This reply makes me think that my original post also comes across as overly dismissive of reasonable debate around code changes.
As you've stated, years of development has made me expect a certain level of discourse as people will inevitably want to defend the quality if they think it's reasonable.
Maybe my post is a form of AI psychosis in itself....
Not sure if it's just my age but pair programming seems to have a different meaning these days.
It used to mean that two developers would literally sit next to each other, one would type and one would review as the person typed, then they would repeat.
I guess in the world of remote working it's just not practical any more.
I certainly wouldn't call, one person reviewing another persons code during the merge process pair programming at all.
Because I don't review everything between changes, there might be 10 small commits I review and state I am happy with, then I might prompt the agent to perform some small refactors after the review, I don't want the diff to show me everything in those 10 commits again in the diff ( like the usual PR would ) I want it only to show me new stuff.
The demo is particularly good if you can get past ( by the authors own admission ) slow typing speed.
As with everything these days I can see this being even more useful in reviewing agent code.
For example if an agent has spat out a bunch of code that I've reviewed and then I've asked it to make changes, I definitely do not want to review all that code again in the same diff later.
Has anyone got any insights into what hiring software engineers looks like these days? As someone currently with a job and not hiring it is hard to imagine.
Has there been any sort of paradigm shift in coding interviews? Is LLM use expected/encouraged or frowned upon?
If companies are still looking for people to write code by hand then perhaps the author is onto something, if however we as an industry are moving on, will those who don't adapt be relegated to hobbyists?
I loved the section about trying to fight against a system that isn't deterministic.
LLMs because of their nature require constant hand-holding by humans, unless business are willing to make them entirely accountable for the systems/products they produce.
There's limits to AGENTS.md too, a junior will start to understand the concepts/rationale and design decisions and be able to apply that knowledge to future problems, the LLM will not.
I find talking to LLMs both amazing and frustrating, a computer that can understand my plain text ramblings is incredible, but it's inability to learn is frustrating.
A good example, with junior developers I create thorough specs first and as I saw their skills and reasoning abilities progress my thoroughness drops as my trust in them grows. You just can't do that with LLMs
It’s easy to overlook what I think is the real value of these “home-built” tools.
We can now produce products and apps that are tailored to our own preferred ways of working.
Regardless of the cost of generating them (which can be as low as $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription) or the effort involved (sometimes less than an hour of “vibe coding”), we’ve reached a point where the resulting product can be significantly more valuable than the existing product, service, or subscription it replaces.
It doesn't work on mobile, and unless you played it back in the day the feedback from my friends who I've introduced it too, is that it's got quite the learning curve.
Let's put it this way, I don't think AI will take my job/career away until company owners are also prepared to also let it handle being on-call. I still very accountable for the code produced.
I basically have two modes
1. "Snipe mode"
I need to solve problem X, here I fire up my IDE, start codex up and begin prompting to find the bug fix. Most of the time I have enough domain context about the code that once it's found and fixed the issue it's trivial for to reconcile that it's good code and I am shipping it. I can be sniping several targets at anyone time.
Most of my day-to-day work is in snipe mode.
2. "Feature mode"
This is where I get agents to build features/apps, I've not used this mode in anger for anything other than toy/side projects and I would not be happy about the long term prospects of maintaining anything I've produced.
It's stupidly stupidly fun/addictive and yes satisfying! :)
I rebuilt a game that I used to play when I was 11 and still had a small community of people actively wanting to play it, entirely by vibe coding, it works, it's live and honestly I've had some of the most rewarding feedback from making that I've had in my career from complete strangers!
I've also built numerous tools for myself and my kids that I'd never of had time to build before, and I now can. Again the level of reward for building apps etc that my kids ( and their friends ) are using, is very different from anything I've been career wise.
https://x.com/CurleighBraces