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Eight more months of agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: Eight more months of agents

#131

Post by palata »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #67
illusive4080 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bolstering your point, check out the comments in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1qy9dcs/who_has_compl... There’s a lot of unwillingness to even attempt to try the tools.

Those people are absolutely going to get left in the dust. In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.

> In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.

What do you get from it? Say you produce more, do you get a higher salary?

What I have seen so far is the opposite: if you don't produce more, you risk getting fired.

I am not denying that LLMs make me more productive. Just saying that they don't make me more wealthy. On the other hand, they use a ton of energy at a time where we as a society should probably know better. The way I see it, we are killing the Earth because we produce too much. LLMs help us produce more, why should we be happy?

Re: Eight more months of agents

#132

Post by ares623 »

esafak wrote: post #50
gradus_ad wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Existential? Maybe to beachfront property owners

Did you know that 10% of the world's population lives in coastal zones at low elevations?

But they'll just disappear into thin air peacefully when that happens right? It's not like they're gonna fight tooth and nail to find a place to survive, that'd be rude.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#133

Post by ares623 »

overgard wrote: post #49
uludag wrote: post #42

> I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing. It might be just me but this reads as very tone deaf. From my perspective, CEOs are seething at the mouth to make as many developers redundant as possible, not being shy about…

I bought Steve Yegge's "Vibe Coding" book. I think I'm about 1/4th of the way through it or so. One thing that surprised me is there's this naivete on display that workers are going to be the ones to reap the benefits of this. Like, Steve was using an example of being able to direct the agent while doing leisure activities (never mind that Steve is more of an executive/thought leader in this company, and, prior to LL…

in addition to B, the best part is the 4 fired engineers can go around and say "we'll do the same work as those 4 for 10% less" and so on.

"AI won't replace you. The guy who's about to get fired but has more to lose is going to replace you."

Re: Eight more months of agents

#134

Post by kakacik »

symfrog wrote: post #120

Any sufficiently complicated LLM generated program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an open source project.

We had an effort recently where one much more experienced dev from our company ran Claude on our oldish codebase for one system, with the goal of transforming it into newer structure, newer libraries etc. while preserving various built in functionalities. Not the first time this guy did such a thing and he is supposed to be an expert.

I took a look at the result and its maybe half of stuff missing completely, rest is cryptic. I know that codebase by heart since I created it. From my 20+ years of experience correcting all this would take way more effort than manual rewrite from scratch by a senior. Suffice to say thats not what upper management wants to hear, llm adoption often became one of their yearly targets to be evaluated against. So we have a hammer and looking for nails to bend and crook.

Suffice to say this effort led nowhere since we have other high priority goals, for now. Smaller things here & there, why not. Bigger efforts, so far sawed-off 2-barrel shotgun loaded with buckshot right into both feet.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#135

Post by duggan »

matsemann wrote: post #121
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people are absolutely going to get left in the dust. In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.

That's one of the sentiments I don't quite grasp, though. Why can't they just learn the tools when they're stable? So far it's been sooo many changes in workflows, basically relearn the tools every three months. It's maybe a bit more stabilized the last year, but still one could spend an enormous amount of time twiddling with various models or tools, knowledge that someone else probably could learn quicker at a later…

Not the person you asked, but my interpretation of “left in the dust” here (not a phrasing I particularly agree with) would be the same way iOS development took off in the 2010s.

There was a land rush to create apps. Basic stuff like the flash light, todo lists, etc, were created and found a huge audience. Development studios were established, people became very successful out of it.

I think the same thing will happen here. There is a first mover advantage. The future is not yet evenly distributed.

You can still start as an iOS developer today, but the opportunity is different.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#136

Post by nickcw »

> Some believe AI Super-intelligence is just around the corner (for good or evil). Others believe we're mistaking philosophical zombies for true intelligence, and speedrunning our own brainrot

Not sure which camp I'm in, but I enjoyed the imagery.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#137

Post by cactusplant7374 »

symfrog wrote: post #120

Any sufficiently complicated LLM generated program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an open source project.

All software before LLMs had a copious number of bugs, many of which were never fixed.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#138

Post by coldtea »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #67
illusive4080 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bolstering your point, check out the comments in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1qy9dcs/who_has_compl... There’s a lot of unwillingness to even attempt to try the tools.

Those people are absolutely going to get left in the dust. In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.

I only wish I was there when that cocky "skilled dev" is laid off.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#139

Post by bananaflag »

entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

I think, if there were to be a noticeable increase in software quantity due to agentic coding, we should test it by looking into indie games.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#140

Post by sdoering »

entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

Quite a few - and I know I am only speaking for myself - live on my different computers. I created a few CLI tools that make my life and that of my agent smoother sailing for information retrieval. I created, inspired by a blog post, a digital personal assistant, that really enables me to better juggle different work contexts as well as different projects within these work contexts.

I created a platform for a virtual pub quiz for my team at my day job, built multiple pandingpages for events, debugged dark table to recognize my new camera (it was to new to be included in the camera.xml file, but the specs were known). I debugged quite a few parts of a legacy shitshow of an application, did a lot of infrastructure optimization and I also created a massive ton of content as a centaur in dialog with the help of Claude Code.

But I don't do "Show HN" posts. And I don't advertise my builds - because other than those named, most are one off things, that I throw away after this one problem was solved.

To me code became way more ephemeral.

But YMMV - and that is a good thing. I also believe that way less people than the hype bubble implies are actually really into hard core usage like Pete Steinberger or Armin Ronacher and the likes.

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