I work at a large technology company and every day I’m astounded by how much quicker our team can get through projects. I’m talking 1/10th the time of before
One would expect that companies will start iterating much quicker. Either shorter times between releases or bigger leaps with each release. But I don’t necessarily see that yet. I wonder when we can expect it to filter through
Preemptive warning: Sorry if this was badly written I'm dyslexic (thank God for spell check!) and autistic, and generally bad at English, so I often get the tone wrong but I hope I get my question across. I'm always trying to improve. Thanks!
I was just looking back on an old repo we were working on early last year and it struck me that most of the code was written by me. Fast forward to today and I'm barely writing any code, Codex and Claude do pretty much everything for me.
I've only been in the industry for 4 years (UCD CS grad 2022) but it's just crazy to see what this year's UCD/TCD/TUD/DCU/NUIG etc grads will have at their disposal compared to me. Will they/should they even learn to code (sorry if that sounds crazy but what I'm seeing on the ground is basically nobody is coding anymore) ? How are they even doing their final year projects? Are they mainly using LLMs or what? Are they just going straight into agent based development like everyone at my company seems to be. Worries me that they won't nail down the fundamentals as the code still needs to be reviewed obviously. Although the agents keep getting better at producing first time clean code I have to say.
With my career progression (4 yoe) I was already moving into more of a systems/higher level approach and not just coding work so really I think the LLMs are more of an aid to me and not taking away from my learning or career opportunities. In fact I find myself spending a lot more time thinking of the bigger picture now as I’m not bogged down fixing bugs.
I worry new grads will miss that initial 2 or 3 years in your first company where you just get your hands dirty understanding massive codebases and making relatively small contributions on a big picture scale but really getting to understand the nitty gritty stuff. I genuinely enjoyed the coding and debugging side of that, and the fact a new grad can just hand it off to Claude Opus makes me feel they're going to miss out. All that work is automated now.
I guess you could argue it's just another step up in abstraction, albeit a much bigger leap than ever before. I don't know much about assembly or low level c programming and it hasn't really affected me... but I'm not sure it's quite the same with LLMs as the abstraction is now just plain language.
NOTE:
I know the question isn't strictly Ireland-specific, but most of the discourse I see is from people in the US and I'd rather hear what it actually looks like around here. Asking on DevelEire because my dev friends at other companies don't seem to be using AI for everything the way we are, so it's clearly being pushed harder by my employer than by theirs. I can't tell if I'm the outlier for being in a company that's gone all-in, or if my friends are the outliers for holding back.
For background I’m 27 and have been working for 3.5 years since graduating. My pension fund is currently at €46,500 invested all in standard life vanguard global stock index fund s2. Since graduating I’ve been maxing out my contributions of 8% plus 10% employer. Also been contributing another 7% AVCs which takes me up to the max for my age tax free.
This was all based on advice I was getting here back then and I basically ignored it since. But now I want to start saving some real money. I’m pretty bad at saving so don’t have much at the moment but I’m wondering if cutting back on the AVCs is a good idea while I get my deposit for a house together? It would add another €150-€200 a month onto my take home. By the way I pay extortionate rent €1500 per month to live alone which I value a lot so I can’t cut back on that for my own sanity.
I also recently bought a used EV for €20k so will save a good chunk per month on fuel there (charging at work) but my savings in the bank are basically zero now! When it comes to actually buying the house I’ll consider selling the EV again, 2 years from now it might be worth €15k maybe and just slum it on public transport for a while. The cost saved on fuel should more than cover the depreciation based on the numbers I ran. That’s my plan anyway. I've already increased my direct debit by 240 per month redirecting what would have went towards fuel into savings. So ideally I could boost that again by stopping the AVCs.
It says my fund is projected to be between €2,699,308 and €3,422,288 at retirement (unfavourable scenario vs favourable scenario). I think I may have leeway here to drop the contributions after contributing fairly aggressively for 3 years but looking for other opinions here.