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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#91

Post by Supermancho »

simonw wrote: post #55
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving 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…

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#92

Post by kingkawn »

titzer wrote: post #59
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving 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…

If a catastrophic failure occurs we will have to return to first principles and re-derive the solutions. Not so bad, probably enlivening even to get to spin up the mind again after a break.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#93

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

titzer wrote: post #59
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving 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…

>But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us.

That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. People will tinker with those things as hobbies and they'll broadcast that out too. Worst case we hobble along until we get better at it. And if we have to hobble along and it's important, someone's going to be paying well for learning all of that stuff from zero, so the motivation will be there.

Why do people worry about a potential, temporary loss of skill?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#94

Post by qsera »

Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving 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…

> I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending.

Frankly I don't think so. The AI using LLMs is the perpetual motion mechanism scam of our time. But it is cloaked in unimaginable complexity, and thus it is the perfect scam. But even the most elaborately hidden power source in a perpetual motion machine cannot fool nature and should come to a complete stop as it runs out.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#95

Post by staminade »

Anti-AI articles like this seem to be the new "Doing my part to resist big tech: Why I'm switching back from Chrome to Firefox" genre that popped up on HN for a decade or so. If it makes you feel better, great, but don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#96

Post by anovikov »

nicksergeant wrote: post #72
titzer wrote: post #59

Earlier 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…

This. I never had patience to figure how to build a from-scratch iOS app because it required too much boilerplate work. Now i do, and i got to enjoy Swift as a language, and learned a lot of iOS (and Mac) APIs.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#97

Post by tuvang »

titzer wrote: post #59
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving 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…

There is a deadly game of chicken going on. Junior recruiting already stopped for the most part. Only way this doesn’t end in a catastrophe is if AI becomes genuinely as good as the most skilled developers before we run out of them. Which I doubt very much but don’t find completely impossible.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#98

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

kstenerud wrote: post #83
mmustapic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the free software movement wants that the source code of the software you use be available to you to modify it if you wish. AI does not necessarily do that.

AI makes the entirety of the software engineering profession available to you. All you have to do is ask the right way, and you can build in days what once took months or years. Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. Closed source is no longer the moat it was, an…

> Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied.

Jesus christ.

"The people who wanted everyone to have a home should be happy with the invention of the lockpick. You can just find a nice house and open the lock and move in. Ignore the lockpick company charging essentially whatver they want for lockpicks or how they got accesss to everyones keyfob, or the danger of someone breaking into your house"

That is basically your argument. Like AI is a copyright theft machine, with companies owning the entire stack and being able to take away at will, and comitting crimes like decompiling source code instead of clean room is not a selling point either...

The open source community wants people to upskill, people become tech literate, free solutions that grow organically out of people who care, features the community needs and wants and people having the freedom to modify that code to solve their own circumstances.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#99

Post by SirHumphrey »

xnorswap wrote: post #31
farfatched wrote: post #18

> The AI industry is 99% hype; a billion dollar industrial complex to put a price tag on creation. At this point if you believe AI is ‘just a tool’ you’re wilfully ignoring the harm. > (Regardless, why do I keep being told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I decide not to buy something?) > The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates. This sort of reasoning is why you might have been…

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…

Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#100

Post by oompydoompy74 »

jdefr89 wrote: post #90
oompydoompy74 wrote: post #71

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?

Sort of hard to do because AI it shoved down your throat in one form or another virtually everywhere you go. I also think a lot of us Hackers are mourning the fact we spent many years mastering machines and programming just to have the skill devalued (at least from the publics perspective) nearly over night. I personally think it is more important now more than ever to understand technology. To be able to write code,…

I get it. I’ve been doing this for 11 years. I use agents everyday at work now and deal with all the benefits and problems of that. The craft is certainly changing and it will take years for everything to shake out and settle. I understand the desire to publicly wax poetic, but nobody actually knows shit about where we will land, so it gets a bit tiresome to see over and over.
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