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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: 0.001s | 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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Denzel ◴[03 Apr 25 22:12 UTC] No.43576102[source]▶
Can you talk through specifically what sprint goals you’ve completed in an afternoon? Hopefully multiple examples.

Grounding these conversations in an actual reality affords more context for people to evaluate your claims. Otherwise it’s just “trust me bro”.

And I say this as a Senior SWE who’s successfully worked with ChatGPT to code up some prototype stuff, but haven’t been able to dedicate 100+ hours to work through all the minutia of learning how to drive daily with it.

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1. jonnycoder ◴[03 Apr 25 22:48 UTC] No.43576395[source]▶
I think experiences vary. AI can work well with greenfield projects, small features, and helping solve annoying problems. I've tried using it on a large Python Django codebase and it works really well if I ask for help with a particular function AND I give it an example to model after for code consistency.

But I have also spent hours asking Claude and ChatGPT with help trying to solve several annoying Django problems and I have reached the point multiple times where they circle back and give me answers that did not previously work in the same context window. Eventually when I figure out the issue, I have fun and ask it "well does it not work as expected because the existing code chained multiple filter calls in django?" and all of a sudden the AI knows what is wrong! To be fair, there was only one sentence in the django documentation that mentions not chaining filter calls on many to many relationships.