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The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

rickmanelius.com

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Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#81

Post by cgearhart »

Aurornis wrote: post #59
cgearhart wrote: post #23

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…

AI completely broke some of the signals management used as proxies for team competence. In the past, teams that moved quickly and had a proof of concept to show management were valued for the speed of their execution. Usually a team that could execute quickly had some competent developers who could also quickly execute on the challenges of the implementation when it scaled up to real world problems. Now anyone with e…

This is exactly what I’m talking about. I’m seeing the same pattern. And the most useful proxy I’ve found so far for “we don’t understand the problem” is taking zero dependencies. It means that you haven’t bothered to understand what the library does and you think it can be replaced with something AI one-shots.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#82

Post by cgearhart »

petra wrote: post #74
cgearhart wrote: post #23

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 ?

Zero dependencies should not be the goal. It’s just a modern retelling of “not invented here” syndrome. It’s an anti-pattern because now you own maintenance on something that is not your core problem. In every case I’ve seen so far, the problem is that the person running the LLM doesn’t understand what problems the library solves and so they erroneously think the dependency and their generated solution are equivalent.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#83

Post by misiti3780 »

NateEag wrote: post #25
misiti3780 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I do this all the time and the results are pretty impressive and different than what you get out of the box prompting.

> Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I believe you misspelled "rip it off." I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are using the tools built by ripping off the collective creative works of humanity to rip off individual things, too.

im not ripping it off, or at least, i wouldnt consider that. a perfect example is artsy. i like the clean style of the website, and the colors, so if im building a prototype instead of getting the standard shadcn look i get something a bit different. im not building a competing product to artsy, i built a piece of software i run locally to aggregate my taxes everything year.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#84

Post by goldlimetea »

da-x wrote: post #70
goldlimetea wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

People try to automate-maxxing and forget the Human In The Loop (HITL). We need the HITL. As opposed to people who think that Human In The Loop Entirely Redundant is better. But it's dangerous.

[dead]

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#85

Post by tomrod »

georgemcbay wrote: post #43
tomrod wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs said something about good and great artists.

> Steve Jobs said something about good and great artists. Picasso said that, Jobs quoted it (and to his credit, gave attribution... which I doubt is happening with all of these claude-cloned designs).

Brilliant irony!

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#86

Post by PunchyHamster »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #48
esseph wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you're not on salary in the US, I take it.

I dunno about in the US, but being on salary in Canada I bet I've averaged well over 40 hours a week in my career. I know the usual trope is people on salary work as little as possible but it's not true for me. And that's not a flex. I'd much prefer to work less, but deadlines are deadlines and they're always calibrated to cost me my evenings and weekends, not cause the customer any delays

There are three kinds of deadlines:

* the business season (whether holidays or otherwise) - you lose actual bags of money any time it is missed. Alternative versions is "run out of VC money" and "get jumped over by competition" deadlines, those are real

* the "someone decided to promise it to customer" - Missing it over and over might get you to lose a customer but generally after missing one people responsible for setting them make them long enough to have some leeway

* The "gantt chart fitting" deadline - somewhere somewhere plans a thing he had no idea about, just gathered various random estimates and put them in a chart. Then stuff changes, estimates are missed, and somehow the guys at end of the chart had to catch up for guys at start of the chart taking too long. Missing it doesn't matter, it's self inflicted pain by managers to managers.

Majority of deadlines are in third category. Small part is in second. Vanishingly small part is in third. And without pain the system won't learn to not be too "optimistic" with them. And so enabling delivering miscalculated deadlines just makes it worse.

Do not get me wrong, sometimes shit does hit the fan and you burn midnight oil to fix it, but shit hitting the fan often enough all of the walls are brown is management's, not worker problem

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#87

Post by bluefirebrand »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #86
bluefirebrand wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno about in the US, but being on salary in Canada I bet I've averaged well over 40 hours a week in my career. I know the usual trope is people on salary work as little as possible but it's not true for me. And that's not a flex. I'd much prefer to work less, but deadlines are deadlines and they're always calibrated to cost me my evenings and weekends, not cause the customer any delays

There are three kinds of deadlines: * the business season (whether holidays or otherwise) - you lose actual bags of money any time it is missed. Alternative versions is "run out of VC money" and "get jumped over by competition" deadlines, those are real * the "someone decided to promise it to customer" - Missing it over and over might get you to lose a customer but generally after missing one people responsible for s…

> shit hitting the fan often enough all of the walls are brown is management's, not worker problem

Sure, but as a worker how do I actually convince my bosses to hold themselves or each other accountable? Shit flows downhill and I'm close enough to the bottom it lands on me, not my bosses

I'm not speaking in hypotheticals. I've received the "not a team player" speech a number of times in my career for refusing to do continuous overtime

I love building software, I love writing code, but man am I increasingly convinced I'm not cut out for the industry

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#89

Post by bzhang33 »

Skinney wrote: post #57

> So logically, if AI can help us complete tasks 2-100x faster than before, we should be UNDERWORKED and experiencing ZERO burnout, right? Got to admit, I stopped reading here. In my experience, burnout isn't related to the amount of work, but to your confidence in being able to do your job and if you find your job meaningful (like, does it even matter?). I'm probably doing twice as much work now compared to the peri…

I agree with your points here - I don't know if I feel more burnt out, but I definitely feel like my work has become less meaningful and fulfilling despite doing more work and iterating faster on a daily basis. I miss the satisfaction that comes with solving a problem on my own after wrestling with it for a bit.

It raises the uncomfortable question of, if so much of my work could be automated, was it ever really that important to begin with? It definitely has me asking a lot of questions about what I'm doing and where my life is headed.

One optimistic view is that AI could free up time for people who see their job as just a job, allowing them to invest more in other parts of their lives... but who knows how far down the line that is, and whether it'll even reach that point.

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