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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

#221

Post by somenameforme »

dofm wrote: post #213
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…

> 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…

You're not just in a race to the bottom with everybody else who is doing this. I don't think his anecdote is particularly surprising at all. You can do the same with basically any typical CRUD app, which is already going to be some very large percentage of all business software. But this kind of also leads to the conclusion that so can the people paying you.

I think the years of software development/employment for problem solving, in and of itself, are numbered at this point. When people start to understand how relatively easy this stuff is, they're going to be in-housing everything. Not only for price but also because of increased flexibility/confidentiality/control, and even lower concept-to-live timelines.

What third party stuff continues to exist will see its comp plummet. I imagine now you can already get some really nice quality software contracted out on places like fiverr for nothing simply because the skill involved to produce quality solutions has plummeted.

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

#222

Post by turpentine »

kaffekaka wrote: post #68
turpentine wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are going from the era of manual, line-by-line mental model transcription to one where software engineers can focus on data structures, software architecture and algorithms. Focusing on data structures, architecture and algorithms is what competency in programming has looked like since forever. Building systems out of smaller pieces gets you there. If your complaint above is that you were struggling with syntax…

I think you are not interpreting GP in the most charitable way. He simply said that not having to manually write all the code lets him spend his energy on bigger things. That is different from "struggling with syntax".

Syntax is listed right there in the GP comment. They've given plenty of rope to hang themselves by.

Someone who says that programming is not about working at the level of about data structures and algorithms without LLMs raises red flags.

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

#223

Post by heaney-555 »

ghthor wrote: post #214
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 progra…

>use it with a cheap and fast model

Also try it with a frontier model though. With $20 for a one-month sub you can get a decent amount of GPT-6 Astra usage.

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

#224

Post by heaney-555 »

jmull wrote: post #197

> But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter. Seems like a fundamentally poor analogy. Software development is collaborative, not competitive.

Within a company it's collaborative. Between companies it's absolutely competitive.

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

#225

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#226

Post by magicalist »

ElProlactin wrote: post #210
sinuhe69 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Plenty of reasons, including: 1. They don't (yet) know how to use AI to accomplish what they need. 2. The ROI is still meaningfully positive and they don't want to have to do it themselves. 3. Having a third-party do the work provides protection for decision-makers. If the project fails, the third-party takes the b…

I mean they've boasted[1] about their generated code being so good that they add basically zero value and that they're riding out the rentseeking for as long as possible.

Meanwhile they've apparently played with LLM porting of Postgres (or Postgres features?) and "would not put it in production"[2], so we can also guess the kind and scope of features being discussed here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594498

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855951

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

#227

Post by tclancy »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #62
tclancy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a new theory as of this moment. Elon Musk, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge and now, sadly John Carmack. Your average hacker scoffs at the idea of religion or faith, but somehow is comfortable with complete unquestioning fealty to whichever person who did something interesting with technology in the past and made enough money to afford drugs you don’t get arrested for and then they started prophesying. Before you ston…

> Elon Musk, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge and now, sadly John Carmack. Your average hacker scoffs at the idea of religion or faith, but somehow is comfortable with complete unquestioning fealty to whichever person who did something interesting with technology in the past and made enough money to afford drugs you don’t get arrested for and then they started prophesying. Why do you characterize people you disagree with as…

I am not lumping everyone in, more observing we are still amplifying the signal from radio stations that should have ceased broadcasting years ago.

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

#228

Post by thih9 »

soundworlds wrote: post #46
thih9 wrote: post #45

> WorldEnder > Its just that, it used to be free. All I needed was a computer. https://xcancel.com/rustishard/status/2098853622263976328#m Same here. In particular regarding free as in freedom, so about access and control. Just like I never enjoyed working with proprietary coding platforms, OS, or IDEs, I’m not particularly excited about proprietary models.

Check out DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, just released, and I am enjoying it more than Claude. No one can run it locally.. Yet.. But give it a few years and I wouldn't be surprised if models of that capability were standard for programming laptops.

We don't know the training set so it's still not very transparent - and means giving away some control. Then again, it does look better than closed weights

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

#229

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

N_Lens wrote: post #178
skydhash wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For people without sufficient clarity I imagine it amplifies that lack of clarity, which is where it is factually unproductive while it still ‘seem’ to be productive Convenient way of saying "you're holding it wrong".

Yes, that's what I'm saying.

I get flamed here whenever I say it's a skill issue, but it absolutely is. Not everyone has what it takes to be a successful CTO but that's the role you play if have 20 agents working on something you designed. I see you got downvoted too.

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

#230

Post by watwut »

Razengan wrote: post #81
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…

> I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle? Does your ability to cook good food depend upon your ability to till soil and sow seeds? I don't mean that in ass way but re: what other comments said: > it feels like a rich getting richer scenario in all aspects of society Tha…

Some people are schooled in farming. Farming is not some kind of lost knowledge people dont practice anymore.
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