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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#251

Post by nicksergeant »

zozbot234 wrote: post #112
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…

What do you mean by "LLM coding"? That's not a very meaningful term, it covers everything from 100% vibe coded projects, to using the LLM to gradually flesh out a careful initial design and then verifying that the implementation is done correctly at every step with meticulous human review and checking.

The latter.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#252

Post by jerf »

RhysU wrote: post #136
Waterluvian wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aga…

I've been waiting for the article talking about how AI is affecting COBOL. Preferably with quotes from actual COBOL programmers since I can already theorize as well as the next guy but I'm interested in the reports from the field.

While LLMs have become pretty good at generating code, I think some of their other capabilities are still undersold and poorly understood, and one of them is that they are very good at porting. AI may offer the way out for porting COBOL finally.

You definitely can't just blindly point it at one code base and tell it to convert to another. The LLMs do "blur" the code, I find, just sort of deciding that maybe this little clause wasn't important and dropping it. (Though in some cases I've encountered this, I sometimes understand where it is coming from, when the old code was twisty and full of indirection I often as a human have a hard time being sure what is and is not used just by reading the code too...) But the process is still way, way faster than the old days of typing the new code in one line at a time by staring at the old code. It's definitely way cheaper to port a code base into a new language in 2026 than it was in 2020. In 2020 it was so expensive it was almost always not even an option. I think a lot of people have not caught up with the cost reductions in such porting actions now, and are not correctly calculating that into their costs.

It is easier than ever to get out of a language that has some fundamental issue that is hard to overcome (performance, general lack of capability like COBOL) and into something more modern that doesn't have that flaw.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#253

Post by malwrar »

niek_pas wrote: post #220
malwrar wrote: post #47

I 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…

This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it. I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?

There’s definitely a fear of repercussions (I’ve been commenting on this site for over a decade now! Who knows what’s in my history...) but importantly I actually take some pride in many of the comments I write. What drew me to this site originally was how high quality everyone’s perspectives and articulation was, and I suppose I view the writing voice I’ve nurtured here as unique and special to me. It’s not about compensation, I’d just hate to see some future chatbot sound 1/1,000,000th like me I guess? Hard feeling to describe, but I’d rather just not be globbed in and instead express myself in ways that aren’t profitable or feasible to copy.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#254

Post by rkapsoro »

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…

I think you're agreeing with him. All of the things you just listed are key senior developer skills.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#255

Post by nicksergeant »

titzer wrote: post #241
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…

Learning calculus by watching the professor solve integrals on the board for an hour doesn't result in the same level and depth of understanding as working through homeworks every week for a semester. If you ran off to your TA to solve every problem in your homework, you just won't learn calculus. I've vibe coded plenty. I mostly don't look at the crap coming out. Don't want to. When I do I absorb a tiny bit, but not…

"I mostly don't look at the crap coming out."

This is pretty much my point. I use LLMs to code _and_ to learn. I read everything that comes out. Half of it is wrong or incomplete. The other half saved me a bunch of time and taught me things.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#256

Post by justonceokay »

rickcarlino wrote: post #202

LLMs can produce text information but they cannot have experiences. Writing about authentic experience is still a worth while endeavor. Expression of a preference is also an experience when framed correctly.

I think about Irish and British writing of dialogue, where is is extremely common for characters to only just now realize the importance of something their interlocutor said, and backtrack the conversation. Often this is done for humor. (Think about characters correcting each other with the use of “exacerbate” in Shaun of the Dead)

The only way to write like that is to have a real theory of mind for the two characters and understand that they are four processing speeds: that of both speakers, that of the narrator, and that of the reader.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#257

Post by ndriscoll »

rafterydj wrote: post #244
jnovek wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Able to review the code output of coding agents That probably won’t be necessary in a few years.

I see this line of thought put out there many times, and I've been thinking: why do people do anything at all? What's the point? If no one at all is even reviewing the output of coding agents, genuinely, what are we doing as a society? I fail to see how we transition society into a positive future without supplying means of verifying systemic integrity. There is a reason that Upton Sinclair became famous: wayward inc…

You could e.g. write specs and only review high level types plus have deterministic validation that no type escapes/"unsafe" hatches were used, or instruct another agent to create adversarial blackbox attempts to break functionality of the primary artifact (which is really just to say "perform QA").

As a simple use-case, I've found LLMs to be much better than me at macro programming, and I don't really need to care about what it does because ultimately the constraint is just that it bends the syntax I have into the syntax I want, and things compile. The details are basically irrelevant.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#258

Post by bonoboTP »

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”…

I also remember a similar wave around 10-15 years ago regarding ML tooling and libraries becoming more accessible, more open source releases etc. People whose value add was knowing MATLAB toolboxes and keeping their code private got very afraid when Python numpy, scikit learn and Theano etc came to the forefront. And people started releasing the code with research papers on github. Anyone could just get that working code and start tweaking the equations put different tools and techniques together even if you didn't work in one of those few companies or didn't do an internship at a lab who were in the know.

Or other people who just kept their research dataset private and milked it for years training incrementally better ML models on the same data. Then similar datasets appeared openly and they threw a hissy fit.

Usually there are a million little tricks and oral culture around how to use various datasets, configurations, hyperparameters etc and papers often only gave the high level ideas and math away. But when the code started to become open it freaked out many who felt they won't be able to keep up and just wanted to keep on until retirement by simply guarding their knowledge and skill from getting too known. Many of them were convinced it's going to go away. "Python is just a silly, free language. Serious engineers use Matlab, after all, that's a serious paid product. All the kiddies stacking layers in Theano will just go away, it's just a fad and we will all go back to SVM which has real math backing it up from VC theory." (The Vapnik-Chervonenkis kind, not the venture capital kind.)

I don't want to be too dismissive though. People build up an identity, like the blacksmith of the village back in the day, and just want to keep doing it and build a life on a skill they learn in their youth and then just do it 9 to 5 and focus on family etc. I get it. But wishing it won't make it so.

Talented, skilled people with good intuition and judgements will be needed for a long time but that will still require adapting to changing tools and workflows. But the bulk of the workforce is not that.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#259

Post by v3xro »

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 think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home.

It could hardly have been a hobby if people were willing to pay you for it (and good rates too)?

I will rephrase it like this - the market has shifted away from providing value to the customers of said companies to pumping itself instead and it does not need to employ people for that. Simple as.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#260

Post by pklausler »

> First let’s accept the realities. The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Mass surveillance and tracking are a feature, privacy is a bug. Everything is an “algorithm” optimised to exploit.

Suppose that I have discovered a novel algorithm that solves an important basic problem much more efficiently than current techniques do. How do I hide it from the web scrapers that will steal it if I put it on GitHub or elsewhere? Should I just write it up as a paper and be content with citations and minor glory? Or should I capture AI search results today for "write me code that does X", put my new code up under a restrictive license, capture search results a day later, demonstrate that an AI scraper has acquired the algorithm in violation of the license, and seek damages?

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