We have a problem§

In this new reality where A.I. is being pushed onto developers by their masters C-Suites in the hopes of boosting short-term productivity - the foundations of tomorrow are being built by clueless coasters leveraging AI. Your average joe ships code watching companies profit every year while still also sees that their co-workers are getting laid off. Can yo blame them for being coasters? Where maximising shareholder value is the only ultimate goal for modern software shops.

I am not trying to justify this behavior - it should be taken this into consideration when we are talking about the new software that's being written today. Most people, well maybe not the most but a sizeable chunk of software engineers seem to be relying on A.I to write production software for them and its not pretty or reliable - but can we blame them?

A.I. is good enough... is what it looks like§

Today A.I. is good enough to get things into a working state. All spaghetti however, as I said earlier loyalty to a corporation isn't really the vibe these days. This sentiment is added with mediocre at best or downright bad code is being shipped which passes all the test cases (again written by A.I.) and goes straight to production.

I feel sorry for every engineer today because we are going to inherit this spaghetti and I hope by then we would have something sentient, if not I will meet you at my farm - no way I am going to deal with legacy A.I slop.

Solution?§

Honestly I don't think there is one. The genie is out of the bag and many young folks who are trying to enter into this brutal tech industry are bombarded with a culture where engineers are not valued, replaced whenever and treated like a commodity. A lot of people simply entered into this domain because of the lucrative pay which makes the competition harder cause there are more people. When you have something like A.I. which can give you a small edge in the short-term to survive this competition - tools that help you cheat on interviews and other stuff where you can just create hobby projects out of thin air and put them on your github it realyl tests your character and nudges you in the wrong direction - worst of all our hiring practices are not designed to test character but are built for robots to succeed.

The future honestly looks grim, software today is usually a pile of shit. Not many write performant, reliable, robust code these days as hardware usually makes up for it - except fot the time it doesn't.

I am young, how do I avoid this trap?§

After seeing all this you still wish to be in this industry? My advice use A.I. as a teaching assistant. When I was learning things (still am) it was very hard to navigate stuff and to gather information even about what should I learn. This domain is really huge, computer science is deep and wide, even if you pick a lane there is still so much and its overwhelming, but in my experience A.I. can you help you here, its a fantastic way to discover things that you didn't even know you need to learn. Using A.I. to dive deep into rabbitholes is what I believe is a great way to explore.

This AI hype is unreal - when I typed rabbitholes I was unsure of the spelling, so I googled and this is what I get.

Let's hope we survive this bubble.