I'm paid to produce software that has features and works.

Nobody cares how I get there or how ugly the code is. They care how fast I can do it and how reliable the software is.

I look at code sometimes, in down time, to see what's been done terribly by AI, and to fix it and hopefully fix the process so that things don't get done terribly in that particular way in the future.

▲

poncho_romero 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's not about "how ugly the code is". Poor solutions heaped on top of poor solutions can result in a system with real users and intractable issues. I'm all for AI, but not reviewing the code seems likely to cause issues long term.

	▲	ipsod 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done. The AI review stage is where I've found prompting matters a lot more than that initial prototyping phase. I've iterated on prompts and tooling that help the AI keep the codebase clean-ish.

▲

swozey 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Whats your YOE, like when did you enter tech as a SWE?

This shouldn't be normalized for you yet unless you're at a faang pushing this at the edge and new to the field, cause this isn't what we used to do 2 years ago.

If you're happy with the ai slop $$$ job more power to you but that isn't the entire field and there used to be (and hopefully still are) good and fun engineering jobs.

Contrary to popular normie belief, no not everyone wants to work at the Metas and OpenAIs and for good reason.

	▲	ipsod 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		YOE is ~30, from my first PHP app to present. I've spent somewhere between 5 and 80 hours a week coding for the past 30 years, mostly self-employed, writing tools and creating custom CNC machines/robots for my own business, but more recently doing same thing for a company. I still get to do some coding, where there are safety-critical production systems, but the work is mostly tooling that gets us to that point or supports the business otherwise. It's an awesome job. Couldn't be funner, pretty much, except on data collection days. I get high level tasks, or come up with my own, and find or build solutions - no more running a whole business, doing production, keeping books, shipping orders, doing customer support - I only do the stuff I like.