I started my IT career in 2011, I have enjoyed it, I have got to do a lot of interesting stuff and meet interesting people, I will treasure those memories forever.

But, starting with crypto turing general computing from being:

“Wow, this machine can run so many apps at the same time!” or “Holy shit, those graphics look epic!” or “Amazing, this computer has really sped up that annoying task!”

To being:

Yo! Look at how many numbers I can generate!

That brought down my enthusiasm severely, but hey, figuring out solutions to problems was still fun.

Then came AI/LLMs.

And with it, a mountain of slop.

Finding help about an issue has gone from googling and reading help articles written by something with an actual brain to mostly being rephrased manuals that only provide working answers to semi standard answers.

Add to that a general push to us AI in anything and everything, no matter how little relevance it holds for the task at hand.

I also remember how AI was sold to the us at first, we were promised to do away with boring paperwork, so we could get on with our actual job.

What did we get? An AI that takes the fun and creative parts, leaving the paperwork for the workers.

We got an AI that we need to expect to be stealing our work and data at every point, giving us shit work back, while being told that we should applaude it and be grateful for it.

And the worst thing, the worst thing is that people seem happy with it. I keep getting requests to buy another Copilot license or asking for another AI service to be added to our tenant, I am sick of it!

We got an AI that somehow has slithered onto the golden throne and can’t be questioned.

I am not able to leave the tech market at this time, but I will focus on more tangible hobbies going forward.

This year, I have given myself a project, I will try to build a model railway in a suitcase. That will be a Z-scale tiny world in a suitcase.

I have never done anything remotely like it, but I feel like I need something physical to take my mind off tech.

Sorry for the rant, but I just came off of a high from realizing and putting words to my feelings.

  • entropiclyclaude@lemmy.wtf
    61·
    1 day ago

    Let me help you:

    AI does create a lot of slop - but at the same time, a lot of people don’t know what capabilities exist and what’s just marketing/hyperbole.

    They read “AI will replace software engineers” and think that they can just talk to an AI and spit out working production level code.

    Not saying that’s you. I don’t know your work.

    1. It doesn’t know your machine unless it has local access. How will it know where you’re installing if it doesn’t know your directory tree?
    2. it doesn’t know that it needs to import other modules or how separate functions need to interact. Not until you build it out and track what you’re doing and how the functions interact. It’s just documenting the work you do.
    3. It defaults to basic framework from which to build - just like we would.

    You don’t sit down and write 8,000 lines of code just one line after another. Shit - it could take me 3 days to figure WHERE to put 2 lines of code.

    1. Claude web and Claude code can be split into dedicated projects or containers.

    This allows specific contextual awareness. The more work you do in a project the more you can build off of it.

    Organizing into context aware containers allows you to massively improve your code base because it actually accesses the code itself. Less guess - less slop. Not “no slop” just less.

    It doesn’t replace everything, but recently I had Claude code evaluate ~43,000 lines of code. I verified its audits manually, and let it do its thing. I still had to make corrections on some assumptions it made but I fixed 110 critical bugs in an afternoon because of this system I’ve described.

    If you’re expecting to say “build me x” it isn’t going to be successful.

    Treat it like it’s a tool in the toolbox, not a replacement for good practices.

    To your other note - the first time I tested Claude code I was blown away. Then the 2nd or 3rd time it took over… I felt like I lost my purpose. I need to be involved, not replaced.