Good lord I’m going to have to figure out some way to filter Hacker News. I’m so tired of this same sort of article (and the opposite) being posted every day. AI isn’t going away. AI is better than you think it is. AI is probably also worse than you think it is. The world has nuance, so can we please all chill?
I quit. The clankers won
71–80 of 515 posts
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#72Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…
The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is bui…
I feel I've upskilled in so many directions (not just "ability to prompt LLMs") since going all in on LLM coding. So many tools, techniques, systems, and new areas of research I'd never have had the time to fully learn in the past.
I have a hard time believing any tenured developer is not actually learning things when using LLMs to build. They make interesting choices that are repeatable (new CLIs I didn't even know existed, writing scripts to churn through tricky data, using specific languages for specific tasks like Go for concurrently working through large numerous tasks, etc.)
Anyone not learning things via LLM coding right now either doesn't care at all about the underlying code/systems, or they had no foundational knowledge or interest in programming to begin with (which is also a valid way to use these tools, but they don't work very well without guidance for too long [yet]).
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#73Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging.
The one I like better is: software is great at playing chess, doesn't mean you cannot play too
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#74I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore. Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, no…
I think the immediate term action is to viciously block all crawlers. Writing a blog yes, feeding the beast no.
This sounds like a nice principled stance, but you won't get any traffic with this approach. That's demotivating - to me blogging is a tight balance of exploration, learning, improving and feedback. I'm not able to write without considering how this impacts the reader - removing all readers breaks the process for me.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#75One problem writing does have: we grew up in a massive changing and progressing software writing area. A golden area. Now i still show clean code videos from bob and other old things to new hires and young collegues. Java got more features, given but the golden area of discovery is over. The new big thing is ai and i'm curious to see how it will feel to write real agents for my company specific use cases. But i'm als…
At least have the grace to show new hires Rich Hickey lectures or something. Uncle bob is nonsense.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#76> The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all? Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere. You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfa…
Progress is good. But why on earth should we support Anthropic/OpenAI/etc? What the planet needs is less multibillion corporations, not more
I want to support local models and compute over SaaS models.
I want to support RISC V over Intel.
I want other things too, and on balance, Intel+Anthropic is most compliant with my various preferences, even if they're not perfect.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, declaring AI to be 99% hype just turns away people like me from what the author has to say. I was an AI sceptic for a long time until toward the end of last year when I seriously evaluated them, and came to realise it could add tremendous value. When someone comes along and declares that it's all hype, it goes against my experience that it's getting things done. I can also see the harm it does, and I hope the to…
It’s worse than that, in the linked “I’ve done my research” they make the tired claim that ai hallucinates api calls. Which while true has not been a practical problem since tool calling was added. I think the position that ai is morally troubling enough that the downsides out way the positives is perfectly defensible. But the entire argument becomes a joke when you can’t accurately catalog the positives.
At this point, I’m pretty sure saying “I’ve done my research” is more of an indicator that someone hasn’t done their research but would like to be taken seriously anyway by pretending they did. The kind of person who’s both smart enough to realize that an issue might be more nuanced than they present it, as well as intellectually dishonest enough to… not care.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#78Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading. More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.
> we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI.
Here's my advice: if there's someone around you who can teach you, learn from them. But if there isn't anyone around you who can teach you, find someone around you who can learn from you and mentor them. You'll actually grow more from the latter than from the former, if you can believe that.
I think there's a broad blindness in industry to the benefits of mentorship for the mentors. Mentoring has sharpened my thinking and pushed me to articulate why things are true in a way I never would have gone to the effort of otherwise.
If there are no juniors around to teach, seniors will forever be less senior than they might have been had they been getting reps at mentorship along the way.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is bui…
I feel I've upskilled in so many directions (not just "ability to prompt LLMs") since going all in on LLM coding. So many tools, techniques, systems, and new areas of research I'd never have had the time to fully learn in the past. I have a hard time believing any tenured developer is not actually learning things when using LLMs to build. They make interesting choices that are repeatable (new CLIs I didn't even know…
I think there's a considerable difference in its ability to help with breadth vs. depth of expertise.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#80> The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all? Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere. You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfa…
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