It's time to become an ML engineer (2022) • Hacker News Board

Re: It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)

#11

Post by ramon156 » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

deoxykev wrote: post #4

lowsong wrote: post #3

Nearly two years on from this article's publication, 'AI' tools are still as useless as ever for productive work.

Curious to hear what kind of work you do. Because there are definitely fields where productivity as 10x'd because of AI tools.

Seriously? 10x? Either those were cushion jobs or you oversold your claim

Re: It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)

#12

Post by tempodox » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 2:54 PM UTC

lowsong wrote: post #3

Nearly two years on from this article's publication, 'AI' tools are still as useless as ever for productive work.

Still remarkable though that they didn't mean a prompt guesser when they said, “ML engineer”.

Re: It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)

#13

Post by rikafurude21 » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 2:54 PM UTC

lowsong wrote: post #3

Nearly two years on from this article's publication, 'AI' tools are still as useless as ever for productive work.

They can be incredibly useful for many kinds of knowledge work. I've been much more productive using LLMs than before. I'm at the point where I dont know how I ever managed without.

Re: It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)

#14

Post by petesergeant » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

lowsong wrote: post #3

Nearly two years on from this article's publication, 'AI' tools are still as useless as ever for productive work.

After crypto-bros, we now have AI-deniers

Re: It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)

#15

Post by petesergeant » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

badgersnake wrote: post #10

Did you used to be a blockchain engineer?

You can find out a little more about Greg's background here: https://gregbrockman.com/

Rather than a crypto-guy, he used to be the CTO of Stripe, who were moderately successful.

Re: It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)

#16

Post by portaouflop » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

I think I’ll pass

Re: It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)

#17

Post by drpossum » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

I hope this removes some people from the general dev pool who jumped because someone told them to "learn to code" and they thought it was a good way to get rich.

Re: It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)

#18

Post by LunaSea » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

deoxykev wrote: post #4

lowsong wrote: post #3

Nearly two years on from this article's publication, 'AI' tools are still as useless as ever for productive work.

Curious to hear what kind of work you do. Because there are definitely fields where productivity as 10x'd because of AI tools.

Please give us a source for the x10.

Re: It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)

#19

Post by ethagnawl » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

lowsong wrote: post #3

Nearly two years on from this article's publication, 'AI' tools are still as useless as ever for productive work.

I don't know that I'd say _useless_ but there's _a long way_ to go. I also suspect that many developers are going to wind up being dependent upon them at the expense of getting familiar with reading code/documentation, exploring with debuggers, writing forum/blog posts, etc.

Here is one example from the last time I asked Claude a question about message filtering on AWS SQS, which is a very common exchange in my (relatively limited) experience with these tools.tool

# me responding to a suggestion to use a feature which I was pretty sure did not exist

> ... and you're sure this strategy works with SQS FIFO queues?

# Claude apologizing for hallucinating

> I apologize - I need to correct my previous responses. I made a mistake - message filtering with message attributes is NOT supported with FIFO queues. This is an important limitation of FIFO queues.

If I didn't already have familiarity with this service and its feature set, I would have wasted 15/30/60 mins trying to validate the suggestion.

I can't imagine trying to debug code that was automatically generated and inserted into my toolchain using Copilot or whatever else. Again, I'm sure this will all get better but I'm not convinced that any of these tools should be the first ones we reach for.

Re: It's time to become an ML engineer (2022)

#20

Post by lbhdc » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

I find this take interesting in the present. I work at $BIGCO that has done lots of ML in house for many years. I have noticed more and more ML projects being killed because their work is superseded by external model vendors. Why spend millions on a team to build a new model, when you can pay thousands to rent someone elses?