Exactly. For most of my career, bad engineers (or juniors who were earnestly learning) would struggle to even create output that compiled, let alone ran. And it would take them a long time to implement something poorly. So the blast radius from their incompetence would be limited. Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not on a tight leash, they'll sink the whole codebase or inundate every senior person with garbage code review requests. The blast radius is unlimited!
> Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not on a tight leash, they'll sink the whole codebase or inundate every senior person with garbage code review requests. The blast radius is unlimited!
The term for that is "10x AI engineer." Anyone who has anything negative to say about such people is just jealous of their insane productivity and speed.
FYI, your comment showed up as [dead] like you were banned until I vouched for it, but I don't see any reason for that. Just thought I'd let you know in case you want to follow up.
> You can make your own numbers look incredible while reducing the throughput of the entire team.
Taken how some companies award promotions and bonus this is actually a double win. You not only improve your own numbers but also make this of your competition worse! /s
I just left a backstabby stack ranked company and so many people were sabotaging colleagues or teams they were in competition with. AI psychosis has been enabling terrible management practices as well as terrible engineering practices.
Sadly AI also amplifies both the good and the bad managers and tech leads. If you have managers who fail to set a clear direction or tech leads who fail to define a good framework for developers to operate within then AI just means the poorly directed developer effort goes further in the wrong direction faster. Meanwhile teams with well-specified goals and better structure and processes can exploit the benefits of AI tools much more effectively.
In the before times, a small dedicated team could hold back against bad engineering culture and intentional enshittification. Now the balance has changed.
