381–390 of 588 posts
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I think I'll keep defaulting to critical thinking rather than some kinda pseudo-religious "crossing the bridge" talk.
Just a metaphore - used to code by hand, now he doesn't, but still produces software. Keep religion out of this.
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> but I can point to many examples in my own work where using Codex has saved me easily a week or more Care to share a few of these examples?
Sure thing. I work on a few projects for my company. The main one is an Android and iOS audiobook-media-player app. I had to update the Android side to use the Google Media3 library instead of the legacy ExoPlayer library. In a typical app this would be pretty straightforward, but we’ve mixed in a lot of custom elements that made the transition quite challenging. I actually attempted it manually back in the day and p…
Any decent IDE can do that refactoring instantly.
> I could go on
Clearly.
This thread is full of antidotes from “AI is useless for me” to “AI changes everythingfor me” I believe each and every one of them.
In firm wait and see mode.
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Nothing I could make would be very good. So the only reason I would, say, write, is in order to write, not to have produced an essay. Hobbies are ways to pass time productively. If it took less time, it wouldn't be a better use of time, but a worse one.
It's not about being able to do more faster, but be able to faster get help doing what you wanted to do. For example, before LLMs, if I wanted to figure out how to do something with a specific analog synth I basically spent time reading manuals and browsing internet forums, piecing together whatever I could find into something actionable, sometimes slightly wrong, but at least in the right direction. Nowadays, I fire…
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Explain to me why my judgement is flawed. What I’m saying is true.
Because, among other claims, "5x now or you're fired!" is completely ridiculous.
It’s obvious to anyone if your output is 5x less than everyone else you will eventually be let go. There’s no paradigm shift where the boss suddenly announced that. But the underlying unsaid expectation is obvious given what everyone is doing.
What happened was this, a couple new hires and some current employees started were using AI. There output was magnified and they were not only having more output but they were deploying code outside their areas of expertise doing dev ops, infra, backend and frontend.
This spread and within months everyone in the company was doing it. The boss can now throw a frontend job to a backend developer and now expect completion in a day or less. This isn’t every task but such output for the majority of tasks it’s normal.
If you’re not meeting that norm it’s blindingly obvious. The boss doesn’t need to announce anything when everyone is faster. There was no deliberate culture shift where the boss announced it. The closest equivalent is the boss hiring a 10x engineer to work alongside you and you have to scramble to catch up. The difference is now we know exactly what is making each engineer 10x and we can use that tool to also operate at that level.
Critical thinking my ass. You’re just labeling and assuming things with your premeditated subconscious bias. If anything it’s your perspective that is religious.
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> littered with ppl who only use AI "Littered" is a great verb to use here. Also I did not ask for a deviated proxy non-measure, like how many people who are choking themselves to death in a meaningless bullshit job are now surviving by having LLMs generate their spreadsheets and presentations. I asked for solid proof of succesful, commercial products built up by dreaming them up through LLMs.
The proof is all around you. I am talking about software professionals not some bullshit spread sheet thing. What I’m saying is this: From my pov Everyone is using LLMs to write code now. The overwhelming majority of software products in existence today are now being changed with LLM code. The majority of software products being created from scratch are also mostly LLM code. This is obvious to me. It’s not speculatio…
We have been using LLMs since 2021, if I havent repeated that enough in these threads. What culture do I have to catch up with? I have been paying top tier LLM models for my entire team since it became an option. Do you think you are proselytizing to the un-initiated here? That is a naive view at best. My issue is that the tools are at best a worse replacement for the pre-2019 google search and at worst a huge danger in the hands of people who dont know what they are doing.
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This is a good point but you can see the price "ceiling" by examining the prices for PCs that can effectively run local models. A DGX Spark is ~$4k (plus power) for example. That's not nothing, but it's still not very much to pay compared to e.g. the cost of a FTE.
You're counting the cost of running the model, but what about training it? You can't count the compute and data costs at $0.
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Just a metaphore - used to code by hand, now he doesn't, but still produces software. Keep religion out of this.
No one shrugs off 5x like brushing one's teeth in the morning. That makes no sense.
We have half the thread saying it’s 5x and the other half saying they’re delusional and lack critical thinking.
I think it’s obvious who lacks critical thinking. If half the thread is saying on the ground AI has changed things and the other half just labels everyone as crazy without investigation… guess which one didn’t do any critical thinking?
Last week I built an app that cross compiled into Tauri and electron that’s essentially a google earth clone for farms. It uses mapbox and deckgl and you can play back gps tracks of tractor movements and the gps traces change color as the tractor moves in actual real time. There’s pausing, seeking, bookmarking, skipping. All happening in real time because it’s optimized to use shader code and uniforms to do all these updates rather than redrawing the layers. There’s also color grading for gps fix values and satellite counts which the user can switch instantaneously to with zero slow down on tracks with thousands and thousands of points. It all interfaces with an API that scans gcp storage for gps tracks and organizes it into a queryable api that interfaces with our firebase based authentication. The backend is deployed by terraform and written in strictly typed typescript and it’s automatically deployed and checked by GHA. Of course the electron and tauri app have GUI login interfaces that work fully correctly with the backend api and it all looks professionally designed like a movie player merged with Google earth for farm orchards.
I have rudimentary understanding for many of the technologies involved in the above. But I was able to write that whole internal tool in less than a week thanks to AI. I couldn’t have pulled it off without rudimentary understanding of the tech so some novice swe couldn’t really do it without the optimizations I used but that’s literally all I needed. I never wrote shader code for prod in my life and left to its own devices the AI would have come up with an implementation that’s too laggy to work properly.
That’s all that’s needed. Some basic high level understanding and AI did everything else and now our company has an internal tool that is polished beyond anything that would’ve been given effort to before AI.
I’m willing to bet you didn’t use AI agents in a meaningful way. Maybe copying and pasting some snippets of code into a chatbot and not liking the output. And then you do it every couple of weeks to have your finger on the pulse of AI.
Go deeper. Build an app with AI. Hand hold it into building something you never built before. It’s essentially a pair programming endeavor. Im willing to bet you haven’t done this. Go in with the goal of building something polished and don’t automatically dismiss it when the AI does something stupid (it inevitably will) Doing this is what actual “critical thinking” is.
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Generating CRUD is like solving cancer in mice, we already have a dizzying array of effective solutions… Ruby on Rails, Access 97, model first ORMs with GUI mappers. SharePoint lets anyone do all the things easily. The issue is and always has been maintenance and evolution. Early missteps cause limitations, customer volume creates momentum, and suddenly real engineering is needed. I’d be a lot more worried about our…
Go with Laravel and some admin packages and you generate CRUD pages in minutes. And I think with Django, that is builtin. But I don’t think I’ve seen pure CRUD on anything other than prototype. Add an Identity and Access Management subsystem and the complexity of requirements will explode. Then you add integration to external services and legacy systems, and that’s where the bulk of the work is. And there’s the scala…
For you, maybe. But for a non-progrmamer who's starting a business or just needs a website it's the difference between hiring some web dev firm and doing it themselves.