I'm seeing this happen in the security space right now. Someone on my team I was helping train and bring along is all of sudden regressing in their understanding of the issues we're working on, and instead focusing on AI tool outputs to do their job for them.
Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform.
I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about.
At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or uses terminology interchangably, which confuses me. It sounds plausible, but it does not actually translate into a working system or shared understanding.
Then one day I did some pair programming with him and whenever there was an error or a resource missing, he would type it into the LLM, copy paste it out of it and then brute force error messages. He did not even wait a second to think or reconcile whats happening on the screen or what the exact requirement is. Never taking one step back and questioning any assumption.
Now that the timeline is shifting and everyone starts to be stressed, he continues to vibe code through me and it is so tiring, there is no higher level planning or architecture, its just a reactive type of trial and error to be faster.
It feels like these people are so used to talking to bots, that they treat you like an agent they can chat to or talk through monologs with.
It is quite shocking how people went from being humble (learn the basics or close the gaps in understanding) to full on authority on everything and berating people 24/7...
So right now I'm considering quitting IT for a couple of years until people calm down, but I think its pretty futile
I don't think it's generalizable. The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. It's more compelling, and we probably see more of them because of it, but it's the same general thing.
The kind of person who insists on understanding things and working through the problem has always been rarer. It's not "humble", it's "inquisitive" and "persistent".
I'm seeing people who _used to be_ like that losing that understanding without realizing it's happening - they have a superficial idea of what the code is doing, enough to feel like they understand it, but the change is apparent when watching them handle something unexpected.
That's certainly what I expect to happen. LLMs will ruin your software if you don't hand-hold them, but it'll take time for that to happen. And until that does happen, businesses hell bent on using them won't have anything to push them into realizing what a mistake it was to use them.
1. "Nonsense, if it was a code-quality issue from the AI stuff, we'd have seen problems sooner, like in the first few months or a year. Oh, sure, some engineers complained, but that was just an adjustment period because they stopped once we told them we didn't care and mandated that they up-skill into the new AI-centric workflow future."
2. "The bold new AI initiative I put into place can't possibly be wrong, this failure is on the engineers who were responsible for overseeing its operation. This is supremely disappointing because we made their jobs so easy, they no longer have to write code, just review several dozens of pages per day with unremitting paranoid vigilance and attention to detail."
This, plus anyone responsible dodging that as soon as possible via job hopping. Harder to do in the current job market but internal transfers are still available, most of the time.
I was pretty early in the LLM stuff and I got called out on using it back in the day, because I showed the exact symptoms we see now, but as soon as management jumped on the train all the coworkers did a 180 and I alt tabbed out into a different department thinking it would change something... well it didn't :'D
I guess it will take some years till we are sane again or not...
I revisit it to see if the promises are unbroken now from time to time with every other update and these days it doesn't look so good. It is non deterministic all the way down.
If I know where the error is (a script written by AI in powershell) and it's a logical one, it's ok to let the AI reason about it to get it fixed and move on.
If I have no clue about how this part of the system works, then it's worth reading closely what the error says, in order to understand it first, then have the agent check the assumption you have.
Reduce the friction by having the agent explain what happened and why the fix solved it. I know this might be an intellectual placebo, but sometimes you need to fix something fast to move on. Learning takes longer, and these days everyone expects you to be a 100x engineer with AI.
> I don't think it's generalizable. The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. It's more compelling, and we probably see more of them because of it, but it's the same general thing.
There's an infinity between someone who has to panel beat what they copied off SO and someone who just bangs their head repeatedly against an LLM.
In essence, you are correct. What I see with LLMs is how they will happily make up stuff, meanwhile you can pretty much exhaust SO, until you are forced to understand the problem you are having.
You don't have to be a certain person to fall into this trap, you just condition your brain to accept this workflow somewhere.
Pair this with day to day work stress like time and amount of tasks and you almost give in to a sort of addiction to deal with it all.
> The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. The kind of person who insists on understanding things and working through the problem has always been rarer.
Well, this is where I disagree. I have coworkers who used to insist on understanding and now are doing exactly as OP wrote - copy/pasting from the LLM to brute force error messages. I don't know if it's generalizable but this is what I see in <big tech> working on a frontend team with mid to senior level engineers who I respect.
One example a few weeks ago, I was helping a coworker root cause a bug in a React codebase. Pair programming isn't necessarily common but sometimes you see someone banging their head at a problem and you get curious. It turned out there was an effect (a callback that's invoked whenever some state changes) that invokes an API and this effect caused an infinite render loop because the error handling wasn't written correctly. It was something silly like - Call this API if we have no data -> get error -> update state -> call API again because we have no data...
That was almost immediately what I suspected but my colleague was pulling out all the stops usually reserved for when you're desperate or need a sanity check, like logging to stdout after each line. Both my colleague and the LLM were convinced the problem lied in the pagination logic of the helper that invokes the API. He ended up rewriting that helper imperatively and functionally. To his credit, he rewrote it by hand and implemented the recursion correctly but he was baffled when the problem remained. Completely surprised Pikachu face.
I don't think my coworker changed or suddenly stopped caring. It seems much more likely this is a predictable outcome when you lean heavily into AI authoring code for a sustained period of time. I'd also say that in itself is a consequence of the extreme pressure being exerted across the entire company to ship more code and review more code, faster.
At my place, this is what they want. They want people to smash through things as fast as possible. They don’t want people to sit and craft a solution which takes in to account the whole. They are choosing tools which are low code, and use llm’s to produce what they need. as they say “this is the way things are going”.
