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Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

(manuel.kiessling.net)
421 points briankelly | 1 comments | 03 Apr 25 18:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.225s | source
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necovek ◴[03 Apr 25 21:27 UTC] No.43575664[source]▶
The premise might possibly be true, but as an actually seasoned Python developer, I've taken a look at one file: https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co...

All of it smells of a (lousy) junior software engineer: from configuring root logger at the top, module level (which relies on module import caching not to be reapplied), over not using a stdlib config file parser and building one themselves, to a raciness in load_json where it's checked for file existence with an if and then carrying on as if the file is certainly there...

In a nutshell, if the rest of it is like this, it simply sucks.

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1. mjr00 ◴[03 Apr 25 21:36 UTC] No.43575764[source]▶
I "love" this part:

  def ensure_dir_exists(path: str) -> None:
    """
    Ensure a directory exists.

    Args:
        path: Directory path
    """
An extremely useful and insightful comment. Then you look where it's actually used,

    # Ensure the directory exists and is writable
    ensure_dir_exists(work_dir)

    work_path = Path(work_dir)
    if not work_path.exists() or not os.access(work_dir, os.W_OK):
... so like, the entire function and its call (and its needlessly verbose comment) could be removed because the existence of the directory is being checked anyway by pathlib.

This might not matter here because it's a small, trivial example, but if you have 10, 50, 100, 500 developers working on a codebase, and they're all thoughtlessly slinging code like this in, you're going to have a dumpster fire soon enough.

I honestly think "vibe coding" is the best use case for AI coding, because at least then you're fully aware the code is throwaway shit and don't pretend otherwise.

edit: and actually looking deeper, `ensure_dir_exists` actually makes the directory, except it's already been made before the function is called so... sigh. Code reviews are going to be pretty tedious in the coming years, aren't they?