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

fokus.cool

641–650 of 808 posts

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

#641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think that people at BigTech are doing it for the “enjoyment” and not for the $250K+ they are making 3 years out of college? From my n=1 experience, they are doing it for the pay + RSUs. If you see what it takes to get ahead in large corporations, it’s not about those who are “passionate”, it’s about people who know how to play the game. If you look at the dumb AI companies that YC is funding, those “entre…

I don't know, look at someone like https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dmbaggett he seems to be an entrepreneur who enjoys what he's doing.

Now compare that to these founders.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...

How many of them do you think started their companies out of “passion”?

Some of the ones I spotted checked had a couple of non technical founders looking for a “founding engineer” that they could underpay with the promise of “equity” that would probably be worthless.

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

#642
post #498

"I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain." Then why should I care about your opinions of them if you have zero experience using them?

I look at these people with fascination. We had digital nomads, guess now we have digital Amishes :-)

  The AImish

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

#643
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an LLM helps me exchange my labor for money more efficiently Except that's unproven. It might make you more productive, but whether you get any of that new value is untested.

Well I have personally tested it on the green field projects I mostly work on and it does the grunt work of IAC (Terraform) and even did a decently complicated API with some detailed instructions like I would give another developer. I’ve done literally dozens of short term quick turn around POCs from doing the full stack from an empty AWS account to “DevOps” to the software development -> training customers how to fi…

> I know how many fewer man hours it takes me now.

But how much has your hourly rate risen?

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

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm just pulling anecdotes out of my ass/am hallucinating. Is there something specific you'd like to point me to, besides just replying with a soundbite?

How about you tell us where the market is good for devs? It is heinous in Canada and all of Europe that I'm aware of. Are you in China? India?

Western Europe is fine, for seniors as well as newcomers, based on my own experience and friends & acquaintances. Then based on more acquaintances South America and Asia seems OK too. But again, ensure you actually understand the context here.

What does "heinous" actually mean here? I've repeated it before, but I guess one more time can't hurt: I'm not saying it isn't difficult to find a job as a developer today compared to a decade ago, but what I am saying is that it's a thing across all sectors and developers aren't hit by it worse than any other sector. Hiring freezes has been happening in not just technology companies, but across the board.

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

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want. But they'd prefer if it was shorts.

No, they wouldn't. On Youtube, for example, videos were consistently trending longer over time, and you used to see frequent explainers ( https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-video-extra-long/ ) on why this was happening and how Youtube benefits from it. Short-form videos are harder to monetize and reduce retention, but users demand them so strongly that most platforms have built a dedicated experience for them to com…

If that was true, I would be able to turn off shorts from my recommendation feed.

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

#646

> 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 is easy software engineering is easy? you live in bubble, try teaching programming to someone new to it and you'll realize how muuuuch effort it requires

Have you tried any other jobs? Have to ever tried teaching just the basics of plumbing to a 18 year old who can barely hold a screwdriver?

If you want a challenge, try almost any other job than development, and you'll realize how easy all this stuff actually is.

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

#647
post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. This is so incredibly true.

I'm interested in this. Code review, most egregiously where the "author" neglected to review the LLM output themselves, seems like a clear instance. What are some other examples? Something that should go in a "survival guide" for devs that still prefer to code themselves.

Well, if you take "review the LLM output" in its most general way, I guess you can class everything under that. But I think it's worth talking about the problem in a bit more detail than that, because someone can easily say "Oh I definitely review the LLM output!" and still be pushing work onto other people.

The fact is that no matter whether we review the LLM output or not, no matter whether we write the code entirely by hand or not, there's always going to be the possibility of errors. So it's not some bright-line thing. If you're relatively lazier and relatively less thoughtful in the way you work, you'll make more errors and more significant errors. You'll look like you're doing the work, but your teammates have to do more to make up for the problems.

Having to work around problems your coworkers introduced is nothing new, but LLMs make it worse in a few ways I think. One is just, that old joke about there being four kinds of people: lazy and stupid, industrious and stupid, smart and lazy, and industrious and smart. It's always been the "industrious and stupid" people that kill you, so LLMs are an obvious problem there.

Second there's what I call the six-fingered hands thing. LLMs make mistakes a human wouldn't, which means the problem won't be in your hypothesis-space when you're debugging.

Third, it's very useful to have unfinished work look unfinished. It lets you know what to expect. If there's voluminous docs and tests and the functionality either doesn't work at all or doesn't even make sense when you think about it, that's going to make you waste time.

Finally, at the most basic level, we expect there to be some sort of plan behind our coworkers' work. We expect that someone's thought about this and that the stuff they're doing is fundamentally going to be responsive to the requirements. If someone's phoning it in with an LLM, problems can stay hidden for a long time.

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

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the idea is that such a CNC saw shouldn't need an operator at all. To the extent it still does, the operator doesn't even need to be in the same town, much less the same building. This is a GOOD thing.

Good or bad, converting craft work to production work is not making the craft worker more productive, it's eliminating the craft worker. The unskilled operator's position is also precarious, as you point out, but while it lasts, it's a different and (arguably) less satisfying form of work. The LLM is not a table saw that makes a carpenter faster, it's an automatic machine that makes an owner's capital more efficient.

(Shrug) I don't know about "owners" and "capital," but used properly, they make me more efficient.

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

#649

> 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),…

> 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 programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy Eh? I'm happy for you (and envious), because that is not my experience. The job is hard. Agile's constant fortnightly deadlines, a complete lack of respect by the rest of the stakeholders for the work developers…

I guess ultimately our perspectives shape how we see current situations.

When I write that, I write that with the history and experience of doing other things. Deadlines, lack of respect from stakeholders, egoists and changing requirements just don't sound so bad when you compare to "Ah yeah resident 41 broke their leg completely and we need to clean up their entire apartment from the pools of blood and pus + work with the ambulance crew to get them to the hospital".

I guess it's kind of a PTSD of sorts or something, as soldiers describe the same thing coming home to a "normal life" after spending time in a battle-zone. Everything just seems so trivial compared to the situations you've faced before.

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

#650
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah it’s interesting to see if blaming LLMs becomes as acceptable as “caused by a technical fault” to deflect responsibility from what is a programmer’s output. Perhaps that’s what lead to a decline in accountability and quality.

The decline in accountability has been in progress for decades, so LLMs can obviously not have caused it.

They might of course accelerate it if used unwisely, but the solution to that is arguably to use them wisely, not to completely shun them because "think of the craft and the jobs".

And yes, in some contexts, using them wisely might well mean not using them at all. I'd just be surprised if that were a reasonable default position in many domains in 5-10 years.

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