491–500 of 575 posts
Very few people know how to read assembly, instruction sets, binary or even transistor combos. All those layers have been "left behind" to become specializations.
In many ways coding is always about abstracting and LLMs can be a form of "higher level coding".
There's lots of problems with this argument, but it's what's happening and we'll be okay. We've always been.
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Outside of the most niche domains like frontier AI development, are there software engineering questions that Sol 5.6/Fable 5 can't answer better than the median software engineer if explicitly asked? It strikes me that models already have superhuman software architecture capabilities, they are simply underelicited. Furthermore the AI companies are spending gobs of money and compute to address this—harness developmen…
In terms of getting a the consensus answer to a specific question, they're likely better than a median software engineer at most questions. Where they still fall massively short, even compared to a straight out of college junior developer, is figuring out what the correct question to ask is. This has led to situations like Fable 5 spending six days debugging a deadlock because it didn't think to add any observability…
If anything I feel I am understating the capability of current models here. What is stopping the next generation of models from closing the feedback loop further?
Thinking through a problem is hard. For the most people will take any chance they can get to not think. Myself included. I probably gain double digits of IQ when my internet goes down.
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I don't agree. Chess is a perfect information game with objective, easily measurable outcomes. Show me a software business that looks like that and I'll agree with your hypothesis. Otherwise I don't believe your metaphor proves much of anything.
Another thing is, I have been playing Chinese chess a bit lately and, yes, Pikafish is stronger than any human player, but if you actually share a board state or list of moves with an LLM they will fail to accurately interpret the state of the board, let alone give good advice on what moves to make. Doesn't really prove or disprove the claim that LLMs will replace human programmers but it does show that the word "AI"…
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Maybe I’m naive, or misguided, or something else, but I decided almost 2 years ago that I’m going to bank on not using LLMs to do my job. I still write code by hand everyday. I don’t use AI to write code or lookup docs, or anything else. I just figure that if we really, truly, indisputably hit the point of AI assisted coding being mandatory, I can learn it and get up to speed in a few weeks (or at worst a couple mont…
I am in exactly the same position; I don't feel left behind per se but I was just fired for my stance. Management is entirely deluded across the industry, and in my case it was even acknowledged and agreed that my output and the quality of work was not in question, simply the fact that I didn't use LLMs to produce it. I reckon everything needs another 6-18 months to ripen, then those of us who haven't bet the farm on…
// The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation. The subtitle of the story tells it all. There are some people who seek out friction. Think about an athlete or a hardcore nerd. The best engineers are ones who were fascinated with computers and learning as kids and persued it at every opportunity. Found their own friction in other words. For those kinds of people, friction-seeking is the constant and wha…
Curiosity is really key, and I find that LLMs diminish curiosity in people that might otherwise have it because the allure of the answer is often a lot stronger than the allure of the friction. I guess that's just the distilling of the industry over time, but that could certainly lead to a shortage of expertise.
Who else is going to talk about a topic like how Searle would approach differentiating ownership from privilege in RBAC?
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> That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year. Nor even €50k/year. Two things are true: 1) The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to *write*. 2) My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the…
Before, if I would start working / thinking on a problem and discover it was harder than anticipated, that often was a signal that the feature may not be worth it. Because implementing it doesn't fit the current model of how things work or similar. Then it was back to the drawing table and find a better way of solving the underlying issue. But an LLM just happily chugs along and does it, no one feels the friction, wh…