We have had this very discussion about self-driving cars. We have had this very discussion about AI in audio. We have gotten to the point where AI is tentatively shuttling passengers around urban hubs, effectively turning an open network into a closed system. Waymo and a couple others have gotten to the point where they can replace a fresh-to-the-country Uber driver, under ideal conditions, within a closed environment. But all the companies that proposed a wide-open adaptive environment are either (A) gone, like Uber or (B) killing people with aplomb, like Tesla. We have gotten to the point where AI is tentatively adding chorus effects and synthesizing voices but it still can't mix worth a shit. We had a lengthy discussion about how to do a simple recording and not only did you not hear the chair squeaks, but they were so bad I couldn't do anything with them. AI can't either, of course. Izotope tried to prove that my entire industry was doomed in 2010 and released a tool that went so badly they scrubbed it from the Internet. I'm about to cut a DJ session. You would think that beat-matching and pitch-shifting and crossfading would be the sort of thing an AI could do the shit out of. And yes! Rekordbox has an automix. It's got some fuckin' "AI" tag on it too. And if you want to hear the worst mixes you can imagine, engage it. Fuckin' AI can't even tell the difference between a chorus and a verse. You're not a coder. Neither am I. I know enough to know that I hate it, but that's based a lot on learning to code in fucking Fortran and Turbo Pascal. You know enough that you'd rather code than pick up a soldering iron, but you're very much at the "genie, make me a thing" phase of the adventure. You never got to try a self-driving car in the beginning; you likely would have survived but also likely wouldn't have pushed it into the corner-cases necessary to ensure life-safety for everyone on the road. "Push it into the corner cases" is the thing every AI booster refuses to do. kk in this scenario? For Pro Tools? I'm the onshore dev. Their problem is a lack of documentation, not the imminent threat of AI. The Birth Center has a 500pp binder of documentation on every fucking thing we do, not because we really like documentation but because we're required to have all this shit documented for certification. Because if we fuck up in the clutch, people may die. here's the problem in a nutshell: - Be this company - Be ready to join the 20th century - Be stopping down for eight months to fucking document everything - Be ready to join the 21st century OR - Be this company - Be ready to join the 20th century - Be feeding your codebase to an AI to generate documentation - Be spending three years on pins and needles as you spend eighteen months proofreading the documentation and then eighteen months breaking things you missed From your addendum: FUCKING HELL DUDE. Which is faster - writing it yourself or playing minesweeper with someone else's code? If you answered "playing minesweeper" you just tattled on yourself. Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic. Using agents well is both a both a skill and an engineering project all its own, of prompts, indices, and (especially) tooling. LLMs only produce shitty code if you let them. Here's a game I play regularly: "Hey receptionist - I would like a slide for the billboard that says this." (crap slide) "Great. Now apply the discussions we've had about whitespace and readibility." (Vaguely less-crap slide) "Okay awesome. Can you mess with the color palate a little?" (heinously more-crap slide) "Okay try these RGB values" (less-crap slide, copy changes, receptionist goes on crying jag) "No no you're doing great. Er... do this." (less-crap slide, let's ship it) I play this game because it's good for her self-esteem. Her roommate is a designer, so she fancies herself a designer. SHE IS NOT A DESIGNER. We've had all sorts of discussions about rule-of-thirds, read-three-times, don't-flash, etc. About a third of it is accessible to her at any given time. But she has such pride in seeing her work parking-lot sized that it's worth it to me for morale to let her pretend she's designing things, rather than whipping that shit out on my own in a third the time. I give no fux about Gemini's self-esteem Your expectation is that everyone will go "well, it'll make it that last 20 percent no problem so we should adopt it now, and damn the consequences." Mine is, too. The difference is I don't think it'll work out. If there's anything I'd want to get built or get changed I had a feedback slack that the onshore devs would process into Jira. If there was anything big that I needed to be implemented, I'd get the onshore junior dev to essentially parse my request into Jira for me, often after a few meetings because chopping my idea into baby-sized steps is never a straightforward task. It'd be well-documented what the desired change was, and what the steps were to get there before it went to offshore. Then a week or so later they'd be working on it and have a bunch of extra questions. Then I'd get a new TestFlight version of the app, I'd do a bunch of testing with that, and would often come back with half a dozen edge cases and misinterpretations. Back and forth, testing, questions, back and forth, testing and then it would usually be fine.
The first months of her job, she was not allowed to write code, instead just having to review other people's code in order to initiate osmosis for the inner workings of EHRs because there is, essentially, no documentation. The entire company from what I gather seems to operate on tribal knowledge, the elders passing down quirks and edge cases that stay in. It is also company policy to forbid writing any documentation in the code. Instead of documentation, they've created a layer cake of processes that code has to go through to be reviewed and checked.
Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?
Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs.
My expectation is that management will, sometime in the next years, realize that they can actually fix the fundamental problems with their organization and get more done.