Live data from Hacker News

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

fokus.cool

201–210 of 808 posts

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

#201
I think the dangers that LLMs pose to the ability of engineers to earn a living is overstated, while at the same time the superpowers that they hand us don't seem to get much discussion. When I was starting out in the 80's I had to prowl dial-up BBSs or order expensive books and manuals to find out how to do something. I once paid IBM $140 for a manual on the VGA interface so I could answer a question. The turn around time on that answer was a week or two. The other day I asked claude something similar to this: "when using github as an OIDC provider for authentication and assumption of an AWS IAM role the JWT token presented during role assumption may have a "context" field. Please list the possible values of this field and the repository events associated with them." I got back a multi-page answer complete with examples.

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.

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

#202

Earlier 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…

Get a standing desk and a walking treadmill! It’s genuinely changed my life. I can focus easier, I get my steps in, and it feels like I did something that day.

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

#203

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…

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over.

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),…

You sound exactly like that turkey from Nassim Taleb's books that came to the conclusion that the purpose of human beings is to make turkeys very happy with lots of food and breeding opportunities. And the turkey's thesis gets validated perfectly every day he wakes up to a delicious fatty meal.

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),…

> And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.

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…

I've wondered about this a lot, and I think it's genetic and optimized for survival in general.

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

#207
post #35

Everytime 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.

So would disruptive young Mr. Gates.

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),…

Software to date has been a [Jevons good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). Demand for software has been constrained by the cost efficiency and risk of software projects. Productivity improvements in software engineering have resulted in higher demand for software, not less, because each improvement in productivity unblocks more of the backlog of projects that weren't cost effective before.

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
post #193

> 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…

> Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different?

Who says we haven't tried it out?

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

#210
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…

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.

I had hired 3 junior/mid lvl devs and paid them to do nothing but study to improve their skills, it was my investment in their future, I had a big project on the horizon that I needed help with. After 6 months I let them go, the improvement was far too slow. Books that should have taken a week to get through were taking 6 weeks. Since then LLM have completely surpassed them. I think it’s reasonable to think that some day, maybe soon, LLMs will surpass me. Like everyone else, I have to the best I can while I can.
Post reply on HN