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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

#271

Post by kiba »

afro88 wrote: post #248
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…

I think you'll be waiting a while for the "crashing down". I was a kid when manufacturing went off shore and mass production went into overdrive. I remember my parents complaining about how low quality a lot of mass produced things were. Yet for decades most of what we buy is mass produced, comparatively low quality goods. We got used to it, the benefits outweighed the negatives. What we thought mattered didn't in th…

Poor quality is not synonymous with mass production. It's just cheap crap made with little care.

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

#272

Post by catlifeonmars »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #177
danaris wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. And where will it be in 5-10 years? Because right now, the trajectory looks like "right about where it is today, with maybe some better integrations". Yes, LLMs experienced a period of explosive growth over the past 5-8 years or so. But then they hit diminishing returns , and they hit them hard. Right now, it looks like a veritable pla…

Right about where it is today with better integrations? One year is the difference between Sonnet 3.5 and Opus 4.5. We're not hitting diminishing returns yet (mostly because of exponential capex scaling, but still). We're already committed to ~3 years of the current trajectory, which means we can expect similar performance boosts year over year. The key to keep in mind is that LLMs are a giant bag of capabilities, an…

You buried the lede with “exponential capex scaling”. How is this technology not like oil extraction?

The bulk of that capex is chips, and those chips are straight up depreciating assets.

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

#273

Post by aurareturn »

rsynnott wrote: post #130
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.

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…

  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, there will be _evidence_ of that.
My relative came to me to make a small business website for her. She knew I was a "coder". She gave me a logo and what her small business does.

I fed all of it into Vercel v0 and out came a professional looking website that is based on the logo design and the business segment. It was mobile friendly too. I took the website and fed it to ChatGPT and asked it to improve the marketing copy. I fed the suggestions back to v0 to make changes.

My relative was extremely happy with the result.

It took me about 10 minutes to do all of this.

In the past, it probably would have taken me 2 weeks. One week to design, write copy, get feedback. Another week to code it, make it mobile friendly, publish it. Honestly, there is no way I could have done a better job given the time constraint.

I even showed my non-tech relative how to use v0. Since all changes requested to v0 was in english, she had no trouble learning how to use it in one minute.

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

#274

Post by Aurornis »

bgwalter wrote: post #265
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT. Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use t…

> Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter.

A lot of hackers, including the black hat kind, DGAF about your ideological purity. They get things done with the tools that make it easy. The tools they’re familiar with.

Some of the hacker circles I was most familiar with in my younger days primarily used Windows as their OS. They did a lot of reverse engineering using Windows tools. They might have used .NET to write their custom tools because it was familiar and fast. They pulled off some amazing reverse engineering feats.

Yet when I tell people they preferred Windows and not Linux you can tell who’s more focused on ideological purity than actual achievements because eww Windows.

> Please do no co-opt the term "hacker".

Right back at you. To me, hacker is about results, not about enforcing ideological purity about only using the acceptable tools on your computer.

In my experience: The more time someone spends identifying as a hacker, gatekeeping the word, and trying to make it a culture war thing about the tools you use, the less “hacker” like they are. When I think of hacker culture I think about the people who accomplish amazing things regardless of the tools or whether HN finds them ideologically acceptable to use.

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

#275

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

enraged_camel wrote: post #254
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This sounds kind of logical, but really isn't. In reality you can ASSIGN a task to a junior dev and expect them to eventually complete it, and learn from the experience as well. Sure there'll likely be some interaction between the jun…

>> e.g. coming back to you and asking for help Funny you mention this because Opus 4.5 did this just yesterday. I accidentally gave it a task with conflicting goals, and after working through it for a few minutes it realized what was going on, summarized the conflict and asked me which goal should be prioritized, along with detailed pros and cons of each approach. It’s exactly how I would expect a mid level developer…

Yes, they continue to get better, but they are not at human level (and jr devs are humans too) yet, and I doubt the next level "AGI" that people like Demis Hassabis are projecting to still be 10 years away will be human level either.

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

#276

Post by arscan »

syllogism wrote: post #243
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…

I think LLMs are net helpful if used well, but there's also a big problem with them in workplaces that needs to be called out. It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. If all your coworkers use LLMs and you don't you're gonna get eaten alive. LLMs are unreasonably effective at generating large volumes of stuff that resembles diligent work on the surface. The other thing is, tools change trade-off…

> It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people.

This is my biggest gripe with LLM use in practice.

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

#277

Post by lxgr »

bgwalter wrote: post #265
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT. Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use t…

> hackers have always rejected bloated tools [...] Hackers have historically derided any website generators

Ah yes, true hackers would never, say, build a Debian package...

Managing complexity has always been part of the game. To a very large extent it is the game.

Hate the company selling you a SaaS subscription to the closed-source tool if you want, and push for open-source alternatives, but don't hate the tool, and definitely don't hate the need for the tool.

> Please do no co-opt the term "hacker".

Indeed, please don't. And leave my true scotsman alone while we're at it!

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

#278

Post by Gagarin1917 »

allturtles wrote: post #240
JeremyNT wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I agree with all this, except there is no plan B. What could plan B possibly be when white collar work collapses? You can go into a trade, but who will be hiring the tradespeople?

The companies who now have piles of cash because they eliminated a huge chunk of labor will spend far more on new projects, many of which will require tradesmen.

Economic waves never hit one sector and stop. The waves continues across the entire economy. You can’t think “companies will get rid of huge amounts of labor” and then stop asking questions. You need to then ask “what will companies do with decreased labor costs?” And “what could that investment look like, who will they need to hit to fulfill it?” and then “what will those workers do after their demand increases?” And so on.

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

#279

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

eithed wrote: post #252
cjbgkagh wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But this is an issue of worker you're hiring. I've worked with senior engineers who a) did nothing (as - really not write any thing within the sprint, nor do any other work) b) worked on things they wanted to work on c) did ONLY things that they were assigned in the sprint (= if there were 10 tickets in the sprint and they were assigned 1 of these tickets then they would finish that ticket and not pick up anything el…

If you are a “senior” engineer who is doing nothing but pulling well defined Jira tickets off the board, you’re horribly mis titled.

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

#280

Post by Trasmatta »

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 is this "devaluation"?

The part where writing performant, readable, resilient, extensible, and pleasing code used to actually be a valued part of the craft? I feel like I'm being gaslit after decades of being lectured on how to be a better software developer, only to be told that my craft is pointless, the only thing of value is the output, and that I should be happy spending my day babysitting agents and reviewing AI code slop.

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