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Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

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Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#211

Post by delusional »

PostOnce wrote: post #88

John Carmack is a personal hero of mine, so it pains me to say this: Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be? It could be he is doing incredible work in private... but it could also be that he's lost in the weeds, because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite? I remain a skeptic.

> Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be?

He's been spinning his wheels for a while. Carmack is a great example of how important working on the right stuff is. He's undoubtedly a brilliant programmer. Through him we get to see that a brilliant programmer working on non-programming tasks, can produce nothing.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#212

Post by anonzzzies »

shjshshshs wrote: post #191
anonzzzies wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that gives me the scary feeling that especially here people are overvalueing themselves by a lot. They find AI counterproductive because they simply never were good at what they do before AI. This is always always my read of people who value talking, meetings and office time as important: I have never met people who have that and who are not sales or just plain suck at their job; AI amplifies that. Also with sa…

You don’t value “talk”? I understand. I have a lot of those around me and they are super productive, all day, alone, in their little cubicles. Oblivious to everything around them. I don’t know what to say to those types anymore. Live and let live I guess.. or in this case, not live I suppose.

It usually is more like; I send an email or so which contains enough details to understand whatever we are doing. A person in that list sends it to 20 people. The next email is a zoom invite with 30 people of 1.5 hours to ‘go over the email together’. If these people have no influence, good or bad over the outcome, why would I waste this time while it usually just says they were too lazy or incompetent to read the email?

Useful talk and meetings all day is fine, but these are just to write busy/billable hours for all these useless folk with no value for the project. And socially I like listening and talking, just not for this.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#213

Post by dofm »

anonzzzies wrote: post #160
skrebbel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite Wow that resonated by a scary amount.

Again I don't get what people on HN are doing? Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed. I mean, we should not measure everything in money, but for lack of a better measure for productivity, I cannot see how anyone fi…

> Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed.

OK so, it sounds empty and miserable to me, but we can stipulate that this is how it is working out for you.

Given that stipulation: how long do you think this can possibly last, when you are in a race to the bottom with everybody else who is doing this?

Have you made plans about how you will get out of your office lease, downsize, subcontract this button-pushing to even cheaper people overseas, etc.? Are you ready to lay off everyone who works for you, downsize your house to a smaller mortgage? Because you're on a burning platform. If you can do this, so can everyone else.

I mean, I think we all are, possibly, on the same burning platform; I don't think I can fully avoid AI so I am trying to make sense of it.

But I intend to fully avoid being in a race with other phone whisperers if I can.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#214

Post by ghthor »

hermitcrab wrote: post #153

This resonated with me as someone who: has read the book of 5 rings (translated), has done quite a lot of martial arts and has been coding for ~50 years. I work for myself developing apps and selling online. So I have no employer pushing to use AI. But I feel a bit like a dinosaur watching the incoming comet. Currently, I just use MSCopilot as enhanced StackOverflow and I find it useful for that. But I have been nowh…

My suggestion would be just to try it. Get an openrouter account, add 50$ to it and setup pi agent to use it with a cheap and fast model; I personally use 5.6-Luna.

Run it on a throwaway system, pick a codebase you’ve always wanted to fix something about but didn’t have the time. Like you wanted to do a major refactoring or do a library migration to a better maintained library. Or you want to rewrite part of a program in rust for performance/security improvements.

The hardest part for me is sometimes it is hard to write what I want in a prompt; but you don’t have to put everything into the prompt, you can make a code edit as an example and then say; look at this diff, it is doing X; look for and apply this some transformation across codebase Y

If you have a good codebase, AI will have good patterns to follow and will produce pretty good code; and you can quickly iterate on the results (maybe over new context windows) and get high quality code that looks very close, if not indistinguishable from the pre-existing code.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#215

Post by dofm »

anonzzzies wrote: post #181
sandworm101 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, AI is very good at generating number, be that code for software, images for ads, or banal prose for company blogs. AI not so good at growing corn, cooking eggs, biulding houses, running fiber, treating disease, changing brake pads, loading a truck... or any of the other millions of physical-world jobs on which the economy is biult. If you company is all about creating things that go on the internet, sure, AI is y…

They sure are though; they have many processes to automate as well: big corn farmers/factories also have admin, erp, crm, departments with processes etc. There are companies doing billions in revenue with departments of people just copy/pasting PDFs who do real life things like you state who have immediate gains. But they won't do it alone yet and luckily need us. They still benefit though vs the large consultant bus…

Literally everyone I know in a large enough company who talks about AI talks about increasingly panicky mandates to use more Copilot coming from above, like you'll lose your job if you don't use it more. I heard exactly this story from my neighbour just three days ago. Literally a call from head office demanding they use Copilot more — to do a task Copilot can't do.

