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The rise of judgement over technical skill

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Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#151

Post by Suppafly »

mlinhares wrote: post #122
bcrosby95 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be at least the third time in history we've tried to shunt writing code to low paid labor. We'll see if it's successful this time. The problem tends to be that small details affect large details which affect small details. If you aren't good at both you're usually shit at both.

The problem wasn't low paid labor, it was just incompetent labor. You can find competent developers in all these countries offering lower pay, India, Brazil, Romania, Poland, China, Pakistan, its just that they would already be hired by other higher paying companies and what is left for the ones that are looking for the lowest paid possible workers are the incompetent ones.

>its just that they would already be hired by other higher paying companies and what is left for the ones that are looking for the lowest paid possible workers are the incompetent ones

Reminds of me working in IT. One company tried to outsource my job to India five different times before they were mostly successful at it. The companies that are successful aren't the ones that assume it'll cost 1/10th the price, they are the ones that know it'll cost 60+% of the price and still require some handholding.

If you're hiring on price alone, you're already selecting the pool that doesn't contain the most competent labor.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#152

Post by coffeefirst »

azeirah wrote: post #116
coffeefirst wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. All this “productivity” has not resulted in one meaningful open source PR or one interesting indie app launch, and I can’t square my own experience with the hype machine. If it’s not all hat and no cattle, someone should be able to show me some cows.

I dunno, as an engineer who likes to make side projects, I can say with high certainty that LLMs have helped me compensate for things I'm worse at when coding a product. I'm good at the engineering side of things, I'm good at UI, I'm good at UX, I'm good at css, I'm just not good at design. So I tell the LLM to do it for me. It works incredibly well. I don't know if it's a net increase in productivity for me, but I a…

That makes perfect sense to me. I’m finding real value in natural language search for code and docs, and “remind me how to do X.”

It’s the extraordinary claims of 10x speed and crazy autopilot that have me looking around for missing cows.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#153

Post by prmph »

whatarethembits wrote: post #127
prmph wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the heck, the code generation _is_ absolutely still a bottle-neck. I dare anyone who making these arguments that LLMs have removed the need for actual programming skill, for example, to share in a virtual pair programming session with me, and I will demonstrate their basic inability to do _any_ moderately complex coding in short order. Yes, I think that's the only way to resolve this controversy. If they have so…

Honestly, its mind boggling. Am I the worst prompter ever? I have three python files (~4k LOC total) that I wanted to refactor with help from Claude 4 (Opus and Sonnet) and I followed Reed Harper's LLM workflow...the results are shockingly bad. It produces an okay plan, albeit full of errors, but usable with heavy editing. In the next step though, most of the code it produced was pretty much unusable. It would've bee…

I couldn't agree more. This has been my exact experience.

Like you I'll probably write a blog post and show, prompt by prompt, just how shockingly bad Claude frequently is. And it's supposed to be one of the best at AI assisted coding, which mean the others are even worse.

That'll either convince people, match their experiences, or show me up to be the worst prompter ever.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#154

Post by mjklin »

tingle wrote: post #94

Chap. CCCLXIV. — On the Judgment of Painters. When the work is equal to the knowledge and judgment of the painter, it is a bad sign; and when it surpasses the judgment, it is still worse, as is the case with those who wonder at having succeeded so well. But when the judgment surpasses the work, it is a perfectly good sign ; and the young painter who possesses that rare disposition, will, no doubt, arrive at great per…

“The reason the gentleman is called worthy is not that he is able to do everything that the most skillful man can do. The reason the gentleman is called wise is not because he knows everything that the wise man knows. When he is called discriminating, this does not mean that he is able to split hairs so exhaustively as the sophists. That he is called an investigator does not mean that he is able to examine exhaustively into everything that an investigator may examine. He has his limit.

In observing high and low lands, in judging whether fields are poor or fertile, and in deciding where the various grains should be planted, the gentleman is not as capable as a farmer. When it is a matter of understanding commodities and determining their quality and value, the gentleman cannot vie with a merchant. As regards skill in the use of the compass, square, plumb line, and other tools, he is less able than an artisan. In disregarding right and wrong, truth and falsehood, but manipulating them so that they seem to change places and shame each other, the gentleman cannot compare with Hui Shih and Teng Hsi.

