Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds less like engineering advice and more like spellcasting advice.
What part of this prompt reads like "spellcasting" to you?
It's all guesses, heuristics, and folk wisdom.
GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
191–200 of 226 posts
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but it saved me from a bunch of tedious work that I don’t enjoy anyway. I play music and find practicing scales and learning music theory much more tedious and less enjoyable. I'd much rather be playing actual songs and having that flow where it is like the music is just coming out of me. But the reason I do the tedious stuff is because I don't get the latter stuff without the former. I can still learn to play song…
I don't find this analogy compelling because practicing scales is an exercise to trains up the cerebellum so that you no longer have to pay close attention to fine motor control and can shift the focus of your attention to higher levels.
Music practice does a lot of things, including that. But also, when I'm in a flow state I can often just churn out code the same way. Practice helps take what is system 2 and allow it to be system 1.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#193"But anything beyond writing a simple function always leads to useless junk."
If that's the article writer's experience then they are simply using it incorrectly. The author seems to suggest most of their usage involves pasting code or chatting via the text interface, likely with a non-sota model.
It would be surprising to find that someone using e.g. Claude Code cli with full access to a codebase and carefully considered prompts is always getting useless junk.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#194You are using them wrong and yes you will be left behind. But we will all get replaced so it doesnt matter as much.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it depends a lot on what you're trying to get them to do and what you're working on. I don't really buy into the whole "prompt engineering" part. I use agents quite a lot, but they have limitations. They excel at writing SQL, kubernetes configuration, bicep and similar... at least so long as you know what you're doing. I also have quite a lot of success with them keeping documentation and tests updated. I wou…
> Bad from a traditionalist software engineering perspective, but great from a business perspective (which is what matters). Not everything needs to scale after all. Anyway, I do question whether the author has actually worked with LLM's a lot. I would think that the strengths failings of LLM's would get obvious rather quickly to anyone who uses them. Few things I've seen here. > If you're working in a field where "g…
I would argue that "good enough" means that it doesn't add inconvenience or significant cost, but I know what you're talking about. That is the flip-side of it though, there is already so much non-AI garbage that it sometimes doesn't even registrer with the business when something was written by a MBA and some LLM. Not because that is necessarily a good thing, but it is what it is.
Nothing we do that is user facing is created by AI (this doesn't include any of our business intelligence as that's another department). We currently have a frontend lead who passionately hates AI for basically all of the reasons you bring up, and as long as they keep delivering, I doubt that will change anytime soon. As far as the BI goes, well, that will probably always be a horrible mess because it's next to impossible to find someone who's interested in working with the development/design side of PowerBI. I'm not sure it's even because we won't pay them enough, there doesn't seem to be anyone around here who wants a job like that. We tell our collective selves that it'll be better when we switch to Microsoft Fabric, but we'll see.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#196Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it depends a lot on what you're trying to get them to do and what you're working on. I don't really buy into the whole "prompt engineering" part. I use agents quite a lot, but they have limitations. They excel at writing SQL, kubernetes configuration, bicep and similar... at least so long as you know what you're doing. I also have quite a lot of success with them keeping documentation and tests updated. I wou…
> Bad from a traditionalist software engineering perspective, but great from a business perspective (which is what matters). Not everything needs to scale after all. Anyway, I do question whether the author has actually worked with LLM's a lot. I would think that the strengths failings of LLM's would get obvious rather quickly to anyone who uses them. Few things I've seen here. > If you're working in a field where "g…
> There's some specific timesheet software used for Gov Contractors that's hands-down, the worst web "application" I've ever used.
Deltek. Yuck.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's all guesses, heuristics, and folk wisdom.
Which part? Be specific. They took the trouble to actually give a full prompt.
I cite literally the entire thing, specifically lines 1-N. Is there any actual engineering advice in here? Do they cite any hard facts? Any actual science? Real statistics? No. The post can be summarized as: "Here are some things I tried; it seems to work for me", which is astrology-level support.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which part? Be specific. They took the trouble to actually give a full prompt.
I cite literally the entire thing, specifically lines 1-N. Is there any actual engineering advice in here? Do they cite any hard facts? Any actual science? Real statistics? No. The post can be summarized as: "Here are some things I tried; it seems to work for me", which is astrology-level support.
Are we talking about the same comment? I'm talking about this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854637
... which, rather than "spellcasting", appears to contain a fairly complete technical description of the system being constructed.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cite literally the entire thing, specifically lines 1-N. Is there any actual engineering advice in here? Do they cite any hard facts? Any actual science? Real statistics? No. The post can be summarized as: "Here are some things I tried; it seems to work for me", which is astrology-level support.
Are we talking about the same comment? I'm talking about this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854637 ... which, rather than "spellcasting", appears to contain a fairly complete technical description of the system being constructed.
That's the spell. It's proffered soley because it "compiled and worked on the first try". This only flies as engineering advice in the software world because our version of engineering is "just try this out and see if it works. If it does, ship. Bugs be damned we'll patch them live!", which has resulted in... well I guess acceptance of this current push toward vibe coding.