401–410 of 630 posts
I have never felt this much ahead as a programmer. So many developers I see, including at my workplace, are blindly prompting models hoping to solve their problem and failing every step of the way. The people who truly understand what is happening are still in the ruling class, and their skills are not going to be irrelevant anytime soon.
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It’s wild that programmers are willing to accept less determinism.
It's not something that suddenly changed. "I'll generate some code" is as nondeterministic as "I'll look for a library that does it", "I'll assign John to code this feature", or "I'll outsource this code to a consulting company". Even if you write yourself, you're pretty nondeterministic in your results - you're not going to write exactly the same code to solve a problem, even if you explicitly try.
If I use a library, I know it will do the same thing from the same inputs, every time. If I don't understand something about its behavior, then I can look to the documentation. Some are better about this, some are crap. But a good library will continuing doing what I want years or decades later.
An LLM can't decide between one sentence and the next what to do.
What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…
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Oh, well if it can generate some simple code for your personal website, surely it can also be the "next level of abstraction" for the entirety of software engineering.
Well, I don’t really think it’s “simple”. The code uses React, nodejs, realtime events pushed via SSE, infra pushed via Terraform, postgres, blob store on S3, emails send with SES… sure, it’s not the next Google, but it’s a bit above, like, a personal blog. And in any case, you are moving goalposts. OP said he had never seen anyone serious claim that they got productivity gains from AI. When I claim that, you say “we…
Your site is case in point of why LLMs demo well but kind of fall apart in the real world. It's pretty good at fitting lego blocks together based on a ton of work other people have put into React and node or the SSE library you used, etc. But that's not what Karpathy is saying, he's saying "the hottest programming language is english".
That's bonkers. In my experience it can actually slow you down as much as speed you up, and when you try to do more complicated things it falls apart.
I admit to pangs of this, but it's really never made any sense because the implication is that the profession is now magically closed off to newcomers. Imagine someone in the 90s saying "if you don't master the web NOW you will be forever behind!" and yet 20 years later kids who weren't even born then are building web apps and frameworks. Waiting for it to all shake out and "mastering" it then is still a strategy. Th…
I don't usually post something like this, but this is so fucking stupid. I'm prepared to stand by that. Let's see in a few years if I'm right. "AI" is literally models trained to make you think it's intelligent. That's it. It's like the ultimate "algorithm" or addiction machine. It's trained to make you think it's amazing and magical and therefore you think it's amazing and magical.
'"AI" is literally models trained to make you think it's intelligent.' What's the difference? I try to make people think I'm intelligent all the time.
I admit to pangs of this, but it's really never made any sense because the implication is that the profession is now magically closed off to newcomers. Imagine someone in the 90s saying "if you don't master the web NOW you will be forever behind!" and yet 20 years later kids who weren't even born then are building web apps and frameworks. Waiting for it to all shake out and "mastering" it then is still a strategy. Th…
Eh, for myself as a middle-aged software engineer, it feels a little like the last chopper out of Saigon. I feel less and less confident that I can make as good a living in software for the next decade as I have for the last couple. Or if I want to. The job is changing so fast right now, and I’m not sure I like it. When I worked in big tech, I preferred being an IC over an EM or tech lead because I like writing code.…
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That would go over on any decently sized team like a lead balloon.
As it should, normally, because "we'll rewrite it in React later" used to represent weeks if not months of massively disruptive work. I've seen migration projects like that push on for more than a year! The new normal isn't like that. Rewrite an existing cleanly implemented Vanilla JavaScript project (with tests) in React the kind of rote task you can throw at a coding agent like Claude Code and come back the next mo…
He is right. The game has changed. We can now refactor using an agent and have it done by morning. The cost of architectural mistakes is minimal and if it gets out of hand, you refactor and take a nap anyway.
What’s interesting is now it’s about intent. The prompts and specs you write, the documents you keep that outline your intended solution, and you let the agent go. You do research. Agent does code. I’ve seen this at scale.
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I'm not arguing for using LLMs as an abstraction. I'm saying that a key component of the dependency calculation has changed. It used to be that one of the most influential facts affecting your decision to add a new library was the cost of writing the subset of code that you needed yourself. If writing that code and the accompanying tests represented more than an hour of work, a library was usually a better investment…
Without commenting if parent is right or wrong. (I suspect it is correct) If its true, the market will soon reward it. Being able to competently write good code cheaper will be rewarded. People don't employ programmers because they care about them, they are employed to produce output. If someone can use llms to produce more output for less $$ they will quickly make the people that don't understand the technology less…
That's a trap: it's not obvious for those without experience in both business and engineering on how to estimate or later calculate this $$. The trap is in the cost of changes and fix budget when things will break. And things will break. Often. Also, the requirements will change often, that's normal (our world is not static). So the cost has some tendency to change (guess which direction). The thoughtless copy-paste and rewrite-everything approach is nice, but the cost goes up steep with time soon. Those who don't know it will be trapped dead and lose business.
As an Opus user, I genuinely don’t understand how someone can work for weeks or months without regularly opening an IDE. The output almost always fails. I repeatedly rewrite prompts, restate the same constraints, and write detailed acceptance criteria, yet still end up with broken or non-functional code.its very frustrating to say the least Yesterday alone I spent about $200 on generations that now require significan…
I hardly ever open an IDE anymore. I use Claude Code and Cursor. What I do: - use statically typed languages: TypeScript, Go, Rust, Python w/ types - Setup linters. For TS I have a bunch of custom lint rules (authored by AI) for common feedback that I've given. ( https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package... ) - For Cursor, lots of feedback on my desired style. https://github.com/shepherdjerred/scou…