561–570 of 1001 posts
I had a friend in LA who was sure that CSS and HTML were enough for her to be a "Senior frontend developer". This year she moved to Tennessee and is trying to find a rich husband because she can't find a single job.
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Are banks that concerned about velocity? Because moving fast and breaking things in the banking sector can get extremely expensive. It's also not a who-gives-a-shit industry like operating a taxi service or hosting images, but a very tightly regulated sector.
> Are banks that concerned about velocity? Yes
The fact that the author can articulate _why_ the AI is getting so good is kind of a moat for specialist, right? Imagine a layman prompting without domain expertise:
"There is likely a race condition here + [long-winded explanation and analysis carefully guiding the AI]"
Degenerates to:
"This button is not working, please fix. I don't care about code. Decide yourself"
Degenerates to:
"Claude make me money"
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> I think people are being naive here thinking this can't or won't happen in tech. What would this future look like? Software developer salaries burrowing into the ground?
There's quite a large cushion for software salaries to decline before permanent structural unemployment were to set in. It's not really feasible for "normal" businesses to hire developers at current salaries. Tech companies will probably shrink in headcount, but all the non-tech kind of businesses can increase developer headcount. Current Tech salaries are far above other fields while requiring (used to) significantl…
Maybe in some markets but in many places around the world software salaries already weren't that high. Or at least not really much higher than other white collar professions
I don't know how else to say this but LLMs are just word calculators. They are becoming better for sure but at this point even Claude 4.8 is absolute shit at any complex task in a not so common field. I have been working on terrain contour matching algorithms for the last few days and, oh boy are the predictions about AI taking over the world wrong. Its the highest level of bullshit I have ever come across in my life…
That's an extremely niche specialty though. 99% of software development jobs are web frontend/backend or mobile/desktop apps and they are more at risk from LLMs.
I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care e…
Good ideas are expensive. They're expensive because you have to weed through all the bad ones to identify them, find a market, and turn them into a product. You don't know that from the start, which is why the landscape is littered with millions of dead projects from thousands of dead companies.
Even if the execution were cheap and implementation were perfect, if the starting idea was bad, it's all been a waste.
Ideas aren't cheap, because bad ideas are expensive and good ideas cost money to vet.
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> get a pot of land and grow your own food Rejecting industrialized society is actually very expensive
Artisanal food for hipsters is always going to be a market. People are willing to pay a premium for locally or regionally grown produce, fruit, eggs and meat. However, it's a risky business so I'd only recommend getting started if you either (!) are FIRE already even after sinking 3 million bucks into purchasing land and machinery as well as constructing all the buildings or if you join a cooperative/union or if you…
No. Just try to make a 5x8 plot to grow vegetables and realise how ridiculously hard it is.
I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care e…
Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks…
> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track. But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading t…
LLMs are going to show that there's a huge divide in "engineers" between people who love "coding" and people who like "engineering".
The group of people kicking and screaming the most are the people who love code and don't want to see their coding go away.
These are typically the build vs buy folks. "We can't use anything anyone else wrote, I can do it better..."
What do you think Staff level engineers do? They don't sit around coding all day.
Writing the code is just something you had to do in the past to get the job done.
What you get paid to do is "engineer". The two are related, but they are separate. Coding is a very small part of the average engineer's job (and almost none at staff level and above).
And yet the vast majority of engineers think that the world is going to end if they aren't spending most of their time "coding".
1. most jobs are created by small to medium size enterprise
2. the throttle for new SMEs has been people, money and ideas, in that order
3. with LLMs being a force multiplier, fewer technical people are needed but some people still ARE needed
4. with less throttling, MORE SMEs will be created with more jobs - they will be able to do more, faster, but still need some human oversight.
Also, what is the point of software if it is not to serve human needs?
Also, in open source, community building and tending is a very human enterprise that will not be replaced by bots any time soon. So, as coding becomes commoditised, perhaps the soft skills backed by technical knowledge will be the complementary skill that increases in value.
Or, maybe it's time for me to become an itinerant folk musician.