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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#231

Post by bachmeier »

mikkupikku wrote: post #150
tpdly wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're fooling yourself. It's very easy to get demonstrably working results in an afternoon that would take weeks at least without coding agents. Demonstrably working , as in you can prove the code actually works by then putting it to use. I had a coding agent write an entire declarative GUI library for mpv userscripts, rendering all widgets with ASS subtitles, then proceeded to prove to my satisfaction that it does…

> Fairly straightforward but a ton of bitch work. The LLM blasted through it like it was nothing.

One might argue that this is a substitute for metaprogramming, not software developers.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#232

Post by [deleted] »

moron4hire wrote: post #182
Thanemate wrote: post #84

Funnily enough I saw this post as I was placing my HN account on hiatus, because I'm tired pretending that the quality of discourse is on par with what I've been used to read and participate in. We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone…

There is a lot more "yngmi" and "have fun being poor"-style attitude around here regarding LLM boosterism.

[deleted]

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#234

Post by damnitbuilds »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #206

I find it funny how clanker took off and everyone uses it. It was edited in a video where someone was otherwise saying something extremely racist (the more offensive version of the n-word). For those curious it involves a burger king hat, schizophrenia and an airplane, someone edited the n-word out and put clanker with AI (because why not insult AI by using AI?). I do wonder if the AI uprising will involve robots kil…

Years until we are forbidden from writing Clanker and have to write C***r: 3

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#235

Post by ojbyrne »

tasuki wrote: post #134
Supermancho wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Perhaps the lack of investment in their skills was the cause for the commenter’s job hopping, not the effect.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#236

Post by cdetrio »

kingkawn wrote: post #92
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…

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.

We found 500 zero-days in ten year old widely used open-source projects. Was that not a demonstration of the catastrophic failure of human debugging capability?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#238

Post by probably_wrong »

kstenerud wrote: post #65

> 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…

> Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?

But this is not that. The current situations is closer to "what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine".

I have been releasing my writings under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license which requires attribution and that anything built upon the material to be distributed "under the same license as the original". And yet I have no access to OpenAI's built-upon material (I know for a fact they scrape my posts) while they get my data for free. This is so far legal, but it's probably not ethical and definitely not what the free software movement wanted.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#239

Post by coldtea »

zozbot234 wrote: post #211
coldtea wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not how you prove that code works properly and isn't going to fail due to some obscure or unforessen corner case. So? We didn't prove human code "isn't going to fail due to some obscure or unforessen corner case" either (aside the tiny niche of formal verification). So from that aspect it's quite similar. > so most coding agents simply work their way iteratively to get their test results to pass. That's not…

> describe the issue exactly in the way a human programmer would Human programmers don't usually hallucinate things out of thin air, AIs like to do that a whole lot. So no, they aren't working the exact same way.

>Human programmers don't usually hallucinate things out of thin air

Oh, you wouldn't believe how much they do that too, or are unreliable in similar ways. Bullshiting, thinking they tested x when they didn't, misremembering things, confidently saying that X is the bottleneck and spending weeks refactoring without measuring (to turn out not to be), the list goes on.

>So no, they aren't working the exact same way.

However they work internally, most of the time, current agents (of say, last year and above) "describe the issue exactly in the way a human programmer would".

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#240

Post by underlipton »

ozozozd wrote: post #227
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”…

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

Crypto did win, just not where you're looking.
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