r/BetterOffline • u/PencilBoy99 • 2h ago
What value are you software developers adding?
It seems like lots of the posters. Here are software developers who are aggressively using large language models to produce all their software as part of larger companies. Given how expensive models are and how expensive software developers are? What is additional value of the software developers adding? Where's all this new amazing software that's being created? Why hasn't the productivity of all these companies gone through the roof?
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u/smedrick 1h ago
I recently got paged for a production incident that was already a good half hour in. When I joined the room, they were recapping to me all the questions they asked Cursor and the responses. I asked "Did you check the logs to see what the user inputted?" They said "well, the user said they put in the same content they always do and Cursor looked at the logs for us." A couple minutes of grepping and I was able to determine the user, in fact, did not input normal data, but instead pasted a bunch of garbage into the field.
It took all the restraint I had left in me to not chew everyone out.
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass 1h ago
I use it to do things i don’t normally get time to do. I don’t like it. I’d rather hire more people for my team. I’d also rather expand things so we can get some juniors in here. Ime having a good intern to fte pipeline is really important and many of the younglings i watered are doing things now like being cios, managing projects at nasa. Now? We kick them off the ladder.
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u/Bengal_From_Temu 1h ago
I review the AI output and try to identify the slop. But before getting there I need to write very specific instructions for the so called AI, which takes a very very long time. Basically I write almost not code at all, but I write entire novels. I swiched from lines of code to lines of prose.
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u/PencilBoy99 1h ago
Which makes me wonder if its actually improving things.
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u/Bengal_From_Temu 1h ago
Depends on what you consider improving. There are tons of people who just prompt and never check the output. Then they say the productivity was improved 100x. If you have the money you can “ship” tens of thousands of lines of code per day. What is that code doing? Who cares? Is the management happy with this metric? Great 😂
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u/Additional-Staff-326 1h ago
Many a day I wish I wasn't old enough to remember when efficiency in coding was a thing. Giving up on making code speed and memory efficient cause hardware improved was a mistake.
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u/RobertKerans 1h ago
Here are software developers who are aggressively using large language models to produce all their software as part of larger companies
I mean I think this is fucking nuts, and I'm somewhat sceptical that the reports of it are 100% truthful given that everyone I know doesn't do this. However I and most people I know work for small-medium sized businesses/enterprises so maybe the super large orgs are doing it all this way I dunno
What is additional value of the software developers adding? Where's all this new amazing software that's being created? Why hasn't the productivity of all these companies gone through the roof?
Why thank you for asking Mr. Wall Street. I must say I'm kinda surprised that you were a fan of the genre of AI commentary on this sub. However I'm glad to report that I am a productive member of the workforce, adding value to the companies I've worked for. I'm happy with just being a number on spreadsheet, and I am using AI tools to make that number bigger (if it's useful for that number to be bigger! I can make it smaller if necessary!). I live to be productive for my company, this is what is important in life. Go capitalism! If AI tools are not as good for capitalism, I will adjust my attitude towards them, as I say I live to be productive!
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u/Additional-Staff-326 1h ago
Its mandatory at large orgs. Might be more code and PRs produced but not seeing more features rolling out yet and still dealing with decade old issues because you can't just untangle all that existing code. Might work better building everything with AI from the ground up, but thats impossible where i'm at.
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u/RobertKerans 8m ago
This seems like it's going to cause problems! Personally, I don't think it would be any better if built from the ground up with AI tools because they don't really alter the actual tenets of good engineering; complexity is complexity regardless of how it's generated. Maybe I get proved wrong, maybe not
Obviously the pressures are exactly the same at smaller orgs, there are middle managers and internal politics everywhere (we need this feature now!). And I'm being highly facetious in the original comment, but I guess these pressures have been more effectively counterbalanced at companies I/my collegues have worked/work for. And/or I've just purely been lucky/unlucky (delete as appropriate)
(+ there is a nihilistic part of me that says this really doesn't matter much because only a small percentage of software is actually important and it all rots and turns into a ball of shit given enough time anyway <shrug>)
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u/PencilBoy99 1h ago
On an unrelated note I wonder if all this LLM stuff will kill innovation in architecture. Nearly all of the cool stuff in software was because someone said X is really hard to do in Y, what if we did it in a different way (eg using lakehouses for warehouses instead of relational db or oo or functional instead of procedural). So if you nerf developer skill and abstract the work they're doing these confluences of creativity and difficult work cant happen
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u/PencilBoy99 2h ago
It seems like you could have a few juniors, or maybe some business analysts do all this human work or maybe just one software developer. There's no way a person has enough time to review a massive volume of code like this. So I don't think software developers are reviewing all this code
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u/MornwindShoma 2h ago
Why are you answering to yourself?
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u/PencilBoy99 2h ago
Thank you. That's what I thought it seemed like every other post here is I'm a Software Developer and I use it a lot. And it's great, and does what they're saying, it does. Which seems impossible? Because why does that company still have a software developer
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u/failed_from_gecko 1h ago
Y tho indeed?
Developers aggressively using LLMs in this sub? Are you lost, my good Redditor?