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Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

(manuel.kiessling.net)
421 points briankelly | 2 comments | 03 Apr 25 18:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ramesh31 ◴[03 Apr 25 21:51 UTC] No.43575909[source]▶
This maps pretty well to my experience.

Other devs will say things like "AI is just a stupid glorified autocomplete, it will never be able to handle my Very Special Unique Codebase. I even spent 20 minutes one time trying out Cursor, and it just failed"

Nope, you're just not that good obviously. I am literally 10x more productive at this point. Sprint goals have become single afternoons. If you are not tuned in to what's going on here and embracing it, you are going to be completely obsolete in the next 6 months unless you are some extremely niche high level expert. It wont be a dramatic moment where anyone gets "fired for AI". Orgs will just simply not replace people through attrition when they see productivity staying the same (or even increasing) as headcount goes down.

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1. __jochen__ ◴[03 Apr 25 22:06 UTC] No.43576040[source]▶
That's the problem. The new norm will be 10x of pre-AI productivity, nobody will be able justify hand-writing code. And until the quality bar of LLM's/their successors get much better (see e.g. comments above looking at the details in the examples given), you'll get accumulation of errors that are higher than what decent programmers get. With higher LOC and more uninspected complexity, you'll get significantly lower quality overall. The coming wave of AI-coded bugs will be fun for all. GOTO FAIL;
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2. cglace ◴[03 Apr 25 23:02 UTC] No.43576513[source]▶
After spending a week coding exclusively with AI assistants, I got functional results but was alarmed by the code quality. I discovered that I didn't actually save much time, and the generated code was so complex and unfamiliar that I was scared to modify it. I still use Copilot and Claude and would say I'm able to work through problems 2-3x faster than I would be without AI but I wouldn't say I get a 10x improvement.

My projects are much more complex than standard CRUD applications. If you're building simple back-office CRUD apps, you might see a 10x productivity improvement with AI, but that hasn't been my experience with more complex work.