You don't need to use LLMs for coding to stay "competitive" with your colleagues.

I work for a FAANG, we have unlimited AI credits to be used on any model we want, with basically any tooling we want.

My whole team massively uses AI, I barely do. I use not even 10% of the tokens that they do. Yet I have not only the highest rate of PRs raised, but also the highest rate of PRs I reviewed, and the second lowest number of revisions per PR.

AI is all about fake productivity. You feel productive while you're achieving the same, if not less (or even often, nothing at all).

Long term it's pretty obvious that people heavily using AI will become a lot less productive, if not simply unable to work as software engineers. My colleagues are already scared.

In fact, as a challenge to anyone who says they "haven't written a line of code by hand in X amount of time", go do a test. Try to write any code without any LLM use for just 30 minutes.

▲

ricardobeat 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All that tells me is that your org hasn't learned how to use AI effectively yet.

There is no way a human programmer can keep up with a computer doing the work of four programmers at once. You might not see this for every problem of course - in product development the bottleneck is often the design/product work, feedback cycles, not the coding.

	▲	coffeefirst 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Nah. It sounds like OP is using the tools where they help him instead of for everything regardless of utility. Which seems like the right way to use tools?
	▲	iLoveOncall 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah of course, it's always "you're not prompting it correctly", right? I understand though, it's hard to feel your skills atrophy in real time while at the same time realizing that the data shows your productivity has in fact not increased at all.

▲

sublinear 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is extremely accurate, but HN doesn't like it when you burst their bubble.

A good software engineer has always been able to write a ton of code all by themselves in a short period of time without any oversight. There's nothing romantic or intelligent about that. It's just reckless.

Teamwork is more important than ever, and yes of course that slows things down. That's the point. The decision making is the slowest part. 5 hours of meetings today can completely change the trajectory of the next 5 years. This isn't a revelation for anyone but the most naive.

▲

jvidalv 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Im sorry but nope.

▲

blocked_againnn 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Okay. My knee jerk reaction to this is

1. OP probably works on a team that does not ship much. It's a dead end team on maintenance mode.

2. OPs colleagues were not good engineers even before LLMS

3. OP is lying.

4. OP is delusional and is actually left behind. And is measuring wrong metrics.

Which one did I get correct and wrong? Does you manager also agree you are the most productive engineer in team?

▲

iLoveOncall 7 hours ago | parent [-]

We're a greenfield team working on a new piece of software.

My colleagues are all also FAANG software engineers.

> Does you manager also agree you are the most productive engineer in team?

It would seem so.

Additionally, in my mid-year performance review a couple of months ago he specifically mentioned how every metric also looks great.

It seems the only option left is that I'm lying.

In reality, your knee jerk reaction was to be scared and deny that what you have taken as productivity increase was just an illusion, and that you've actively been losing your skills for literally nothing.

▲

blocked_againnn 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Hmm. I don't know to be honest. I actually ship way more features in my side projects. Even work wise I have seen projects delivery speed going half or 1/4th of what it used to be.

And all the engineers in my team are full on AI. Even the best ones.

For me I see the opposite of what you are saying.

I don't particularly see much value in handwriting the code itself after the tech specs and all is finalized.

So me personally I am liking how the industry is going.

Never really enjoyed writing thousands of lines of code to be honest.

Though always like programming when I was young.

▲

lilerjee 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't particularly see much value in handwriting the code itself after the tech specs and all is finalized.

It's impossible. You are lying.

If you developed software, you should know "the tech specs and all" is never finalized, the requirements are always changed, when you are developing it, the specs or details are changed or improved.

	▲	blocked_againnn 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hmm. None of us in our team has written hand written code for almost an year now. We don't really find the need anymore. Pretty much defining tech spec and getting it implemented by breaking through tickets are more than enough. There might be bugs. Wbut we catch it through testing and get it merged while building.

▲

iLoveOncall 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I actually ship way more features in my side projects. Even work wise I have seen projects delivery speed going half or 1/4th of what it used to be.

Again, you are conflating appearance of productivity, with actual productivity.

Are you shipping more features in your side projects because AI is allowing you to ship more features faster (let's assume at the same level of quality), or are you investing more time in shipping features in your side projects, because you FEEL like AI is a productivity booster and therefore you get more out of your time, even if it's not real?

Are projects at work estimated to be a lower cost because of AI productivity increases, or because estimates were too high previously, and you could always deliver at that speed?

For the second point, I'd add that any launch announcement I see at work touting AI gains of 50-75-90% NEVER hold to any sort of scrutiny, so it's also simply, lies? Employees currently are desperate to look good in the eyes of the CEOs pushing for higher AI adoption.

You're entitled to feeling more productive, I'm just saying you likely aren't, or not by very much. Add to that the fact that you didn't like writing code to begin with, it's easy to fall into this sort of falacy.

To be clear, I do use AI, and I do see some productivity gains, but they're not in writing production code (issue management, automation that was too expensive before, generation of code or artifacts that I don't actually care much about, etc.).