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Is this sustainable?

jamiehurst.co.uk

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Re: Is this sustainable?

#61

Post by weakfish »

faangguyindia wrote: post #56

I know a few guys here who were doing sysadmin, devops, frontend jobs for a few years in India and now they are driving a taxi in India. AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India. As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses. will it also happen to developers in other countries? I've no idea. When I tell this…

Did AI replace their job, or did the cost of having AI skyrocket so the companies did layoffs to make budget? There’s a difference.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#62

Post by CuriouslyC »

simonw wrote: post #41

This piece is really good: > The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination. We're still figuring out how to productively use coding agents as individuals, the next ch…

I still don't understand why coding agents are silo'd, and chat history is treated as disposable. Everyone on the team should be able to see all conversations and drop in and steer agents at any time, and chat history should be part of organizational memory.

I thought labs would have pushed collaborative steering by now, but I guess people got so TUI pilled they haven't even considered the possibility.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#63

Post by Gomotono »

r_lee wrote: post #40
Gomotono wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes of course. Why? You are already on hn which filters content before you read it

that is just simply wrong

What is wrong?

I do not mind at all that someone creates an AI Image to decorate a blog article.

I'm also not directly offended if someone is using an LLM to write text.

And i find it a valid argument, that people who post on HN and get enough votes for content, people read and liked, that this can be enough as a filter or quality gate.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#64

Post by nullpoint420 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #62
simonw wrote: post #41

This piece is really good: > The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination. We're still figuring out how to productively use coding agents as individuals, the next ch…

I still don't understand why coding agents are silo'd, and chat history is treated as disposable. Everyone on the team should be able to see all conversations and drop in and steer agents at any time, and chat history should be part of organizational memory. I thought labs would have pushed collaborative steering by now, but I guess people got so TUI pilled they haven't even considered the possibility.

I built this at my work and it didn’t turn out too well.

It’s a distributed agentic system on Temporal where all inputs are signals to the workflow. And then each agent has its own GNOME desktop either in a K8S pod or KubeVirt VM.

The biggest problem was context and ownership. The more we kept steering the model the worse it got until eventually it couldn’t complete its task. And on the ownership side, no one clearly owned the outcomes so it was just there… generating slop.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#65

Post by Gomotono »

weakfish wrote: post #61
faangguyindia wrote: post #56

I know a few guys here who were doing sysadmin, devops, frontend jobs for a few years in India and now they are driving a taxi in India. AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India. As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses. will it also happen to developers in other countries? I've no idea. When I tell this…

Did AI replace their job, or did the cost of having AI skyrocket so the companies did layoffs to make budget? There’s a difference.

There are plenty of use cases were you can easily replace a person with AI today.

AI is very good in creating a working website. We do not have the issue of internet explorer 6 anymore, frontend doesn't host security relevant code and it shouuld also not have the business logic. So its easy to let ai create a website which talks to a secure api endpoint.

Plenty of basic android apps are just the same thing: Some API Endpoint calling Frontend.

I know plenty of people i worked with, which I would replace tomorrow if i got the choice of more tokens vs. having to work with them, putting in a lot of effort in Code Review and not seeing real benefits.

If the industry thinks we don't want to grow anymore, than the market gets saturated -> issue 1. Issue 2 -> if the market is saturated and tokens costs a lot of money budget wise, you will have to reduce your team size to compensate for the budget -> further reduction of market capacity.

We know that AI is replacing jobs

Re: Is this sustainable?

#66

Post by thatmf »

> ...this shift advantages people who can build fast with AI tools and disadvantages people who can't. The bias to action is genuine, but it isn't neutral. The engineers who've adopted these tools effectively get heard more often, get their proposals taken seriously more often, and shape direction more than those who haven't.

If only this was limited to engineers.

I'm seeing this applied to every role across organizations. The designer that gets heard is the one who can vibe code the best. Same with strategists, writers (seriously), and other people for whom "coding" is not remotely their expertise or function. This exponentially accelerates the "cost of aligning organisationally" when you have not only several eng groups but every single person in your team regardless of role proposing their own solutions, that as an engineer it is now your responsibility to babysit (or as we are terming it, "harden").

Meanwhile, the quality of creative work suffers because instead of working in a surface that's designed for their trade and process (e.g. Figma) they jump straight to Claude or Cursor or v0 or whatever, where they're bounded by (and graded on) their ability to manipulate a bot, rather than their actual skillset.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#68

Post by skydhash »

carlosjobim wrote: post #57
skydhash wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software That’s on the level of complaining about having to learn music theory to play the piano, or to learn grammar to write a report. Or having to learn the road rules to drive a car on the street.

Have you ever seen a police report? They are the people who write most reports of any profession, and usually they are full of grammar and spelling mistakes. But I understand that the majority of hackers here think that spelling mistakes in a report means that somebody is bad at their job as a police officer. And I know that a good portion of hackers here think that a suspect should have all charges dismissed if a po…

Nope. Doing a syntax error in a programming language is the equivalent of filing the wrong form or filing the form incorrectly. Like if the question was “Suspect Height” and you put “green”.

Indentation rule are about scoping, You need a delimiter to mark end of a statements, and quoting often have to do with value type and interpolation. They’re not merely visual markers. Messing them up is the equivalent of answering “400 miles” when asked “what’s the color of the sky?”.

ADDENDUM: Yep writing code is filing a form. And just like any form, it’s easy to validate basic errors like syntax and type of values. The hard thing is to validate what happens after the form is processed. i.e, the intent of filing that specific form.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#69

Post by neuroblaster »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #58
neuroblaster wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally in economics black swan is an unpredictable negative event. The only thing that is unsettled here still is how many more people will lose their jobs and how much cumulative loss prisoner's dilemma will generate. I saw random people on Internet suggesting to piggyback this disaster and dip into the crazy money that it is "generating", but in a zero-sum game somebody has to lose.

As I understand it, it's something unpredictable and high-consequence, not necessarily negative. The origins are in Hume's problem of induction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

Unpredictable positive events usually just don't get attention. Something good just happened, okay, that's good. People just don't pay attention.

Technically black swan might not be negative, but for all practical reasons, "black swan event" is what people call impactful unpredictable negative events and they expect those events to be negative. In other words, it is a synonym for "a disaster" of sorts, only "economical".

This is how an economist would call a disaster.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#70

Post by 1dom »

lstodd wrote: post #55
1dom wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not an engineer's job to fix upper management delusions, and engineering is poorly equipped for that in any case. What is the job of engineering leadership in your mind then, if not to take requirements from the business and convert them into technical solutions which improve things for the business? The requirement here was "AI to improve DX" the outcome was developers lives are worse in many creative and fut…

If the requirements are self-contradicting while at the same time being non-negotiable their job is to quit.

So we agree on what their job is, but you're saying that if their job becomes impossible, they should quit, and I agree.

Do you think the author of the original article should have quit, rather than tried?

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