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Fuck it, make it anyway

joelotter.com

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Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#541

Post by bluefirebrand »

sigseg1v wrote: post #530
bluefirebrand wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value. Yes obviously. But consider: In the past my employer and I were aligned. We agreed that in order for me to create more value for them I also had to enrich myself by learning new stuff so I could use that learning to better provide value to them Now that i…

Why would you stop learning new things? I lead a team of developers as part of my current role, reviewing and approving what they work on (in addition to doing development and architecture design as well) and from my experience, the difference in someone who has spent time building up their skills in how to do agentic development with AI is so insane. One person can build more than an entire team in some cases, while…

> How is this not a skill issue and why would one conclude that you need to stop learning if this is the case?

It's not the skill I'm interested in learning nor is it the same skill I spent my career building

My problem also is not just to do with "My future learning" it is also about the value and opportunity to use the skilled I already spent decades on. Which are now devalued heavily or will be in the very near future

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#542

Post by amelius »

jjulius wrote: post #531
amelius wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but horses to cars is insignificant compared to an AI that is going to swallow us all. We don't even have time to make new career choices because AI will catch up faster than we can think.

Is it for sure going to "swallow us all"? Who's "us"?

Don't be hung up on details. This time the change is much more fundamental. That's the main point.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#543

Post by dahart »

aniviacat wrote: post #66
MachineMan wrote: post #10

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

I don't think that fully captures the situation. My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes. However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do…

Sure of course there will be some internal reason or some non-zero value behind doing any craft. But the analogy to AI & software engineering careers is that there are corporate for-profit tomato farms today. They have pushed out plenty of small farm businesses. Your mom enjoys tomato growing in spite of the availability of cheap high quality tomatoes. Your comment seems to me to agree with and support the GP comment entirely; you mom found value in doing the work despite there being no financial incentive.

Many people have argued over the years that it would be great when we have an economy that takes care of all the labor and everyone in society is free to choose to spend all of their time on things that have no financial incentive.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#544

Post by Freedom2 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #242
socalgal2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just see it as tool. Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense. I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back. Construction w…

> LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project. > I really don't get the hate I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums,…

I don't understand this comment. I also slogged through blogs, docs, forums and websites and throughout it all I found it enriching and enjoyable, despite some frustrations along the way. Even if the end result is much faster to get to, I can sit back and think to myself that I learnt a lot and had enjoyable interactions.

Some may think their pursuit of mastery is now wasted, but I find that intriguing especially in a field where mastery cannot really be obtained due to technological progress. I suppose I just don't let others reduce my own experience and what I value?

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#545

Post by bossyTeacher »

jenniferhooley wrote: post #131
srcreigh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for now, not everybody can make a private SaaS. Doing that requires skills and focus. Even with SOTA models, as of ~today, there are inflection points where the AI would not be able to make the right choice without a knowledgable human, or would cycle and waste time with things that don't matter, etc.

Not really true tbh. Plenty of 50 year old business guys with less than zero technical ability making saas startups over months of focused chats with LLMs. Of course they're slower at making stuff and the projects are worse than a smart engineer, but they can definitely ship and run to thousands of real customers.

> they can definitely ship and run to thousands of real customers

Each of those customers, who also have access to LLMs and can therefore bypass his LLM built service by making their own LLM built service. Cameras in phones didn't turn everyone into a professional photographer, it gave everyone the ability to take pics, as badly composited as they are, they fulfill their purpose. On the few life occasions where a professional is needed, you don't go for a smartphone-based photographer, you go for an old school professional photographer. I think software will be the same. These 50 year olds won't be selling to anyone. And if they are, it won't be for long.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#546

Post by qarl »

MachineMan wrote: post #10

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

As a creator - I am delighted that I can now create at about 20X the rate of what I could before. Maybe more.

I have produced more cool shit in the last 6 months than I have in the preceding 10 years. It's an amazing time to be alive.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#547

Post by fragmede »

1dom wrote: post #479
dasil003 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the nerdiness is still a huge asset, because what I've seen is that technical people are the ones whos ceiling is raised the most by AI. Sure, anyone can make a flashy demo now, and so the signaling value of being able to create something like that is gone, not to mention flashy demos themselves have lost 90% of the wow factor overnight and will continue to plummet. But in a way these superficial perception s…

> I would argue that was an especially privileged moat over the last 20 years powered by the rise of FAANG. I agree. I was going to touch on this, but I was trying to practice smaller walls of text - I do think AI has merged/interacted/double-teamed with a correction in tech salaries. We all worked through a very lucky decade or 2! This just adds I think to the current "Fuck it" attitude around the tech world and AI…

https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#548

Post by amlib »

adar2378 wrote: post #511
jschveibinz wrote: post #509

Look, folks. I'm an old man and pretty much out of the workforce at this point in my life. But what I see in these comments day, after day is rather pitiful. As your Uncle John, I'm going to give you a lecture: From the article: >I can’t really blame anyone who’s just gone along with things Whst is this supposed to mean "blame"? Do you "blame" people for driving cars instead of riding horses? Do you "blame" software…

yeah exactly! Either adapt/innovate or do something else.

Hard to do when adapting/innovating means essentially joining the Borg. People have a million analogies to what is happening with AI right now but they often fail to see how unprecedented it is. Is history really just repeating? Are we in a cycle? Or is this just a paperclip optimizer?

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#550

Post by cloverich »

RedCinnabar wrote: post #390
Palomides wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has really revealed the programmers who were temporarily inconvenienced idea guys

I mean, wasn’t that the case for most of them? Im not a developer anymore, but to me programming was always a means to an end. Sure you can have preferences (static vs dynamic typing, functional vs OOP, etc.), but in the end they should only be relevant if they make you more productive, makes the codebase more readable and so on. Since these nuances are progressively getting less and less important, why would you car…

There is such a thing as difficult concepts that code can express elegantly and words cannot. Its far beyond the simple preferences you allude to. Recursion is the simplest example i guess. Perhaps maths is even more elegant, but im among many a non mathmetician for whom code is the only way ive experienced it thus far.

Especially when you combine and mix those concepts in expressive, simple, intuitive ways. Im just not sure what else is like it that our minds can percieve.

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