Like you are hand crafting a C++ game engine because you like to, I am crafting a category theory based foundation of accounting in various odd languages. Mine is made possible by AI because I'm only an accountant, not a mathematician. So your article is inspiring, humane, and I appreciate you sharing it.
Fuck it, make it anyway
551–560 of 607 posts
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#552Look, 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…
I came here to write something similar but not as forceful. Your comment is far better than might ever have the guts or wherewithal to express. I build things with the tools I have. I also repair the ancient wood windows at my house with an assortment of POWER tools, like a router and table saw.
AI is my coding power tool. I'm building stuff for humans, just faster now. It's amazing.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#553Look, 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…
“Just suck it up” coming from a person who doesn’t have to deal with the consequences has to be the least convincing take on the situation I’ve heard by far. So congrats on that. To offer a perspective from someone in the field: I built my career as a craftsman. Not just my livelihood, but my family’s livelihood depended on this craft. And within a few short months, my value has plummeted. I’ve tried to adapt, but I…
Yeah, you and me both. Look at it on the long scale of history, change is a constant. Everything is impermanent. It’s not our choice to have this forced upon us, but it’s our choice as to how we adapt. Or not.
Personally, I’m choosing to be mentally flexible. I don’t want to embrace fear, fear is the mind killer.
You can probably do a whole lot of things to make money. I’ve only ever made software, so this is a real kick in the arse, but so be it. Time to pay attention and see where this story goes.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#554Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fu…
I wouldn't be so negative.
Maybe to cheer you up: we're doing a few tests at our org, and we found that product-minded engineers still have a tremendous leg-up compared to other people when it comes to actually shipping products. It's not even a race.
It's not just quality of code, it's also speed of execution, maintainability. Why? Because we're not building 200 database tables + 200 endpoints when 1 table + enum suffices. Yes that happened. There was also one feature that I can't comment much on because it would doxx but: a PR from non-dev took months, was 100k LOC and rejected by product and engineering as low-quality. The same feature built by my team was 900 LOC, feature complete, shipped.
Nothing beats the combination of domain expertise and expertise in the medium.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, its a very easy line to draw. Rallying and bringing together humans is COMPLETELY different than having an LLM do something. They are not comparable.
No you're just drawing a new arbitrary distinction
In no way shape or form is the distinction between LLMs and Humans arbitrary in any sense.
They are two different things, LLMs are not humans.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just another person who thinks AI===AGI.
Consider that maybe AI should mean AGI. That was what its original meaning was supposed to be, and calling generative models AI is watering down the original term and accepting the frame of the LLM makers. What's really disappointing about current LLM models isn't that they aren't useful, but that they really tell us much about intelligence at all. The techniques used to make LLMs aren't generalizable at all, and I c…
AI has included everything from neural nets to video game NPCs for as long as I'm aware of. What else is the broad umbrella term? We have to have one. And for anything else, you need to be specific about its properties anyway. In particular, usage of "real AI" is nonsense without a more precise definition.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#558Look, 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…
Just cause something has already happened many times to other people doesn't mean it's not special or interesting when it happens to you. It's been extraordinary seeing this unfold before me.
And I think it's worth noting that the novel thing about what's happening now is that, unlike before, when physical labor was devalued and commodified, we are now seeing intellectual labor, even at its highest levels, suffering the same fate.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#559Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a…
Same here. Mind you, I share the many concerns about AI. I agree the industry has gone nuts. I warn everybody that "use more AI" is terrible advice and a terrible strategy. And why are the people saying that AGI could kill us all, the same people who are racing to bring it about?
But: there's a complex business related project I care deeply about. Due to corporate red tape and office politics I couldn't fix it the way I wanted to when I actually worked there, but after I left, I built the solution I had in mind (mostly out of frustration at first, but it's starting to look like a viable product). And thanks to LLMs, I can tackle it on a much larger scale, build it faster, control it better (to my surprise), and I can also plan the really business aspects around it, including how to sell something like this, which is absolutely a first for me.
So I feel like thanks to Claude, I can actually solve problems more effectively, on a larger scale, and I feel like I'm now working on a higher level than ever before.
Compare it to the step from thinking about memory allocation and loop indices to thinking about algorithmic complexity, performance and memory footprint. From thinking about a single feature request to thinking about how the program can solve a complex business problem. Perhaps I'm more architect than programmer now, but I'm still deeply involved with the code, even if Claude now writes most of it. I'm still having fun. Although that might also partially be because I'm free from that restrictive corporate environment and can actually do what I want. (For now; eventually I do have to figure out how to make money from this.)
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#560Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a…
> so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don…
This is absolutely an issue, and I've run into it several times myself, because I am doing Real Difficult Stuff that I don't think anyone has ever done quite like this before. But I'm leaning heavily on Claude for it. Mostly for the stuff that has already been done before but I need to redo in order to be able to improve on it (mostly various aspects of graph layout algorithms of for the Sugiyama framework), but it's also been surprisingly helpful at helping me write some of the complex new stuff. Those parts require a lot more direct guidance and careful review, but it's still helping me keep a firm grasp on the whole thing. Which I also find surprising, because in the past I've experienced many times that I was losing grasp on a project because I let LLMs do too much. But this time it's the opposite.