• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

30,000 NVIDIA Engineers Use Generative AI for 3x Higher Code Output

So this showed up in my newsfeed and I think it's relevant a couple of ways, not all of which I'll address.

AI Makes the Easy Part Easier and the Hard Part Harder
https://www.blundergoat.com/articles/ai-makes-the-easy-part-easier-and-the-hard-part-harder

On a personal project, I asked an AI agent to add a test to a specific file. The file was 500 lines before the request and 100 lines after. I asked why it deleted all the other content. It said it didn't. Then it said the file didn't exist before. I showed it the git history and it apologised, said it should have checked whether the file existed first. (Thank you git).

Now imagine that in a healthcare codebase instead of a side project.

AI assistance can cost more time than it saves. That sounds backwards, but it's what happened here. I spent longer arguing with the agent and recovering the file than I would have spent writing the test myself.

Using AI as an investigation tool, and not jumping straight to AI as solution provider, is a step that some people skip. AI-assisted investigation is an underrated skill that's not easy, and it takes practice to know when AI is wrong. Using AI-generated code can be effective, but if we give AI more of the easy code-writing tasks, we can fall into the trap where AI assistance costs more time than it saves.
Click to expand...

And then (how can I insert a double blockquote? I wanted the last paragraph ("when people claim...") to be indented to show it was a quote in the original article.

My friend's panel raised a point I keep coming back to: if we sprint to deliver something, the expectation becomes to keep sprinting. Always. Tired engineers miss edge cases, skip tests, ship bugs. More incidents, more pressure, more sprinting. It feeds itself.

This is a management problem, not an engineering one. When leadership sees a team deliver fast once (maybe with AI help, maybe not), that becomes the new baseline. The conversation shifts from "how did they do that?" to "why can't they do that every time?"

My friend was saying:

When people claim AI makes them 10x more productive, maybe it's turning them from a 0.1x engineer to a 1x engineer. So technically yes, they've been 10x'd. The question is whether that's a productivity gain or an exposure of how little investigating they were doing before.
Burnout and shipping slop will eat whatever productivity gains AI gives you. You can't optimise your way out of people being too tired to think clearly.
Click to expand...
 
  • Like
Reactions: Meeho
like this
1_rick said:
And then (how can I insert a double blockquote? I wanted the last paragraph ("when people claim...") to be indented to show it was a quote in the original article.
Click to expand...

I think you need to switch to BBcode mode - double bracket "[]" icon on the right - and then create the QUOTE and /QUOTE tags yourself.
 
The silent death of Good Code
https://amit.prasad.me/blog/rip-good-code

That being said, by trade, I am a Software Engineer. Not a “Computer Programmer”, nor a “Coder”, nor any other title that implies that my job is to “write good code”. In fact, nothing about my job title necessitates that I read or write code at all! My job is to create useful software that solves real problems.
Click to expand...
Recently, a colleague of mine at Modal rewrote an external system that integrated deeply with the Linux kernel. The initial rewrite was a simple translation of a C codebase to a Rust one, in preparation for some custom feature work. The resulting code wasn’t bad, nor was it un-idiomatic Rust. What it also wasn’t was Good Code. It was hard to read and understand, would have been difficult to extend and maintain, and it wasn’t even clear to us why we’d taken the burden of rewriting and maintaining this extra system.

The initial rewrite also relied heavily on coding agents.

This same colleague then invested time into understanding the kernel subsystem, the exact reasons why the original C program was written how it was, and rewrote the Rust translation himself. The difference was night and day; the code flowed naturally, explained itself and the underlying subsystems, and may genuinely be some of the nicest parts of the entire codebase. Better, I think, than even the original C, despite this type of program being arguably one of the best places to use C over Rust.

It was the first time in weeks, maybe months, that I’d felt something that used to be common in my day-to-day: excitement about the lines of code in front of me. I used to write (approximations of) Good Code most days. Somewhere along the way, everything changed. Nowadays I don’t even write the first version of most of the code I commit. I’m definitely far more productive with an agent at my side. They’re not at all horrible at this coding stuff, just not truly great at it. At the end of the day, the code they spit out is… acceptable. It gets the job done, it passes my litmus tests, but it certainly isn’t Good Code.
Click to expand...

If you're letting AI write unmaintainable code, you're not writing Good Code, and I'd say that suggests you're not a good Software Engineer.

If you have to rewrite what AI gave you, I question the claim you're making productivity gains.
 
1_rick said:
The silent death of Good Code
https://amit.prasad.me/blog/rip-good-code




If you're letting AI write unmaintainable code, you're not writing Good Code, and I'd say that suggests you're not a good Software Engineer.

If you have to rewrite what AI gave you, I question the claim you're making productivity gains.
Click to expand...

I can't say it is the case here, but I've seen metrics in the past where they analyze documents produced, or lines of code written, and so forth. You know, dumb-ass quantity over quality. If they're just measuring quantity produced and not looking to see if most of it is tossed in the bin then AI may very well help them produce more code, just not more useable code. As usual, I take all productivity gains from AI with a grain of salt if the company in question is also a big beneficiary from the AI itself. They're highly motivated to sell their product so of course they're going to find a way to justify its existence.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top