451–460 of 1001 posts
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
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it is more like: You gatekeep your bike, you keep it behind a gate, you don't let anyone else ride it. Your neighbor got a nicer bike for Christmas, rode it by your house and now you are sad because you aren't the special kid with the bike any more, you are just regular kid like your neighbor.
Yeah, if you studied and mastered all of the various disciplines required for fabricating a bicycle, and then fabricated your own by hand and offered to do likewise for others, sometimes in exchange for compensation, sometimes for free (provided others could use the bike), only for some machine that mass produces bikes to (informal) spec that was built by studying all of the designs you used for the bikes you made to…
Take anthropic for example, they have created MCP/claude code.
MCP has the good parts of how to expose an API surface and also the bad parts of keeping the implementation stuck and force workarounds instead of pushing required changes upstream or to safely fork an implementation.
Claude code is orders of magnitude inefficient than plainly asking an llm to go through an architecture implementation. The sedentary black-box loops in claude code are mind bending for anyone who wants to know how it did something.
And anthropic/openai seems to just rely of user momentum to not innovate on these fundamentals because it keeps the token usage high and as everyone knows by now a unpredictable product is more addictive than a deterministic one.
We are currently in the "Script Monkey" phase of AI dev tools. We are automating the typing, but we haven't yet automated the design. The danger is that we’re building a generation of "copy-paste" architects who can’t see the debt they’re accruing until the system collapses under its own weight.
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Nah man. I understand the frustration, but this is a glass is half empty view. You have decades of expert knowledge, which you can use to drive the LLMs in an expert way. Thats where the value is. The industry or narrative might not have figured that out yet, but its inevitable. Garbage in, garbage out still very much applies in this new world. And just to add, the key metric to good software hasn't changed, and won'…
Glass half empty view? Their whole skill set built up over decades, digitized, and now they have to shift everything they do, and who knows humans will even be in the loop, if they’re not c-suite or brown nosers. Their whole magic and skill is now capable of being done by a PM in 5 minutes with some tokens. How is that supposed to make skillful coders feel? Massive job cuts, bad job market, AI tools everywhere, proba…
I remember a cinema theater projectionist telling me exactly that while I was wiring a software controlling numeric projector, replacing the 35mm ones.
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Any given system will still need people around to steer the AI and ensure the thing gets built and maintained responsibly. I'm working on a small team of in-house devs at a financial company, and not worried about my future at all. As an IC I'm providing more value than ever, and the backlog of potential projects is still basically endless- why would anyone want to fire me?
> why would anyone want to fire me? Because they can hire some "prompt engineer" to "steer the AI" for $30-50k instead of $150-$250k.
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
Suppose you get out of your comfort zone to do something entirely new; AI will be much more helpful for you than it is for people who spent years developing their skills.
AI is the great equalizer.
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I'm mad about Ozempic. For years I toiled, eating healthy foods while other people stuffed their faces with pizza and cheese burgers. Everybody had the opportunity to be thin like me, but they didn't take that and earn it like me. So now instead of being happy about their new good fortune and salvaged health, I'm bitter and think society has somehow betrayed me and canceled promises. /s, obviously I would hope except…
I would rather see regulations fixing incentives that create this problem (why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food?) than a bandaid like Ozempic that 2/3 of people can't quit (hello another hidden subscription service) without regaining their weight back.
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> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a negative way. I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge only because: - book writing and authorship was democratized away from the church and academia - web content publication and p…
> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. It was very democratized before, almost anyone could pick up a book or learn these skills on the internet. Opportunity was democratized for a very long time, all that was needed was the desire to put in the work. OP sounds frustrated but at the same time the societal promise that was working for longest time (spend per…
Is it only possible to have success with paid versions of these LLMs? Google's "Ask AI" and ChatGPT's free models seem to be consistently bad to the point where I've mostly stopped using them. I've lost track of how many times it was like "yes, you're right, I've looked at the code you've linked and I see it is using a newer version than what I had access to. I've thoroughly scanned it and here's the final solution t…
Google's AI that gloms on to search is not particularly good for programming. I don't use any OpenAI stuff but talking to those that do, their models are not good for programming compared to equivalent ones from Anthropic or google.
I have good success with free gemini used either via the web UI or with aider. That can handle some simple software dev. The new qwen3.5 is pretty good considering its size, though multi-$k of local GPU is not exactly "free".
But, this also all depends on the experience level of the developer. If you are gonna vibe code, you'll likely need to use a paid model to achieve results even close to what an experienced developer can achieve with lesser models (or their own brain).
I feel this so, so much. It is a very exciting time. I have had a very specific goal in mind and I could work out large parts on my own. But there is a lot that I didn't have any basis or time to build expertise on. Using Claude Code to fill out those gaps and educate me along the way has meant I've gotten little sleep in the last two months. And I managed to make the thing I was envisioning: https://gridpaper.org/ex…
Opinions differ: hobby coders love it, but domain expert secretly despise it because it narrows the gap between the skills they spent years honing and the average Claude, I mean Joe, that just uses this mental exoskeleton.