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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#521

Post by rewgs »

another-dave wrote: post #110

On the otherhand, when Cloud Computing started to come in, I knew a bunch of sysadmins. Some were in the "it'll never take off" camp and no doubt they know it now, kicking and screaming. But the curious early adopters were the ones best positioned to be leading the charge on "cloud migration" when the business finally pulled the trigger. Similarly with mobile dev. As a Java dev at the time that Android came along, I…

But here's the thing: learning Android dev is nothing like "learning" to use an LLM.

Obviously there are tons of tools and systems building up around LLMs, and I don't intend to minimize that, but at the end of the day, an LLM is more analogous to a tool such as an IDE than a programming language. And I've never seen a job posting that dictated one must have X number of years in Y IDE; if they exist, they're rare, and it's hardly a massive hill to climb.

Sure, there's a continuum with regards to the difficulty of picking up a tool, e.g. learning a new editor is probably easier than learning, say, git. But learning git still has nothing on learning a whole tech stack.

I was very against LLM-assisted programming, but over time my position has softened, and Claude Code has become a regular part of my workflow. I've begun expanding out into the ancilary tools that interact with LLMs, and it's...not at all difficult to pick up. It's nothing like, say, learning iOS development. It's more like learning how to configure Neovim.

In fact, isn't this precisely one of the primary value propositions of LLMs -- that non-technical people can pick up these tools with ease and start doing technical work that they don't understand? If non-technical folks can pick up Claude Code, why would it be even _kind_ of difficult for a developer to?

So, I'm with the post author here: what is there to get left behind _from_?

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#522

Post by daveguy »

js8 wrote: post #201
draftsman wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs have lowered the bar for the unskilled person to create shit software. I have used Opus 4.6 on a number of projects, and it still spits out buggy, and sometimes, flat out broken code. I was actually surprised when it completely hallucinated the names of query params for an HTTP request in my code, when in the prompt I had explicitly given it the exact names it needed to use. I thought these frontier models were…

> LLMs have lowered the bar for the unskilled person to create shit software. So? Demand the source code. Run your own AI to review the quality of the code base. The contracting company doesn't want to do it? Fine, find one that will.

Add another layer of jank to review the original jank? That doesn't sound like a very helpful solution. But the companies selling AI will love it!

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#523

Post by briHass »

bonoboTP wrote: post #431
slfnflctd wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most people want a white collar job and send their kids to college Part of the reason for my prior comment is the clear fact that a not-insignificant percentage of white collar jobs are being massively devalued at the moment, which means many people who thought they'd be able to send their kids to college with income from such jobs won't. Considering that the field of robotics is so far behind LLMs in terms of clea…

I'm not sure how long this state of robotics will last. Dexterity is improving very fast. Robots are getting cheaper and cheaper. But also, a lot of the manual labor is quite expensive and only affordable as long as there are white collar workers who can pay for fancy bathroom remodelings and landscaping and so on. I don't know how a big deluge of reskilled pipefitters and HVAC technicians will be able to find work.…

This is the point missed by many. The trades are in high demand, right now, because of a labor shortage and demand from upper-middle class individuals without any DIY skills. A generation or two of pushing kids into college, and an almost disparaging view of 'getting your hands dirty' has built this perfect storm.

However, besides a few trades that use unions/licensure/apprenticeship as an artificial supply limit, most trades are only limited by a willingness to do the work. A few decades ago, trade work was much less expensive, because supply was higher and many did their own DIY, which limited what prices the market would tolerate.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#524

Post by GeoAtreides »

jghn wrote: post #512
GeoAtreides wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing they all had in common was taking a very targeted approach with their search and leveraging their networks Right, so they applied to a couple of jobs and it worked for them? I'm sorry, do you understand how uncommon and rare that is? sure, if their domain was REALLY niche and the jobs weren't publicly advertised, then i could see how that would work. but the experience is VASTLY different outside such nic…

They applied to a couple of jobs where they were certain the fit would be good, and didn't mindlessly spam their resume to some bot. They got in touch with the right people, and worked it out from there. Because they had done their homework, the path was easier for them.

yes, that's exactly what you said before. you're not engaging with what i'm saying at all.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#525

Post by vunderba »

II2II wrote: post #192
stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

I almost entirely agree with the author's assessment of new technology. Yet that statement rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes it is better to get into things early because it will grow more complex as time goes on, so it will be easier to pick up early in its development. Consider the Web. In the early days, it was just HTML. That was easy to learn. From there on, it was simply a matter of picking up new skills as th…

I think this applies a bit less to the AI sphere, which has the purported goal of making things easier and more automated over time. 90% of the time if you have an AI question you can just... ask the LLM itself.

