readiness to be an emergency backfill, in case I need a developer backfill in 2025, and cannot afford any at prevailing market rates.

Of course, I’ve lived through enough “developers are ludicrously expensive” years, that I just always prepare for them. If it’s not 2025, it’ll be 2026 or whenever, and my team will survive because I kept our options open. Probably will help that I also didn’t piss off the talent by trying to replace them with bad automation, lol.