However, if it is a question of ranking men according to their virtue; if offices are to be bestowed according to ability; if both the worthy and the unworthy are to be put in their proper places… if all things and events are to be dealt with properly; if the charter of Shen Tzu and Mo Tzu are to be suppressed; if Hui Shih and Teng Hsi are not to dare to put forth their arguments; if speech is always to accord with the truth and affairs are always to be properly managed — it is in these matters that the gentleman excels.”

— Hsun-tzu, Chinese (300–235 B.C.)

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#155

Post by [deleted] »

mlinhares wrote: post #122
bcrosby95 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be at least the third time in history we've tried to shunt writing code to low paid labor. We'll see if it's successful this time. The problem tends to be that small details affect large details which affect small details. If you aren't good at both you're usually shit at both.

The problem wasn't low paid labor, it was just incompetent labor. You can find competent developers in all these countries offering lower pay, India, Brazil, Romania, Poland, China, Pakistan, its just that they would already be hired by other higher paying companies and what is left for the ones that are looking for the lowest paid possible workers are the incompetent ones.

[deleted]

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#156

Post by whattheheckheck »

wvoch235 wrote: post #148
bcrosby95 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be at least the third time in history we've tried to shunt writing code to low paid labor. We'll see if it's successful this time. The problem tends to be that small details affect large details which affect small details. If you aren't good at both you're usually shit at both.

IMO attempts to make it low paid work will fail, just like almost every STEM profession. But... the number of engineers that we need who operate as "power multipliers" on team will continue to decrease. Many startup and corporate teams already aren't needing junior/mid level engineers any longer. They just need "drivers", senior/lead/staff engineers that can run independent tracks. AI becomes the "power multiplier" i…

Solopreneurs won't be able to effectively lobby govt regulators

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#157

Post by aaron695 »

scj wrote: post #109

AI can draw blueprints of a house. The house may look aesthetically pleasing, but if it can't hold it's own weight, the design is flawed. There's a difference between an executed image and a display-only image. At a certain point, judgment requires technical knowledge.

[dead]

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#158

Post by wvoch235 »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #156
wvoch235 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO attempts to make it low paid work will fail, just like almost every STEM profession. But... the number of engineers that we need who operate as "power multipliers" on team will continue to decrease. Many startup and corporate teams already aren't needing junior/mid level engineers any longer. They just need "drivers", senior/lead/staff engineers that can run independent tracks. AI becomes the "power multiplier" i…

Solopreneurs won't be able to effectively lobby govt regulators

i have significantly more faith in school children regulating an insane asylum

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#159

Post by ryukoposting »

Suppafly wrote: post #151
mlinhares wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem wasn't low paid labor, it was just incompetent labor. You can find competent developers in all these countries offering lower pay, India, Brazil, Romania, Poland, China, Pakistan, its just that they would already be hired by other higher paying companies and what is left for the ones that are looking for the lowest paid possible workers are the incompetent ones.

>its just that they would already be hired by other higher paying companies and what is left for the ones that are looking for the lowest paid possible workers are the incompetent ones Reminds of me working in IT. One company tried to outsource my job to India five different times before they were mostly successful at it. The companies that are successful aren't the ones that assume it'll cost 1/10th the price, they…

"Never buy the cheapest version of something." I don't remember who told me that, but it was good advice. There's always a reason.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#160

Post by ben30 »

davnn wrote: post #144
ben30 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on the review burden being frustrating. Two strategies I've found helpful for managing the cognitive load: 1. Tight issue scoping : Making sure each issue is narrowly defined so the resulting PRs are small and focused. Easier to reason about a 50-line change than a 500-line one. 2. Parallel PR workflow : Using git worktrees to have multiple small PRs open simultaneously against the same repo. This lets me brea…

> The key insight is that smaller, well-bounded changes are exponentially easier to review thoroughly. I am not sure if that is the real insight. It appears to me that most people prefer small, well-bounded changes, but it's quite tricky to break down large tasks into small but meaningful changes, isn't it? To me, that appears to be the key.

Exactly - and that's where AI becomes really valuable as a thinking partner. I use Claude Code to have conversations with my codebase about how to slice problems down further.

The issue definition itself becomes something you can iterate on and refactor, just like code. Getting that definition tightly bounded is more critical than ever because without clear boundaries, the AI doesn't know when to stop or what constitutes "done."

It's like having a pair programming session focused purely on problem decomposition before any code gets written. The AI can help you explore different ways to break down the work, identify dependencies, and find natural seams in the problem space.

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