61–70 of 744 posts
If you’re quicker then competition heats up management wants more done, efficiencies are soon forgotten and new expectations and baselines set.
Good write-up. I don't disagree with any of his points, but does anybody here have practical suggestions on how to move forward and think about one's career? I've been a frontend (with a little full stack) for a few years now, and much of the modern landscape concerns me, specifically with how I should be positioning myself. I hear vague suggestions like "get better at the business domain" and other things like that.…
AI will probably replace the bottom ~30-70%(depends who you ask) of dev jobs. Dont get caught in the dead zone when the bottom falls out.
Exactly how we'll train good devs in the future, if we don't give them a financially stable environment environment to learn in while they're bad, is an open question.
I keep seeing articles like these popup. I am in the industry but not in the “AI” industry. What I have no concept of, is the current subsidized, VC funded, anywhere close to what the final product will be? I always fall back to the Uber paradox. Yes it was great at first, now it’s 3x what it cost and has only given cabs pricing power. This was good for consumers to start but now it’s just another part of the k shape…
But even if that did happen, the open source models are excellent and cost virtually nothing? Like I prefer Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 to the open weights models, but if Anthropic or Google upped the pricing 10x then everyone would switch to the open weights models. Arguably you could say that the Chinese labs may stop releasing them, true, but even if all model development stopped today then they'd still be extremely use…
What’s the cost to run this stuff locally, what type of hardware is required. When you say virtually nothing, do you mean that’s because you already have a 2k laptop or gpu?
Again I am only asking because I don’t know. Would these local models run OK on my 2016 Mac Pro intel or do I need to upgrade to the latest M4 chip with 32GB memory for it to work correctly?
Ai saves me like an hour per month tops. I still don't understand the hype. It's a solution in search of a problem. It can't solve the hard coding problems. And it doesn't say when it can't solve the essay ones either. It's less valuable than resharper. So the business value is maybe $10 a month. That can't finance this industry.
I read these sort of comments every so often and I do not understand them. You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes. I understand that for some reason this isn't the case for your work flow, but obviously it has a lot more value for others. If you are a chairmaker and everyone gains access to a machine that can spit out all the chair componen…
> I'm sure every organisation has hundreds if not thousands of Excel sheets tracking important business processes that would be far better off as a SaaS app. Far better off for who? People constantly dismiss spreadsheets, but in many cases, they are more powerful, more easily used by the people who have the domain knowledge required to properly implement calculations or workflow, and are more or less universally acce…
Author here. Of course not everything needs to be a web app. But I'm meaning a lot of core sheets I see in businesses need more structure round them. Especially for collaboration, access controls, etc. Not to mention they could do with unit testing.
You have to remember that an SaaS, just like shrink-wrap software, reflects someone else's model of of a process or workflow and the model and implementation evolve per the timeline/agenda of its publisher.
For certain parts of certain workflows, where there's a highly normative and robust industry standard, like invoicing or accounting or inventory tracking, that compromise is worthwhile and we've had both shrink-wrap and SaaS products servicing those needs for a very very long time. We see churn in which application is most popular and what it's interface and pricing look like, but the domains being served have mostly been constant (mostly only growing as new business lines/fashions emerge and mature).
Most of the stuff that remains in a "core sheet" could benefit from the attention of a practiced engineer who could make it more reliable and robust, but almost always reflects that the represented business process is somehow peculiar to the organization. As Access and FoxPro and VBA and Zapier and so many tools have done before, LLM coding assistants and software building tools offer some promise in shaking some of these up by letting orgs convert their "core sheets" to "internal applications".
But that's not an opportunity for SaaS entrepreneurs. It's an opportunity for LLM experts to try to come in and pitch private, bespoke software solutions for a better deal than whatever the Access guy had promised 20 years ago. Because of the long-term maintenance challenges that still plague code that's too LLM-colored, I wouldn't want to be that expert pitching that work, but it's an opportunity for some ambitious folks for sure.
Good write-up. I don't disagree with any of his points, but does anybody here have practical suggestions on how to move forward and think about one's career? I've been a frontend (with a little full stack) for a few years now, and much of the modern landscape concerns me, specifically with how I should be positioning myself. I hear vague suggestions like "get better at the business domain" and other things like that.…
My .02$. Show you can tackle harder problems. That includes knowing which problems matter. That happens with learning a "domain", versus just learning a tool (e.g. web development) in a domain.
Change is scary, but thats because most aren't willing to change. Part of the "scare" is the fear of lost investment (e.g. pick wrong major or career). I can appreciate that, but with a little flexibility, that investment can be repurposed quicker today that in pre-2022 thanks to AI.
AI is just another tool, treat it like a partner not a replacement. That can also include learning a domain. Ask AI how a given process works, its history, regulations, etc. Go confirm what it says. Have it break it down. We now can learn faster than ever before. Trust but verify.
You are using Cursor, that shows a willingness to try new things. Now try to move faster than before, go deeper into the challenges. That is always going to be valued.
> written an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours It’s often hard to ground how “good” blog writers are, but tidbits like this make it easy to disregard the author’s opinions. I’ve worked in many codebases where the test writers share the authors sentiment. They are awful and the tests are at best useless and often harmful. Getting to this point in your career without understanding how to write effective…
Stuff like reimplementing large amounts of the code inside the tests because testing the actual code is "too hard", spending inordinate amounts of time covering every single edge case on some tiny bit of input processing unrelated to the main business logic, mocking out the code under test, changing failing tests to match obviously incorrect behavior... basically all the mistakes you expect to see totally green devs who don't understand the purpose of tests making.
It saves a shitload of time setting up all the scaffolding and whatnot, but unless they very carefully reviewed and either manually edited or iterated a lot with the LLM I would be almost certain the tests were garbage given my experiences.
(This is with fairly current models too btw - mostly sonnet 4 and 4.5, also in fairness to the LLM a shocking proportion of tests written by real people that I've read are also unhelpful garbage, I can't imagine the training data is of great quality)
Good write-up. I don't disagree with any of his points, but does anybody here have practical suggestions on how to move forward and think about one's career? I've been a frontend (with a little full stack) for a few years now, and much of the modern landscape concerns me, specifically with how I should be positioning myself. I hear vague suggestions like "get better at the business domain" and other things like that.…
Was there an explosion of useful features in any software product you use? A jump in quality? Anything tangible an end user can see?..