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The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

rickmanelius.com

71–80 of 90 posts

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#71
I came close to burning out around two years ago. It wasn't even the workload so much as the uncertainty of being able to solve hard problems and feature requests on time. I was in a constant state of stress and fear, thinking about those problems in the evening, at night, and in the morning.

With AI—or coding agents, to be more specific—I'm perhaps working even more than before, yet I feel considerably more relaxed. It feels like the variance in task difficulty and uncertainty has flattened out. If I had a difficult network-related issue before, it might have taken me hours of research and debugging before even being able to tell what was even going on and how long it would take to fix. Now I can just spawn an agent with the right keywords, in the right environment, and with the right permissions, and get feedback within minutes while focusing on other stuff in the meantime.

While I was pessimistic about where software development was heading just a year ago, I now feel more optimistic and happy about how things are going. My only concern, however, is whether it will reduce the demand for software engineers in the long run.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#72
post #45

I will never believe the premise of 100x boost from AI, why are we still pushing this narative? Yes, AI is amazing in small, constrained, focused pieces of code but the code is nowhere fit for production and the last 10% needed to ship shows that the 90% that's already been done by AI is absolutely trash. Hacks on top of hacks. Is no one trying to ship polished things to customers anymore, will each of us have a hack…

I think the trick is to learn exactly what things AI can give a 100x speed boost with, and use it for those tasks, and only those. The tasks where there's little-to-no speed boost at all -- do those yourself. You'll feel better and happier. The best thing is you'll have much more time to work on those things now, because AI is doing all the stupid/boring/dumb/mundane/I-hate-this-so-much/I-don't-ever-want-to-think-abo…

Good points.

First use of AI code generation only recently - I think the key is to throw away code until you can one-shot the app. You wouldn't employ a dentist and tell them half-way through what they must do next.

That's just my first impression.

Interestingly, I started with Gemini and switched to ChatGPT using the initial creativity of Gemini as the starting point.

So like search results, why go to page 7 if you can just retry/rewrite repeatedly and never move passed page 1 because at one point, you'll find the right page at the top. As they say "too many cooks spoil the broth" so just get the menu selection right and the perfect meal will be delivered, and if it's not, don't send it back, throw it away and reorder! The cook won't care - it's a robot - no feelings.

If you can't one-shot it, or almost one-shot it - then you f##### up, not it.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#73
I am going through this burnout cycle since the COVID-19 days. I noticed that the origin of my burnout is not just due to my job, but also several other factors. Though my job constitutes 80% of it. Within that 80% I noticed that doing a monotonous job contribute to 80% and remaining due to orgn. policies, boss and coworkers.

When I first started using AI agents to automate my work tasks I felt liberated for a few months, but after that I again started feeling burnout. There were days when I tried to compete with AI Agents to complete my tasks earlier like zooming in a race car which added to my burnout.

The quest to learn or gain knowledge will alleviate your burnout and the moment you start unlearning your burnout reappears. Thus I stick to HN for most of the day to kill my burnout though it is overwhelming.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#74

This seems very related to a trend I’m seeing as my company goes all in on AI: everyone thinks that every problem is “a couple hours” with AI now, and they all want zero external dependencies because they can move faster alone. As a result, we’re now in an even worse “yet-another-…” age where everyone has built approximately the same (but somehow incompatible) versions of all the same beginner-level software, and (ir…

Given the limits of LLM's regarding context, why is zero dependencies the goal ?

Shouldn't something like maximum reuse/abstraction, minimal written code, should be a better goal ?

Possible leading to more llm-scalable systems ?

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#75

I'm not sure that AI helps us with that last 1%. Just the 99% which is why, instead of having a backlog of 0% projects, we have a backlog of 99% projects. My hope is that we're more effective prioritizing a backlog of 99% projects than 0% projects.

Turns out the last 1% is 90% of the work

But also you can make money by doing 80% of the work and managing the last 20% as it comes up.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#77
post #9

It's wild we're seeing people rediscover the same solution to the same problems we've had forever: being precious about your darlings. Code generators reduced the friction for implementing every shitty idea someone has ever had, but because developers seem to have never experienced throwing shitty ideas away (because if it was written in code it _has_ to be important right?) they treat everything coming out of the Co…

Funny. In writing, the advice is to "kill your darlings". Don't let a particular paragraph that you love a lot stop the whole story because it doesnt fit.

I think that's still the same idea. In his example the darling would be the entire project, in your example it's the paragraph.

Advocating for killing a single paragraph for the sake of the book is like abandoning a single feature for the sake of the project, which is his central point.

The only difference is if you're referring to the darling as the whole or as one paragraph/feature

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#78
At least in Enterprise IT, where I work, the challenge is not how you scale technology, but how you scale trust. Big IT problems are always trust problems. That messy CRM systems everyone complains about? The messiness is likely due to low organizational trust, departments working in silos, and disagreements on definitions (what is a customer?).

LLMs can scale technology, but they are terrible with scaling trust. You know what scales trust in Enterprise? Good leaders, good culture, good conversations, good meetings, good narratives, good insights, good decisions. Exactly the things that scaled trust 50 years ago, and exactly the things LLMs cannot directly impact.

But now see what is happening. Rather than doing the hard work of gaining trust and consent, employees are using LLMs to build their localized agents. Of course they are happy! But the Enterprise, as a whole, is not better off, the real problems have not been addressed, the consensus has not been reached.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#80
post #74

This seems very related to a trend I’m seeing as my company goes all in on AI: everyone thinks that every problem is “a couple hours” with AI now, and they all want zero external dependencies because they can move faster alone. As a result, we’re now in an even worse “yet-another-…” age where everyone has built approximately the same (but somehow incompatible) versions of all the same beginner-level software, and (ir…

Given the limits of LLM's regarding context, why is zero dependencies the goal ? Shouldn't something like maximum reuse/abstraction, minimal written code, should be a better goal ? Possible leading to more llm-scalable systems ?

Two things.

1. Deps are an organizational hassle. They need review, get flagged as security and legal risks, and (mostly incorrectly imo) have been somewhat tarnished by the idea that deps are all just "leftpad" - simple things that are over abstracted. This is the "incorrect" argument that I don't really think should carry much weight, but often does win the discussion internally in organizations.

2. Deps can be misaligned with your precise needs, and you often end up "owning" them anyways the second you patch/fork/modify it in any way. This one is legit. It's a real thing that happens and is painful. Sometimes being honest that you should just be responsible for the thing in the first place is the right call. This one I buy as an argument, but it just doesn't apply to that many deps.

But the combination of the two makes larger organizations somewhat adverse to dependencies on average.

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