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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#221

Post by bachmeier »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #179
pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

Using a coding agent seems quite low skill to me. It’s hard to see it becoming a differentiator. Just look at the number of people who couldn’t code before and are suddenly churning out work to confirm that.

> Using a coding agent seems quite low skill to me.

I agree if that's all you can do. Using a coding agent to complement a valuable domain-specific skill is gold.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#222

Post by niek_pas »

Havoc wrote: post #66

> The only winning move is not to play. Alas I think tech crowd have collectively painted humanity into a corner where not playing is not an option anymore. The combination of having subverted copyright and enabled cheap machine replication kills large swaths of creativity. At least as a viable living. One can still do many things on an artisanal level certainly and as excited as I am about AI it’s hard not to see it…

Interestingly, Ireland just launched a Basic Income for the Arts scheme. Many caveats (I think it's only like 300 euros a month, for a small group of people, etc.) but an interesting development nonetheless.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#223

Post by anon291 »

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…

I mean there should be. But there's not. Despite the millions of CS grads produced many people could not reasonably be expected to produce many 'standard' parts of a software stack

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#224

Post by clvx »

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…

There's a catch. Do not break customer trust. Many people are just tinkering with solving the problem but the indirect effects have not been tackled either by the tool, processes or just some human thinking.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#225

Post by lsaferite »

oblio wrote: post #162
tasuki wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

If you include consulting that could easily be 10 companies a year...

Why would a company you are consulting for invest in training you up exactly? They are paying a consultant with the expectation that they are bringing the knowledge.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#226

Post by WarmWash »

qsera wrote: post #149
colechristensen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No one is saying that it cannot do what you say now. What I am saying is that once the high quality training data runs out, it will drop in its capabilities pretty fast. That is how I compare it to perpetual motion mechanism scams. In the case of a perpetual motion machine, it appear that it will continue to run indefinitely. That is analogous to the impression that you have now. You feel that this will go on and on…

>What I am saying is that once the high quality training data runs out, it will drop in its capabilities pretty fast.

That's more a misunderstood study that over time turned into a confidently stated fact. Yes, the model collapses if you loop the output to the input. But no, that's not how it's done.

The reality is that all the labs are already using synthetic training data, and have been for at least a year now. It basically turned out to be a non-issue if you have robust monitoring and curation in place for the generated data.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#227

Post by ozozozd »

pfisherman wrote: post #131
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”…

There was a moment we thought JS had won. And then crypto. I personally believed low-level development was done.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#228

Post by JustResign »

anovikov wrote: post #96
nicksergeant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it isn't "from scratch", is it? It's "from Claude".

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#229

Post by jnovek »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #207
pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

> what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel . What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one: - Able to review the ou…

> Able to review the code output of coding agents

That probably won’t be necessary in a few years.

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