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I don't care how well your "AI" works

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Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#181

Post by svantana »

amrocha wrote: post #37
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

There’s been over 1 million people laid off in tech in the past 4 years https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

According to that site, there were more tech layoffs in 2022 than in 2024 or 2025. Doesn't that speak against the "AI is taking tech jobs" hypothesis?

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#182

Post by cwiz »

well, maybe adopt an outlook that things you think are real aren't, and just maybe it will work just as fine if you completely ignore them. going forward ignoring ai that are smarter than autocomplete may be just the way to go

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#183

Post by ojr »

I always thought years of experience in a language was a silly job requirement. LLMs allow me to write Rust code as a total Rust beginner and allows me to create a valuable SaaS while most experienced Rust developer never built anything that made $1 outside of their work. I wouldn't say devaluation, my programming experience definitely helps with debugging. LLMs eliminate boilerplate, not engineering judgement and product decisions.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#184

Post by crazygringo »

skydhash wrote: post #66
rho4 wrote: post #23

And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.

If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away. If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away. If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one. What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.

Honestly, LLMs are about as reliable as the rest of my tools are.

Just yesterday, AirDrop wouldn't work until I restarted my Mac. Google Drive wouldn't sync properly until I restarted it. And a bug in Screen Sharing file transfer used up 20 GB of RAM to transfer a 40 GB file, which used swap space so my hard drive ran out of space.

My regular software breaks constantly. All the time. It's a rare day where everything works as it should.

LLMs have certainly gotten to the point where they seem about as reliable as the rest of the tools I use. I've never seen it say 2+2=5. I'm not going to use it for complicated arithmetic, but that's not what it's for. I'm also not going to ask my calculator to write code for me.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#185

Post by monegator »

embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

> What exactly is being de-valuated We are being second guessed by any sub organism with little brain, but opposable thumbs, at a rate much greater than before, because now the sub organism can simply ask the LLM to type their arguments for them. How many times have you received screenshots of an LLM output yesanding whatever bizarre request you already tried to explain and dismiss as not possible/feasible/unnecessary? the sub organism has delegated their thoughts to the LLM and i always find that extremely infuriating, because all i want to do is to shake that organism and cry "why don't you get it? think! THINK! THINK FOR YOURSELF FOR JUST A SECOND"

Also, i enjoy programming. Even typing boring shit as boilerplate because i keep my brain engaged. As much as i type i keep thinking, is this really necessary? and maybe figure out something leaner. LLMs want to deprive me of enjoyment of my work (research, learn) and of my brain. No thanks, no LLM for me. And i don't care whatever garbage it outputs, i'd much prefere if the garbage was your output, or you are useless.

The only use i have for LLMs and diffusion models is to entertain myself with stupid bullshit i come up with that i would find funny. I massively enjoy projects such as https://dumbassideas.com/

Note: Not taking into account the "classic" ML uses, my rant only going to LLMs and the LLM craze. A tool made by grifters, for grifters.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#186

Post by candiddevmike »

skydhash wrote: post #66
rho4 wrote: post #23

And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.

If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away. If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away. If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one. What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.

Sorry you're being downvoted even though you're 100% correct. There are use cases where the poor LLM reliability is as good or better than the alternatives (like search/summarization), but arguing over whether LLMs are reliable is silly. And if you need reliability (or even consistency, maybe) for your use case, LLMs are not the right tool.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#187

Post by ramon156 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #72
csmantle wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it Not in where I live though. Competition is fierce, both in industry and academia, for most posts being saturated and most employees face "HR optimization" in their late 30s. Not to mention working ove…

Again, compare this to other professions, don't look at in isolation, and you'll see why you're still (or will have, seems you're a student still) having a much more pleasant life than others.

Do other professions expect you to work during personal time? At least blue collar people are done when they get told they're done

I get your viewpoint though, physically exhausting work is probably much worse. I do want to point out that 40 hours has always been above average, and right now its the default

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#188

Post by TrackerFF »

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff.

But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever.

If your org is blindly data/metric driven, it is probably just a mater of time until managers start asking why everyone else is producing so much, while you're slow?

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#189

Post by vladimirralev »

spicyusername wrote: post #115
thunky wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now. But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it. Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor qua…

> assign work to an LLM This is just not happening anywhere around me. I don't know why it keeps getting repeated in every one of these discussions. Every software engineer I know is using LLM tools, but every team around me is still hiring new developers. Zero firing is happening in any circle near me due to LLMs. LLMs can not do unsupervised work, period. They do not replace developers. They replace Stack Overflow…

Today's high-end LLMs can do a lot of unsupervised work. Debug iterations are at least junior level. Audio and visual output verification is still very week (i.e. to verify web page layout and component reactivity). Once the visual model is good enough to look at the screen pixels and understand, it will instantly replace junior devs. Currently if you have only text output all new LLMs can iterate flawlessly and solve problems on it. New backend dev from scratch is completely doable with vibe coding now, with some exceptions around race conditions and legacy code comprehension.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#190

Post by chrisweekly »

carrychains wrote: post #159
spicyusername wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> assign work to an LLM This is just not happening anywhere around me. I don't know why it keeps getting repeated in every one of these discussions. Every software engineer I know is using LLM tools, but every team around me is still hiring new developers. Zero firing is happening in any circle near me due to LLMs. LLMs can not do unsupervised work, period. They do not replace developers. They replace Stack Overflow…

It's me. I'm the LM having work assigned to me that junior dev used to get. I'm actually just a highly proficient BA who has always almost read code, followed and understood news about software development here and on /. before, but generally avoided writing code out of sheer laziness. It's always been more convenient to find something easier and more lucrative in those moments if decision where I actually considered…

LM?
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