

A friend at a former workplace was in a discussion with that company leadership earlier this week to understand how and what metrics are to be used for promotion candidates since the office is directed to use “AI” tools for coding. Simply put: lots of entry and lower level engineers submit PRs that are co-authored by Claude so it is difficult to measure their actual software development skills to determine if they should get promoted.
That leadership had no real answers just lots of abstract garbage (vibes essentially) and followed up with telling all the entry levels to reduce the code they write and use the purchased agentic tool.
Along with this a buddy at a very famous prop shop says the firm decided to freeze all junior hiring and is leaning into only hiring senior+ and replacing juniors with AI. He asked what will happen when the current seniors leave/retire and got hit with shock that would even be considered.
I bump into a lot of peers/colleagues who are always “ya but what is intelligence” or simply cannot say no to AI. For a while I’ve tried to use the example that if these “AI coding” things are tools, why would I use a tool that’s never perfect? For example I wouldn’t reach for a 10mm wrench that wasn’t 10mm and always rounds off my bolt heads. Of course they have “it could still be useful” responses.
I’m now realizing most programmers haven’t done a manual labor task that’s important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.
For something not just venting I tasked a coworker with some runtime memory relocation and Gemini had this to say about ASLR:
Age, Sex, Location Randomization