Even that would be acceptable. But they still blame the programmer, who was pressured into this, for any fallouts because of it. Basically trying to have it both ways. The unreasonableness of it is infuriating.
Pretty much this, they want to impose one method, but they don’t want to own the mistakes that it creates. Sometimes it felt like the bullies that are saying “why are you making me hurting you?”.
I see it as laying the groundwork for firing. This is bound to blow-up in production eventually which would be a good enough excuse. If it doesn't, reduce token budget and squeeze some more until it breaks.
It's exposing the hypocrisy of privileged groups suddenly being treated like regular people, when they did NOTHING for decades to help others or even to protect themselves ("f** you, got mine", rockstar programmer, 10x programmer, talents everywhere, etc mentality). No unions, no collective bargaining, sheer individual greed.
Do you think that all programmers have always existed in the US?
On that note, do you think that all programmers in the US are these Silicon Valley stereotypes?
Plenty of programmers in the US make normal wages for professionals with degrees doing things not at the technology companies famous for their disregard of the rest of humanity.
As someone who has done trades and also “machine shop programming” and jail breaking rural equipment for friends to use I’m wondering why comments like this are focusing on dividing us instead of bringing us together.
It's a universal programmer trait. Let's call them "culturally regular programmers": they are less social than the average person. They lean more libertarian and more selfish.
The Open Source community is programmers sharing with other programmers, and it's largely fueled by corporate interests these days.
The Free Software movement has largely failed by now, as shown by GPL 3/AGPL adoption.
And again, all of this was based on the fact that programmers were a "special breed" of people coddled by corporations. Now that the corporate mask is off and programmers are no longer (as) special, the whining is horrendous. And the libertarianism still won't go away.
> According to who and what?
To me, I've been around the block for several decades.
Again, not everyone, but the culturally regular programmer.
Yeah I get that. But having been both it doesn’t advocate for better treatment for any of them.
Also as far as I’m aware the pay for programmers in the US has always been an isolated thing with the rest of the world ranging from normal to “literal sweatshop”.
So, from your comment and your reply, are you just happy that more people are being treated poorly?
That makes no sense. You seem to understand that he was being snarky, so why do you not understand that that snark and desire to see “others” brought down to a lower level just because some were already there doesn’t help anyone? Actually, that division does help people, those people that are putting people there in the first place.
Let’s be clear: for context I’ve been out of the programming game for more than 10 years at this point. I have my own business that I’m set to sell soon and then retire to something more entrepreneurial. But I still don’t desire to see my younger employees suffer any more than the tradesmen I used to work with.
Haha, it seems childish but if you’d like to go that route I’ll just point you to the original posters reply:
>It's exposing the hypocrisy of privileged groups suddenly being treated like regular people, when they did NOTHING for decades to help others or even to protect themselves ("f* you, got mine", rockstar programmer, 10x programmer, talents everywhere, etc mentality). No unions, no collective bargaining, sheer individual greed.
So, I guess since you’re taking that position, Thomas: are you just pro pain for an increasing number of workers or can we agree that adding more people to the pool of mistreated labor isn’t beneficial for anyone?
Personally I’m going to continue advocating for better rights for both.
What a weirdly hostile and offensive response. I'm always struck by people who think they can namedrop my employers to shut down an argument, like we're just going to believe and profess whatever keeps people on message boards from being mean about the company.
But, no, I feel like throughout this thread I've been pretty consistently putting a question to you (what exactly do you mean by "pain" or mistreatment, given the original comment described other professionals having norms developers seem now to be recoiling from).
Nah it’s relevant, because if you hold these views to the point that you’re willing to avoid answering the question then obviously your world view is warped in what even you would consider a negative direction and therefor it’s important that others get a chance to be steered away from a potentially negative experience.
And to be fair, I don’t know what you expect when you advertise your place of work and then insensitively play games with serious subject matter on public message boards. I think the kids call that a self own.
But I agree, you don’t seem willing to put in writing what you’ve conveyed so this isn’t a growth experience for anyone.
> It is quite shocking how people went from being humble (learn the basics or close the gaps in understanding) to full on authority on everything and berating people 24/7...
That was never humility. That was fear. This technology is just enabling people to show their through colors. The unearned confidence is a hell of a drug.
You captured this phenomenon very well in this comment. Appreciate you sharing it because it’s hard to describe exactly what makes this sort of behavior so bizarre.
So quit pair programming. I never did, never will do that, nor worked at a place that remotely encouraged that. Each to their own, that's how it should be.
I wish this was always possible, but sometimes you do it when stuff is ambigous or the task is almost undefined and you just can't reach far enough for someone to fix it, so going over it and talking is simpler
I don't think this is going to change because it helps automate code production. As in, once we reach a point where this method produces acceptable results, we can fire all engineers and automate the process.
I saw this the past year - new employees would put problems into Claude first instead of debugging. A year back I was debug manually first, now I do the same.
The speed AI debugs at is incredible and yes, we lose touch the more we use it like any manager feet up barking orders to their underlings to get things done.
To be fair the cyclical nature of funding and defunding security teams which causes scaling up and scaling down, has always left a race to the bottom in security.
Any CISO or head of security loves the ideal of completely using AI to handle incidents, tune detections, implement mitigations, track vulnerabilities, pen testing, etc. This feels like it driving security teams to have less critical thinking.
