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Greatest irony of the AI age: Humans being increasingly hired to clean AI slop (www.sify.com)
submitted 1 week ago by solrize@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[–] rozodru@piefed.social 31 points 1 week ago (4 children)

FINALLY someone wrote something about my job. This is EXACTLY what I've been doing for the past year and I make more money doing it than I did as a regular freelance/consultant dev.

Seriously people, if you're a dev learn and get good at code reviewing. And honestly you don't even have to be THAT good at it because the slop that is puked out by the likes of Claude Code is so god damn easy to find. Deal with the bullshit that is LinkedIn and start advertising yourself as someone that is a sort of "digital janitor" for AI. you'll get clients.

A buddy of mine that was laid off by a company saw what I was doing and decided to be even more ballsy than I was and actually go BACK to said company and offer them assistance in cleaning up the mess they created by laying him and other devs off. He went back as a freelancer, charged them a premium, and now is "working" for them again but making MORE than what they were paying him and now he gets to work on his terms for doing less work.

These places fucked up, they are now learning how much they fucked up, so take advantage of their fuck ups and fuck them even more. I got ZERO sympathy for ANY company that leveraged AI for their builds and tossed their dev teams to the side. But make no mistake, I charge these places an arm and a leg and they deserve it.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

FINALLY someone wrote something about my job. This is EXACTLY what I’ve been doing for the past year and I make more money doing it than I did as a regular freelance/consultant dev.

Are you serious? I'm good at code review but figured that this slop fixup stuff was a fiverr type of job that paid crap. If there's better money in it, maybe I should look into it.

Machine translations (natural language) used to be way worse than they are now, and I've spent some time cleaning those up for my own personal use. It's not that annoying to do. Maybe it would get annoying after a while though.

Very interesting!

[–] rozodru@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Very serious. I kinda fell into it myself when one of my clients reached out to me late last year about needing help with some project they utilized Claude Code and a vibe coder to build from end to end. After that I thought "huh, wee bit o money to be made here".

It's a menial/easy job for sure but man you charge a Premium for it. These companies have no idea what they're doing I mean hell they put their entire company on the back of a 20 year old junior dev and an Anthropic subscription. I generally charge double what I would normally charge for dev work and it's always less work, thus I'm able to take on more clients to fix this stuff which means I'm making much more for less.

Like I said a friend of mine simply went back to the place he got laid off from and told them he'd fix their fuck ups and nickle and dimed them to do so. I and others simply go on LinkedIn and call out the bullshit from tech bro posts and then say we'll fix it. the thing is YOU have to be the one to advertise your service because companies still aren't going to admit they fucked up and post ads asking for help. Trust me they ARE looking for help they're just won't openly admit to it.

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I wonder what the balance is for the company...

I mean, it wouldn't be impossible that they still save money even while paying you more if they have fired more people. If they fire 3 people and hire 1 code-reviewer for double the salary they are still having to pay 1 less wage.

[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago

"Seriously people, if you're a dev learn and get good at code reviewing"

It's a useful skill, even outside of the context of cleaning up AI code. It seems to be universally the case that it's easier to write code than it is to read it (which is why I sometimes find myself so baffled at my own code that I end up rewriting it again from scratch (good comments are a gift to future-You)).

I've been trying to get into contributing to open-source code recently, and it's been a useful exercise in learning to understand other people's code. It's also been making me a more skilled programmer, because reading lots of code helps me to understand how things are typically done in a way that textbook learning can't. It's been especially useful to understand how large code projects are structured, given that most of my experience in writing code that's used by other people has been in smaller, ad-hoc scientific contexts (e.g. writing a script that adds hydrogens onto the protein structures found in the protein database — by default, they're not included, because it depends on the pH of the environment the protein exists in)

[–] Apollo98@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is super interesting! I don’t know if you have a platform for this but you should write an article about this. Maybe talk to the likes of 404media and see if they have interest in the story.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There are a few people who have posted on Hacker News about it but I figured the pay probably sucked. It sounded like it would be treated as a menial job.

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

Yes, it'll usually be treated like a menial job, because so many of the folks who fell for AI code wholesale are assholes. Non-assholes often have a friend who tells them when they're fucking up that badly.

But the pay tends to be very good, anyway, because assholes are usually desperate for any help they can still get.

[–] rozodru@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

it's very menial/easy. BUT you charge a premium for the service because as /u/pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip put it these places are very desperate to fix their fuck ups and fix them quickly. Like I'm talking builds or projects that could be months along and suddenly...nothing works. or something breaks. or nothing can be added. or more common than anything the AI claimed it had added something when it reality it either didn't or simply made a #todo comment and vibe coders continued on.

But yes the pay is good. I essentially get paid to tell a company how much they fucked up and what it will take to fix. There is always the very slim possibility of refactoring but i'd say 8 times out of 10 the only clear path forward is to start from scratch and that generally means hiring devs again.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This was exactly the concern of the TV and movie writers who went on strike. Instead of being paid writers' wages they'll be paid much less as editors to clean up AI slop, while effectively doing the same job because what it writes is so bad.

[–] Obi@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Except all the actual creative part of the job is gone, you know, the reason they got into it in the first place.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

These AI systems are brought to you by execs who don't know the joy of creating anything but lines that go up.

CEO of AI music generation firm Suno claims majority of people don’t “enjoy” making music

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 2 points 1 week ago

I mean, someone has to do it.