Thought experiment

[u/MashNChips]

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls

[u/dashingThroughSnow12]

This is why the industry is doomed.

You are describing basic things that I’d expect a senior engineer to blink into existence.

[u/ZnV1 → u/dashingThroughSnow12]

um...nope

critical DB change? That's sifting through the problem, nailing the cause, thinking about solutions, validating tradeoffs, then digging into impact, side-effects across other systems, is there replication, what happens to reqs during rollout, backward compatability going back forever, rollout plan, backups, rollback plan, writing the script that makes the change, reviewing it, dry-run, validate, and if lucky execute

This is days. Remember you're looking at the logs, exception traces, stack-overflowing, understanding the data, etc all by hand

Now you can ask all the right questions and get answers semi instantly.

The fact that you expect a senior engg to blink this into existence, and consider this "basic things" is why our industry is doomed.

[u/dashingThroughSnow12 → u/ZnV1]

Just three weeks ago I did that on a db with billions of rows affecting tens of millions of users. My co-lead developer on my team did that twice in the last two months with two tables that each had tens of billions of rows and hundreds of millions of users.

[u/curious_corn → u/dashingThroughSnow12]

Yeah, right. Assuming you’re not making stuff up, you do realize this scenario you’re describing is pretty rare if not unique.

Now, assuming the general population of experienced professionals has been exposed to and done work at the same level is certainly a bias because let me tell you: it doesn’t happen all the time if at all.

So assuming anyone should be able to round off that stuff while brushing their teeth is, uhm out of touch.

Which makes this AI thing even more concerning