I'm sure github has documents out there somewhere that explain this, but typing that prompt took me two minutes. I'm able daily to get fast answers to complex questions that in years past would have taken me potentially hours of research. Most of the time these answers are correct, and when they are wrong it still takes less time to generate the correct answer than all that research would have taken before. So I guess my advice is: if you're starting out in this business worry less about LLMs replacing you and more about how to efficiently use that global expert on everything that is sitting on your shoulder. And also realize that code, and the ability to write working code, is a small part of what we do every day.
I don't care how well your "AI" works
201–210 of 808 posts
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now I'm doing consulting for two companies, maybe a couple of hours per week, mostly having downtime and trying to expand on my machine learning knowledge. But in general, every job I've had has been "high pay and high enjoyment" even when I initially had "shit pay" compared to other programmers, and the product wasn't really fun, I was still programming, an activity I still love. Compare this to the jobs I did…
I work remote and i hate it, sitting all day is killing me, my 5 minute daily stand-up is nowhere near enough social interaction for a whole day's work. I've been looking for a role better suited to me for over a year, but the market is miserable. I miss having jobs where at least a lot of the time i was moving around or working directly with other people. More than anything else i miss casual conversation with cowor…
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#203I 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…
The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse.
edit: sentence fixed.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#204> 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),…
Until Thanksgiving.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#205> 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 do you think they're building all those datacenters for? Why do you think so much money is pouring into AI companies?
It's not to help make developers more efficient with code assistants.
Traditional computation will be replaced with bots in every aspect of software. The goal is to devalue our labor and replace it with computation performed by machines owned by the wealthy, who can lease this out.
If you can't see this coming you lack both imagination and historical perspective.
Five years ago Claude Code would have been essentially unimaginable. Consider this.
So sure, enjoy your job churning out buggy whips while you can, but you better have a plan B for when the automobiles truly arrive.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#206>In a world where fascists redefine truth, where surveillance capitalist companies, more powerful than democratically elected leaders, exert control over our desires, do we really want their machines to become part of our thought process? To share our most intimate thoughts and connections with them? Generally speaking people just cannot really think this way. People broadly are short term thinkers. If something is c…
> People broadly are short term thinkers. I wonder how much of that is "nature vs. nurture"? Like the Tolkienesque elves in fantasy worlds, would humans be more chill too if our natural lifespans were counted in centuries instead of decades? Or is it the pace of society , our civilization, that always keeps us on edge? I mean I'm not sure if we're born with a biological sense of mortality, an hourglass of doom encode…
Dogs barely set food aside; they prefer gorging, which is a good survival technique when your food spoils and can be stolen.
Bees, at the other end of the spectrum, spend their lives storing food (or "canning", if you will - storing prepared food).
We first evolved in areas that were storage-adverse (Africa), and more recently many of us moved to areas with winters (both good and needful storage). I think "finish your meal, you might not get one tomorrow" is our baseline survival instinct; "Winter is coming!" is an afterthought, and might be more nurture-based behavior than the other.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#207Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or ". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?
> Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; The entire open source movement would like a word with you.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#208> 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 no law of nature that says this has to continue forever, but it's a trend that's been with us since the birth of the industry. You don't need to look at AI tools or methodoligies or whatever. We have code reuse! Productivity has obviously improved, it's just that there's also an arms race between software products in UI complexity, features, etc.
If you don't keep improving how efficiently you can ship value, your work will indeed be devalued. It could be that the economics shift such that pretty much all programming work gets paid less, it could be that if you're good and diligent you do even better than before. I don't know.
What I do know is that whichever way the economics shake out, it's morally neutral. It sounds like the author of this post leans into a labor theory of value, and if you buy into that, well...You end up with some pretty confused and contradictory ideas. They position software as a "craft" that's valuable in itself. It's nonsense. People have shit to do and things they want. It's up to us to make ourselves useful. This isn't performance art.
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#209> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. Anything worth reading beyond this transparent and hopefully unsuccessful appeal to tribalism? Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different? > the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated…
Who says we haven't tried it out?
Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works
#210Earlier 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…
LLMs vs human Handholding the human pays off in the long run more than hand holding the llm, which requires more hand holding anyway. Claude doesn't get better as I explain concepts to it the same way a jr engineer does.