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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

#221

Post by davidmurdoch »

TrackerFF wrote: post #188

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…

This just happened to me this week.

I work on the platform everyone builds on top of. A change here can subtlety break any feature, no matter how distant.

AI just can't cope with this yet. So my team has been told that we are too slow.

Meanwhile, earlier this week we halted a roll out because if a bug introduced by AI, as it worked around a privacy feature by just allow listing the behavior it wanted, instead of changing the code to address to policy. It wasn't caught in review because the file that was changed didn't require my teams review (because we ship more slowly, they removed us as code owners for many files recently).

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

#222

Post by lupire »

walt_grata wrote: post #154
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…

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.

Claude gets better as Claude's managers explain concepts to it. It doesn't learn the way a human does. AI is not human. The benefit is that when Claude learns something, it doesn't need to run a MOOC to teach the same things to millions of individuals. Every copy of Claude instantly knows.

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

#223

Post by [deleted] »

lxgr wrote: post #215
fileeditview wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The era of software mass production has begun. We've been in that era for at least two decades now. We just only now invented the steam engine. > I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. At least one such artifact of craft and beauty already literally crashed two airplanes. Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs.

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by knollimar »

lxgr wrote: post #215
fileeditview wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The era of software mass production has begun. We've been in that era for at least two decades now. We just only now invented the steam engine. > I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. At least one such artifact of craft and beauty already literally crashed two airplanes. Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs.

There's a buge difference between possible and likely.

Maybe I'm pessimistic but I at least feel like there's a world of difference between a practice that encourages bugs and one that allows them through when there is negligence. The accountability problem needs to be addressed before we say it's like self driving cars outperforming humans. On a errors per line basis, I don't think LLMs are on par with humans yet

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

#225

Post by empath75 »

lopis wrote: post #28
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),…

The job of a programmer is, and has always been, 50% making our job obsolete (through various forms of automation) and 50% ensuring our job security (through various forms of abstraction).

Over the course of my career, probably 2/3rds of the roles I have had (as in my day to day work, not necessarily the title) just no longer exist, because people like me eliminated them. I personally was the last person that had a few of those jobs because I mostly automated them and got promoted and they didn't hire a replacement. It's not that they hired less people though, they just hired more people, paid them more money, and they focused on more valuable work.

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

#227

Post by goldeneas »

lxgr wrote: post #215
fileeditview wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The era of software mass production has begun. We've been in that era for at least two decades now. We just only now invented the steam engine. > I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. At least one such artifact of craft and beauty already literally crashed two airplanes. Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs.

> Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs

That's obvious. It's a matter of which makes it more likely

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

#228

Post by empath75 »

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

I have been laid off 4 times. Tech has a lot of churn, there are a lot of high risk high reward companies.

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

#229

Post by catapart »

Spivak wrote: post #170
rsynnott wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be the person refusing the 4GL/Segway/3D TV/NFT/Metaverse. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. Like, I mean, at a certain point it runs out of chances. If someone can show me compelling quantitive evidence that these things are broadly useful I may reconsider, but until then I see no particular reason to do my own sampling. If and when they are useful, t…

I mean sure but none of these even claimed to help you do things you were already doing . If your job is writing code none of these help you do that. That being said the metaverse happened but it just wasn't the metaverse those weird cringy tech libertarians wanted it to be. Online spaces where people hang out are bigger than ever. Segways also happened they just changed form to electric scooters.

Being honest, I don't know what a 4GL is. But the rest of them absolutely DID claim to help me do things I was already doing. And, actually, NFTs and the Metaverse even specifically claimed to be able to help with coding in various different flavors. It was mostly superficial bullshit, but... that's kind of the whole tech for those two things.

In any case, Segways promised to be a revolution to how people travel - something I was already doing and something that the marketing was predicated on. 3DTVs - a "better" way to watch TV, which I had already been doing. NFTs - (among other things) a financially superior way to bank, which I had already been doing. Metaverse - a more meaningful way to interact with my team on the internet, which I had already been doing.

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

#230

Post by Razengan »

everdrive wrote: post #138

>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…

> I _need_ to feel comfortable _right now_. It doesn't matter what I do to the world so long as I'm comfortable _right now._

I think that can be offset if you have a strong motivation, a clear goal to look forward to in a reasonable amount of time, to help you endure through the discomfort:

Before I had enough financial independence to be able to travel at will, I was often stuck in a shit ass city, where the most fun to be had was video games and fantasizing about my next vacation coming up in a month or 2, and that helped me a lot in coping with my circumstances.

Too few people are allowed or can afford even this luxury of a pleasant future, a promise of a life different/better than their current.

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