Everyone in smaller companies describes various efforts to get AI to do more that ultimately end up involving lots of corrections or nurse-maiding ChatGPT to get it to do exactly what they need, when what they need is often so formulaic they should already have a process.

Nobody I talk to describes it in terms of massive productivity gains. Everyone describes it as a puzzle they feel variously compelled to solve.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#216

Post by skrebbel »

anonzzzies wrote: post #160
skrebbel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite Wow that resonated by a scary amount.

Again I don't get what people on HN are doing? Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed. I mean, we should not measure everything in money, but for lack of a better measure for productivity, I cannot see how anyone fi…

I mean sure if long term maintenance and code quality don’t matter then I wholeheartedly agree with you.

It’s spectacular for small projects, limited-scope apps (eg marketing campaigns etc) and for market-testable prototypes.

But if you don’t review and edit the code, things become unmaintainable soup very fast, with subtle logic bugs all over the place. And if you do review and edit the code, when working in large nontrivial codebases, then in my experience AI doesn’t actually go faster even if it feels like that at the start of each task.

Obviously this only holds if you have any sort of code quality standard to begin with (and I agree that with small / short-lived products you don’t need one)

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#217

Post by sseagull »

wat10000 wrote: post #209

Fighting is competitive and single-minded in a way that programming very much is not. The purpose of fighting is to defeat, often kill, an enemy who wants to do the same thing to you. In that world, there’s no room for anything but the most advanced techniques and technology. Most jobs, programming included, aren’t like that at all. There’s an element of competition, but you don’t get killed by somebody who does it b…

It does say something about our culture, doesn't it? That something as mundane and non-violent as computer programming gets compared with violent combat.

I suppose it comes down to how hyper-competitive some people are, particularly the "greats", that working on software is in the same category as fisticuffs.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#218

Post by acedTrex »

fragmede wrote: post #80
acedTrex wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ya i find all LLM output to be incredibly boring and unskillful, I can ship vibe bugs fast with the best of them but it brings me no joy. I'll never let myself be left behind but the joy professionally of writing quality software is 100% gone.

The possibility to have an agent implement every little thing that comes up in your mind as you're building doesn't spark the tiniest bit of joy? Previously, "ooh it would be cool if" had to answer to "yeah but it'll take too long". Now, it's more like, "how important is that really ?" to stupid ideas that never would have seen the light of day before.

Not even a little bit to be frank. The joy of things came from their implementation to me. I will write something and then peruse its code on github for hours afterwards just looking, like one would at an art gallery.

If I did not toil on it I wont use it most likely. There's a very very small amount of software I ACTUALLY desperately need in a way that I would not care how it came to exist.

Do not get me wrong, those things exist, i have a plethora of dog shit vibe code websites, clis and tuis and other random stuff on a self hosted forgejo. They did their job now they die. But it brought me no joy, in fact it was rather unpleasant the entire time doing it.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#219

Post by suddenlybananas »

hermitcrab wrote: post #169
sriram_malhar wrote: post #31

Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of having worked without AI. They have been schooled in the basics. Enough of us know about data structures, concurrency, networks, language design etc. from the ground up that the knowledge is passed on. I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Given the attendance rate…

Herodotus wrote about finding people living in the ruins of a great city (Babylon) who had no idea who built it or how they built it.

I think that anecdote is from the Anabasis by Xenophon and refers to Assyrian city of Nineveh. Babylon was still occupied during the time of Herodotus and was one of the biggest cities in the world at the time. (the book spends some time discussing Cyrus's conquest of Babylon).

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#220

Post by jcelerier »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #196
anonzzzies wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again I don't get what people on HN are doing? Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed. I mean, we should not measure everything in money, but for lack of a better measure for productivity, I cannot see how anyone fi…

If it works for you, great! Just keep going. I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves? Certainly they understand their problems better than you and they can adapt to rising issues faster if their in-house team does it themselves. And certainly what kind of AI you can access, they can too and perhaps even more. So what will remain your value propositions? I’m…

> I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves?

I mean, that's exactly what's starting to happen, we have more and more clients to whom we propose a quote and their answer is "guess i'll just vibe code it" or come to use with an app that they vibe-coded and does the job, and they're content with it. So far it seems to work out just fine for them.

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