Remember all the hoopla over how people needed be a "prompt engineer" a couple years back? A lot of that alchemy is basically totally obsolete.

Think about the hoops you had to jump through with early GenAI diffusion models: tons of positive prompt suffixes (“4K, OCTANE RENDER, HYPERREALISTIC TURBO HD FINAL CHALLENGERS SPECIAL EDITION”) bordering on magical incantations, samplers (Euler vs. DPM), latent upscalers, CFG scales, denoising strengths for img2img, masking workflows, etc.

And now? The vast majority of people can mostly just describe desired image in natural language, and any decent SOTA model can handle the vast majority of use cases (gpt-image-1.5, Seedream 4, Nano-banana).

Even when you’re running things locally, it’s still significantly easier than it used to be a few years ago, with options like Flux and Qwen which can handle natural language along with a nice intuitive frontend such as InvokeAI instead of the heavily node-based ComfyUI. (which I still love but understand it's not for everybody).

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#526

Post by toraway »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #402
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Feels like a false dichotomy. Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe. Is it 10x or 1000x or 10,000x? Definitely not. I think actually in the past I would have leaned more on senior developers, books, stack overf…

>Feel like we’re back at Adobe Dreameaver release and everyone is claiming that web development jobs are dead I truly believe so much of the anti-AI sentiment is the same as the Luddites. They're often used as a meme now, but they were very real people, faced with a real and present risk to their livelihoods. They acted out of fear, but not just irrational fear. AI is the same: it's unquestionably (to anyone evaluati…

  AI is the same: it's unquestionably (to anyone evaluating it fairly) a huge boost to productivity .
And yet, the only research that tries to evaluate this in a controlled, scientific way does not actually show this. Critics then say those studies aren’t valid because of X, Y or Z but don’t provide anything stronger than anecdotes in rebuttal.

It’s ridiculous double standard and poisons any reasonable discussion to assert something is a fact and anyone who disagrees is a hysterical Luddite based on no actual evidence.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#527

Post by swframe2 »

I've noticed 2 very obvious trends. The high-performers who previously wrote the most PRs are now using AI the most aggressively and the number PRs they produce has almost doubled. The other trend is that large teams are being split into smaller teams that work on new products. I hope the trend is more projects and less grunt coding. (I know the ai coders are not yet L6 but I suspect they will achieve L3-L5 this year).

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#528

Post by apsurd »

mekoka wrote: post #426
II2II wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost entirely agree with the author's assessment of new technology. Yet that statement rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes it is better to get into things early because it will grow more complex as time goes on, so it will be easier to pick up early in its development. Consider the Web. In the early days, it was just HTML. That was easy to learn. From there on, it was simply a matter of picking up new skills as th…

"It will grow more complex" is never a good reason to get into things early. It's just your mind playing FOMO tricks on you. Many developers who picked up the web in the early years struggle with (front-end) web development today. It doesn't matter if they fetched jQuery or MooTools from some CDN as it was done in the mid 00s. Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-en…

No, this thread and sub-discussion is about specifically early web fundamentals. The web is special in this sense, it's intentionally long-lived warts and all. So the fundamentals pay outsized dividends. The rube goldberg machine that is modern JS dev still spits out an index.html result.

Being a good professional developer means getting the primitives and the data model not horribly pointed in the wrong direction. So it's extremely helpful to be aware of those primitives. And the argument "nobody is better off knowing assembly as a primitive" doesn't hold because as-said the web is literally still html files. It's right there in the source.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#529

Post by _345 »

I would not have started my article with "I could get into Bitcoin anytime, why the rush". That is not the killer first example you think it is. It's been ~17 years of proof so far that you would've made a ton of money by simply mindlessly buying $200 of bitcoin every month after lower risk contributions are made, and just holding onto it.

I mean if you did that you'd have contributed ~$38K USD by 2026 and had ~1.5B USD now if you started in 2010. BTC being so cheap back then dominates the whole process so to demonstrate my point more if you had heard about it all those years and were nervous about trying it and decided to wait until 2016, you'd still need to just put in $24K overall to come out with ~$450K by 2026.

That's not biting your finger nails over the price changes, the hype cycles, the price drop scares. You just set and forget a $200 recurring buy a month and put your energy elsewhere and pocket half a million for basically no effort

And if anything is possible in hindsight, then why in hindsight would you write an article acting like bitcoin was a bad decision to be an early adopter for

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