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AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

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Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#61
post #4

The fear in most people is not of losing the job, but of losing their value in the market as ai raises the floor of capabilities of other people competing for the same job.

I think the main fear is that the (assumed) increase of productivity means that employers may require less employees, resulting to less positions in the market. But I don't think that expertise is no longer relevant or we see getting more people hired with less expertise because AI. If anything, there is this talk about companies not hiring junior engineers as much. Moreover, as getting the expertise could become har…

> require less employees, resulting to less positions in the market

which i counter with the idea that more efficiency means more output for less - ala, more surplus. This extra surplus drives higher demand for more products/services.

It's the same idea as economic resource becoming cheaper leading to a higher usage of it: namely, Jevons paradox.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#62

The litmus test is this: do you enjoy consuming AI-generated stuff? I don’t. Whether it’s written text, or video, audio, restaurant menus, clothing pictures, documentation, airport control, ads… I do think there’s value in LLMs but as a sort of better search engines and q/a machines.

You enjoy good AI all the time you just don’t know it. Nobody enjoys bad 1-shot AI.

Nobody likes having their time routinely wasted by lazy copy/pasting of ChatGPT outputs, which is what too many people do.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#63
I think of it this way. If AI could build the product alone, then why would it ever be worth more than the tokens you spent on it? I think this would hold true 99% of the time. It's literally like asking someone "Can you pay me $1m for new gadget? I hired this other dude for $20p/h and he made it in a week". It simply doesn't add up.

The 80/20 rule still stands.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#64

I'm about to throw away multiple months of LLM generated code for one of my side projects. I was really careful writing design specs and it wasn't even a new code base the LLM worked on, but still after several months of AI changes I feel my code degraded more and more into a subtle mess. Hard to explain, each individual change looked good and logical and on the surface the codebase looks fine, but looking at the who…

[deleted]

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#65

I'm about to throw away multiple months of LLM generated code for one of my side projects. I was really careful writing design specs and it wasn't even a new code base the LLM worked on, but still after several months of AI changes I feel my code degraded more and more into a subtle mess. Hard to explain, each individual change looked good and logical and on the surface the codebase looks fine, but looking at the who…

[flagged]

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#66

The litmus test is this: do you enjoy consuming AI-generated stuff? I don’t. Whether it’s written text, or video, audio, restaurant menus, clothing pictures, documentation, airport control, ads… I do think there’s value in LLMs but as a sort of better search engines and q/a machines.

I consider AI generated stuff as a raw material , never as a product ready to be consumed by any public clients

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#67
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. GPT CODEX and Claude Code are already saying they use AI in their own codebases, and they have huge numbers of active users. Can that really be called a failure? In my view, it's just that the existing infrastructure layer is so thick that it's not immediately visible—but AI adoption is already quite widespread across many companies. People say program quality has declined, but I don't think so. The…

Adoption absolutely did happen, I am not questioning that. What I am questioning is whether it really is the revolution the people selling it want us to believe it is. Just to disclose: I use those every day, I have two Claude Max 20 subscription myself. I am still in doubt how much more productive professionally it made me. I am having a ton of fun in exploring stuff I never would have otherwise though. I define sof…

Senior, I respect your opinion. I think your skills are so advanced that you don't feel the impact as much. That's a different perspective.

>I am delighted by the piece of software I use. Those moments are rare and far between, and it's not getting any better.

First, regarding how much satisfaction we get from the software we use—I see that part a bit differently.

Because that's more about UX and product design than code quality. I think it's because in the business domain, people only attempt safe things. In the early days of the internet and the web, people didn't have a clear direction, so there were many bold attempts. Those original attempts felt fresh. But now we have a set of 'norms.' Most people just implement those norms. I think the reason you don't feel that freshness anymore is precisely because you're already so skilled.

What I'm focusing on is this: I'm not sure about my own productivity, but I'm finding joy in exploring areas I couldn't explore before. The problem is that most of this code just ends up implementing solutions that already exist. That seems to be the core issue.

In other words, both you and I have our threshold for 'average' set so high that the threshold for calling something 'good' has become too high as well.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#68
post #29

There's going to be plenty of work helping other companies make some sense of their vibe coded efforts. The value of individual projects might decrease, but there will be a lot more of them. And without help they won't actually work out all that well. I talked to a company that does not employ software engineers that were doing some things with Claude Code a few weeks ago. Insightful comment: I want that person to do…

> Insightful comment: I want that person to do what I hired them to do, not mess around with code. What does that mean? Who is that person who should not mess with the code?

I think they're saying that the people who aren't software developers are playing around with Claude Code. And that's not what their job is and it's not what they understand. It's all good empowering people who aren't software developers but at the same time, it's not worth running your business on tools and software no one in your business understands. You need someone there who knows what they're talking about, even if it is just as a mentor.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#69

When you have built your working product try this prompt: - Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard. Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did. I call this my million dollar prompt, as in it teaches you just how much you are being fooled.

Popped over to HackerNews, read two comment sections and the top comments in both articles were users saying the same thing: "AI can't write code! The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute! Just you wait!" I've never seen this community like this. Are these people cooked? We are years into this and they haven't been able to figure it out? They are going to continue to tell people using these tools successfu…

Interesting. What product and/or project have you successfully launched with it?
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