This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story.
Well there's the problem.
I'm a software developer and I say that AI is the greatest force-multiplier that's been introduced into the field since the compiler. I love using it, it handles the most tedious and annoying parts of the process. But there are situations I don't want to use it in, and of course being forced to use would give me a more negative opinion of it. Obviously.
I kind of agree it's a multiplier. But so far every time I've had it do something its written such an ugly turd I have to rewire it all taking more time than if I'd just solved the problem to start with. Maybe someday but it's not up to the quality I expect of development.
Have you tried giving it coding standards and other such preferences about how you like your code to be organized? I've found that coding agents can be quite adaptable to various styles, you can put stuff like "try to keep functions less than 100 lines long" or "include assertions validating all function inputs" into your coding agent's general instructions and it'll follow them.
For me, one of the things that's a huge fundamental improvement is telling the agent to create and run unit tests for everything. That way when it does mess up accidentally it can immediately catch the problem and usually fixes it in the same session without further intervention. Unit tests used to be more trouble than they were worth most of the time, now I love them.
You... just started writing unit tests?
No, I've used them plenty before. I just found them to generally be a huge hassle of minimal benefit. They became much more useful in the context of agentic coding, where you want the agent to be able to immediately realize "oh, this change I made causes these specific problems when it's run." The hassle is all on the agent, not on me.
I think we do very different development.
Could be. I'm a professional programmer whose usage runs the whole gamut - large applications with hundreds of programmers working on them for years, smaller apps that I make for my own use, and one-off scripts to do some particular task and then generally throw away afterwards.
I don't do unit tests for that last category, of course. I don't even use coding agents for those, generally speaking - a bit of back-and-forth in a chat interface is usually enough there.
Is this like a who's got a bigger portfolio situation? I'm not sure how to respond
I guess I've been developing for decades including consulting for Page 6, a stint in RD at Sony Music. One of my open source contributions was used as part of the backend for one of Obama's State of the Unions. I spend my time these days writing and maintaining multiple software stacks integrating across multiple platforms.
Since you brought up the notion that we might be doing different styles of development, I was giving you context as to the kinds of development that I do. Sounds like we might not be doing such different scales of development after all, but I couldn't have known that until you gave that information just now.
This isn't supposed to be some kind of duel or argument, I don't see the point of that. I'm just explaining my usage of coding agents and specifically unit tests in that context. Since that's what you were questioning.
I see it seemed more like a weird flex.
Anyways, I couldnt possibly deploy with any confidence a large project or honestly a small project I expected someone to rely on without layers of test. Unintended consequences of even a small change are just a reality. And with the expectation to move quick with large legacy systems, if you don't have tests that's a dangerous high wire act.
Well, I've seen large projects without extensive unit tests before. The main time I remember a big project with them before coding agents they were largely a checkbox that developers implemented with a grumble when first deploying a new system and then that were slowly disabled one by one as later changes broke them.
These were stand-alone projects, though, with a large QA department and without an expectation of future versions directly descended from them once deployed. If it worked then it worked, that was all that was needed at the end of the day.
never had a large qa team. And my experience has when we have qa resources, people move to the new feature so it's up to the developers to not break the critical features everyone forgets about until they break. And I've yet to meet a developer that has time to also be a full time qa resource
I meant my first sentence to be an apology for jumping to conclusions but it clearly isn't. It's late. Sorry for the snarky response.
Wow what a circlejerk this turned into.
Oh well, I guess that's what everything really is the whole time.
Unit tests used to be more trouble than they were worth most of the time, now I love them.
Sounds like you were writing bad unit tests and AI showed you how to do it right.
If so, it was project-wide across hundreds of devs.
It lets me focus on the software architecture, not the minutiae. It feels exactly like when I ran a team of brand new interns. They require a lot of hand holding but with the right direction they get good at their jobs very fast.
I think the problem is that for now, it will always continue to require that hand-holding, whereas interns/new programmers will need less and less over time and become more independent over time
I guess prepare for potential kernel rot: https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-declares-massive-ai-fueled-code-surges-as-the-new-normal-for-linux/
Perhaps I'll follow LTS 🫤
Yeah... well Arch's LTS kernel is on 6.18 not too bad. I can definitely live with that.
