IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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ShakyJake said:
I’m not saying juniors + AI will automatically outperform great seniors. I’m saying we shouldn’t romanticize the existing senior talent as flawless, because they aren’t.
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The value you provide as a staff/principal engineer is rarely the code you write. It's understanding design patterns and various technologies. When does it make sense to do X instead of Y when both have the same immediate outcome but different longterm implications. You learn this kind of expertise almost explicitly through years of interactions across dozens of projects, use cases, business models, coding frameworks, technologies, and so on.

This will always be where AI fails and where juniors with AI will make AI fail spectacularly. As constraining the AI to your specific use case with the long term implications in mind is just not something a 27 year old engineer will do in most cases. Because they had no idea of the downstream effect of using Y when X actually makes it easier for downstream dependencies for various reasons. But both achieved the same immediate output.

Most of us have spent years dealing with this exact kind of technical debt. All organizations create this and all orgs have it but the difference becomes when you spend 50% of your engineering capacity trying to keep day to day functionality due to tech debt or 10%. That kind of thing.
 
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ShakyJake

ShakyJake

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So, some asshole exhausted our credits, and now we're having to code like cavemen for the rest of the month, I guess. Is anyone else having this problem?

As developers, we have zero visibility into how many tokens we're consuming, what the limit is, or if we're approaching it. Not only that, but the credits are grouped at the department level, so a single dev could be hoovering up all of them (which, admittedly, could've been me).
 
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Kuro

Kuro

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ShakyJake said:
So, some asshole exhausted our credits, and now we're having to code like cavemen for the rest of the month, I guess. Is anyone else having this problem?

As developers, we have zero visibility into how many tokens we're consuming, what the limit is, or if we're approaching it. Not only that, but the credits are grouped at the department level, so a single dev could be hoovering up all of them (which, admittedly, could've been me).
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Sounds like you need a 24 year old female college grad with a jira board scheduling twice daily meetings.

To track token usage, but also to reduce productivity by trapping you in endless meetings so that you use fewer tokens
 
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Khane

Khane

Got something right about marriage
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Kuro said:
Sounds like you need a 24 year old female college grad with a jira board scheduling twice daily meetings.

To track token usage, but also to reduce productivity by trapping you in endless meetings so that you use fewer tokens
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Jokes on you bud, she's just using tokens to automate all of that.

Checkmate.

This is actually happening faster than I expected. You know, the whole AI drug dealer dilemma. It was always gonna happen, I just figured it would be after some of the bigger players failed and left the space and the kings were crowned and had their captive audience
 
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Noodleface

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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ShakyJake said:
So, some asshole exhausted our credits, and now we're having to code like cavemen for the rest of the month, I guess. Is anyone else having this problem?

As developers, we have zero visibility into how many tokens we're consuming, what the limit is, or if we're approaching it. Not only that, but the credits are grouped at the department level, so a single dev could be hoovering up all of them (which, admittedly, could've been me).
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Our org is given a pool of credits for the month and it is then doled out to users based on what role they're in. We are also able to request increases where they take from those not using as many.

Not having a guard rail is ridiculous lol.
 
Khane

Khane

Got something right about marriage
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Most companies are/were forcing their entire org to use AI for EVERYTHING. So how's it gonna go when they finally wake up to what that actually costs and try to put a governor on it?

"Why are you guys using so many tokens?!"
"Because you literally threatened my job if I didn't"
 
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ShakyJake

ShakyJake

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Khane said:
Most companies are/were forcing their entire org to use AI for EVERYTHING. So how's it gonna go when they finally wake up to what that actually costs and try to put a governor on it?

"Why are you guys using so many token?!"
"Because you literally threatened my job if I didn't"
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For our team, most individuals were unaware of AI coding agents until quite recently. There were no mandates requiring anyone to use them. Instead, only a small number of people expressed curiosity and experimented with the IDE plugin. Then, a few discovered the CLI and enthusiastically began creating skills and other tools. And now here we are.
 
TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
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ShakyJake said:
So, some asshole exhausted our credits, and now we're having to code like cavemen for the rest of the month, I guess. Is anyone else having this problem?

As developers, we have zero visibility into how many tokens we're consuming, what the limit is, or if we're approaching it. Not only that, but the credits are grouped at the department level, so a single dev could be hoovering up all of them (which, admittedly, could've been me).
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This will be THE one and only problem in the coming years.

Welcome to the Token Economy broski!
 
moonarchia

moonarchia

The Scientific Shitlord
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TJT said:
This will be THE one and only problem in the coming years.

Welcome to the Token Economy broski!
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They have unironically created a KPI for coding ability and productivity. Now AI can start replacing management as well.
 
Phazael

Phazael

Confirmed Beta Shitlord, Fat Bastard
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Khane said:
Jokes on you bud, she's just using tokens to automate all of that.

Checkmate.

This is actually happening faster than I expected. You know, the whole AI drug dealer dilemma. It was always gonna happen, I just figured it would be after some of the bigger players failed and left the space and the kings were crowned and had their captive audience
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Money is drying up so they are accelerating the time table to get out before the bubble pops. Out company is going to escape this trap thanks to its sheer ineptitude and inability to adopt anything new in a timely manner, which is equally hilarious to me. And yea the MBA non technical fucktards gobbled up most of our tokens purely to have AI crank out their buzzword laden business plans that never materialize (and are probably most about getting more AI, LOL) and the actual dev ops and technical people got stiffed. I was actually in the process of automating a bunch of our workflows for end user service when we got told to hold off because there were higher priority people getting to burn them. Turned out it was a bunch of middle managers having AI do useless administrative tasks for them mostly, when we looked into the metrics.
 
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Noodleface

Noodleface

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Khane said:
Most companies are/were forcing their entire org to use AI for EVERYTHING. So how's it gonna go when they finally wake up to what that actually costs and try to put a governor on it?

"Why are you guys using so many tokens?!"
"Because you literally threatened my job if I didn't"
Click to expand...
Already happened here. We had a meeting where they said "ok I know we said use it for everything but now we want you to use them smarter"
 
TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Speaking of using them smarter I can been using Rules | Cursor Docs because these assholes explained that this was the correct way to use Cursor to the best and most efficient effect.

However, clear project level rules for things inflates your contexts and thus your tokens to unmanageable levels really fast. So we instead have to pivot to using skills which are just a lot different.
 
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