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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#131

Post by pfisherman »

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…

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents?

I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won” and using them effectively required development and acquisition of some new domain knowledge and best practices. And the kids are ok. The people who scoffed at neural nets and never got up to speed not so much.

Edit: as an aside, I have learned plenty from reviewing coding agent generated implementations of various algorithms or methods.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#132

Post by deadbabe »

I’ve decided the only way I’ll adopt a full automated agentic AI workflow the way companies want, is if I am allowed to hold multiple jobs at multiple companies.

Imagine having 6 software engineering jobs, each paying maybe $150k a year, all being done by agents.

Hell, I might even do this secretly without their consent. If I can hold just 10 jobs for about 3 or 4 years, I can retire and leave the industry before it all comes crumbling down in 2030.

The problem of course, is securing that many jobs. But maybe agents can help with applying for jobs.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#133

Post by draxil »

alfanick wrote: post #111

I quit. The clankers won. I don't see any proof that software development is not dead. Software engineering is not, and it's much more than writing code, and it can be fun. But writing code is dead, there is no point of doing it if an LLM can output the same code 100x faster. Of course, architecture and operations stays in our hands (for now?). Initially I was very sceptic, first versions of ChatGPT or Claude were ra…

Useful tool, and if you're just scratching a small itch it's great.

For any serious system you still need to understand and guide the code, and unless you do some of the coding.. You won't. It's just novelty right now is skewing our reasoning.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#134

Post by tasuki »

Supermancho wrote: post #91
simonw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I've worked for 35ish companies

It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills.

I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#135

Post by ndriscoll »

Supermancho wrote: post #91
simonw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What exactly do you have in mind? The large companies I've worked at had book subscriptions, internal training courses, and would pay for school. Personally I don't see the point of any of it. For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. You can go download e.g. graduate level CS courses on youtube. MIT OCW has been around for almost a quarter century now. IME no one's going to stop you from spending a couple hours a week of work time watching lectures (at least if you're fulltime). Now at least at my company, we have unlimited use of codex, which you can ask for help explaining things to you. I also don't really see how attending conferences relates to skill improvement. Meanwhile, I've been explicitly told by managers that spending half my time mentoring people sounds reasonable.

I can't understand what people are looking for when they talk about lack of investment into training for engineers. It's not the kind of job where someone can train you. It's like an executive complaining they aren't trained. You're the one who's supposed to be coming up with answers and making decisions. You need to spend time on self-motivated learning/discovering how to better do your work. Every company I've been at big or small assumes that's part of the job.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#136

Post by RhysU »

Waterluvian wrote: post #102
hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

I imagine it being a "does anybody know COBOL?!" but much sooner than sixty years rom now.

COBOL also came to mind.

The COBOL thing seems to be working out just fine last I heard. Today a small number of people get paid well to know COBOL's depths and legacy platforms/software. The world moved on, where possible, to lower cost labor and tools.

Arguably, that outcome was the right creative destruction. Market economics doesn't long-term incentivize any other outcomes. We'll see the arc of COBOL play out again with LLM coding.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#137

Post by draxil »

kasey_junk wrote: post #34
xnorswap wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

I think the fact you need tool calling to stop it doing that, shows the underlying issue with trusting it to do anything without a human

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#138

Post by tpdly »

colechristensen wrote: post #118
qsera wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself. I am still necessary 1% of the time for debug, design, and direction and those of not at all a shallow skill. I have some graduate algebra texts on the way my math friend is guiding me through because I have found a publishable result and need to shore up my background before writing the paper... It's not perpetual motion, it's very…

You're fooling yourself.

People yeating a (shitty) Github clone with Claude in a week apparently can't imagine it, but if you know the shit out of Rails, start with a good a boiler plate, and have a good git library, a solo dev can also build a (shitty) Github clone in a week. And they'll be able to take it somewhere, unlike the llm ratsnest that will require increasingly expensive tokens to (frustratingly) modify.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#139

Post by LunicLynx »

This feels weird somehow. It feels like: Damn we can’t train our AI any better as everything regurgitated slop now. How can we get people to create new content for us, hopefully with new ideas …

Might be just me though, but I definitely don’t get why blogging should be the solution.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#140

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

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