351–360 of 469 posts
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> I've generated 250KLoC this week It's horrifying, all right, but not in the way you think lol. If you don't understand why this isn't a brag, then my job is very safe.
Less is more, its not a hard thing to understand. These companies are accumulating record level tech debt.
> in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you. I've always hated solving puzzles with my deterministic toolbox, learning along the way and producing something of value at the end. Glad that's finally over so I can focus on the soulful art of micromanaging chatbots with markdown instead.
You can always code by hand as a hobby. If someone is paying you for your work results, that you find it interesting or fun is orthogonal. I get the sense from the commentary section here that there’s a perception that writing programs is an exceptional profession where developer happiness is an end unto itself, and everyone doing it deserves to be a millionaire in the process. It just comes across as child-like thin…
Caught my eye. I do think we should wonder and hold intentionality around products, especially digital products, like the spreadsheet. Software is different. It's a limitless resource with limitless instantaneous reach. A good weld is beautiful in its own right, but it's not that.
The spreadsheet in particular changed the way millions of people work. Is it more productive? Is an army of middle-managers orienting humanity through the lens of a literal 2x2cm square a net good?
I say we should moralize on that.
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This is a fools errand We are paid to do the tedious stuff because it is tedious. If we actually ever succeed in automating away the tedious stuff, we're out of work
Don’t you get it? Machine do the tedious work, all we get to do now is the fun part and we can just relax the rest of the day. I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the same salary just for two hours of actual work per day. I have so much more time to pursue my passions. Isn’t the future great?
Can't imagine you really think "the market forces" all point toward a utopia for the workers? We're all just gonna get paid for 2 hours of work a day and post pics from the beach with a special shout-out to Claude?
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To read it in a kinder way, I can focus on a complex logic problem, a flow, an architecture or micro optimisation. I can have an llm setup the test harnesses. I improved test speed which was fun, I had an llm write a nice analysis front end to the test timing which would have taken time but just wasn’t interesting or hard. Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? You’d ins…
> Ask yourself if there are tasks you have to do which you would rather just have done? Yeah. My laundry, my dishes, my cooking... You know. Chores. Not my software, I actually enjoy building that
> in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you. I've always hated solving puzzles with my deterministic toolbox, learning along the way and producing something of value at the end. Glad that's finally over so I can focus on the soulful art of micromanaging chatbots with markdown instead.
You can always code by hand as a hobby. If someone is paying you for your work results, that you find it interesting or fun is orthogonal. I get the sense from the commentary section here that there’s a perception that writing programs is an exceptional profession where developer happiness is an end unto itself, and everyone doing it deserves to be a millionaire in the process. It just comes across as child-like thin…
i write less code than my AI-using coworkers but I have as much or more impact. Coding wasn't so hard that I need to spend time learning a new proprietary tech stack with a subscription fee lol. I believe plenty of engineers did suck enough and computers to benefit tho. That is where Anthropic makes their money.
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This is a fools errand We are paid to do the tedious stuff because it is tedious. If we actually ever succeed in automating away the tedious stuff, we're out of work
Don’t you get it? Machine do the tedious work, all we get to do now is the fun part and we can just relax the rest of the day. I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the same salary just for two hours of actual work per day. I have so much more time to pursue my passions. Isn’t the future great?
But we've been automating the tedious work since the 1950s. There were probably devs back then complaining about imminent job loss when the first compilers were invented. Maybe some jobs were lost, temporarily, but ultimately we all got more ambitious about what software we could make. We ended up hiring more programmers and paying them better, because each one provided so much more value.
When the machines are able to do the hard stuff better than humans, that's when we'll really be in trouble.
I'm starting to find the naive techno-optimism here annoying. If you don't have capital or can do something else you will be homeless.
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Stack overflow (and internet in general) changed the programming as we (at least some of us) knew it. When I was learning programming I had no internet, no books outside of library, nobody to ask for days. I remember vividly having spent days trying to figure out how to use the stdlib qsort, and not being able to.
I'm not from that generation so that's a bit hard for me to understand. Even if you used a closed-source C compiler, wouldn't you still have been able to look at the header file, which would have been pretty self-explanatory? E.g. void qsort(void* base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int ( compar)(const void , const void* )); And surely if you bought a C compiler, you would have gotten a manual or two with it? Documentat…
qsort(base, nel, width, compar)
char *base;
int (*compar)();Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope they are prepared to pay the $500/month per head when subsidies expire.
Realistically that's an increase of maybe a couple percent of cost per employee. If it truly does end up being a force multiplier, 2-5% more per dev is a bargain. I think it's exceedingly unlikely that LLMs will replace devs for most companies, but it probably will speed up dev work enough to justify at least a single-digit percent increase in per-dev cost.
You might think “ok, we’ll just push more workload onto the developers so they stay at higher utilization!”
Except most companies do not have endless amounts of new feature work. Eventually devs are mostly sitting idle.
So you think “Ha! Then we’ll fire more developers and get one guy to do everything!”
Another bad idea for several reason. For one, you are increasing the bus factor. Two, most work being done in companies at any given time is actually maintenance. One dev cannot maintain everything by themselves, even with the help of LLMs. More eyes on stuff means issues get resolved faster, and those eyes need to have real knowledge and experience behind them.
Speed is sexy but a poor trade off for quality code architecture and expert maintainers. Unless you are a company with a literal never ending list of new things to be implemented (very few), it is of no benefit.
Also don’t forget the outrage when Cursor went from $20/month to $200/month and companies quickly cancelled subscriptions…
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Don’t you get it? Machine do the tedious work, all we get to do now is the fun part and we can just relax the rest of the day. I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the same salary just for two hours of actual work per day. I have so much more time to pursue my passions. Isn’t the future great?
I'm surprised you've had three replies so far that didn't notice your sarcasm. But we've been automating the tedious work since the 1950s. There were probably devs back then complaining about imminent job loss when the first compilers were invented. Maybe some jobs were lost, temporarily, but ultimately we all got more ambitious about what software we could make. We ended up hiring more programmers and paying them be…