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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

#271

Post by dofm »

ryandrake wrote: post #266
dofm wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eff…

I can add a data point for you: At my job they have made "amount of AI usage" a criteria for performance reviews, advancement and promotions. Mandate from the top: Use as much AI as you can. They even have a leaderboard (accessible to managers) showing who is using the most and least AI. It feels as though nobody even cares how good or bad a job I do, as long as I do it using AI.

That sounds completely miserable and Kafkaesque.

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

#272

Post by baq »

justonepost2 wrote: post #264
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…

in that case aren't you a completely useless middleman now?

The technical term is ‘meat proxy’

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

#273

Post by baq »

somenameforme wrote: post #221
dofm wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

Software is easy until it isn’t - the moment you need serious infra you’re in deep trouble and looking for an experienced partner or a saas solution anyway.

The days of b2b saas subscriptions doing one simple thing well for 3 or so users are however numbered.

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

#274

Post by dofm »

somenameforme wrote: post #270
dofm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am moving to somewhere cheaper, yes. Though since my passport is no longer strong (British), my choice/range of cheaper is a lot more limited. Quality of life will not improve, because I will be lonelier (plus I have a great quality of life here in other ways, that many places cannot match) but I am mostly reconciled to that loss. I will have a fair bit more flexibility in use of space, which means I can be a bit m…

I don't think you're being gloomy so much as realistic. It's clear a lot of people either don't realize what's already happened, or are in some sort of denial about it. What you're saying is entirely true and was almost certainly also true during past eras of revolutionary leaps in technology. Fortunately in current times we have far more options than we did in the past, but realizing those options takes a bit of adv…

I have taught/lectured the odd thing in my past and I can do it; I come from a family of teachers and it is in the blood.

I do not have the psychological constitution to teach kids so I am not going to do that.

But teaching/training adults is an industry that AI will destroy because the baseline income — the stuff nobody else wanted to do but you could earn from — will be eliminated, increasingly by policy directives from above. I have some ideas in that regard but it is difficult to see how I won't end up competing with LLMs when even open weights models are pretty good at coming up with tech tutorials etc.

Broadly I think there is undue optimism about what will be left to move to when the programming jobs dry up.

(Thank you for the discussion, though! I may sound quite negative but actually I am doing better than I have been for years, and it is always useful to provoke one's own thoughts)

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

#275

Post by neuroticnews25 »

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.

This comment frames it like he's a known vibecoder, is he?

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

#276

Post by dofm »

anonzzzies wrote: post #257
dofm wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The point is that button pushers currently simply don’t seem to be able to do this work, so it’s a little more than pushing some buttons. But no, I don’t think it will last very long, but few years more I guess looking at the competition and lack thereof.

What you describe does not sound all that much more than button pushing, TBH.

And your competition is not non-skilled people using AI to take your jobs. It is _cheaper people_ using AI to take your jobs. All the things that outsourcing teams used to struggle to match are much less of a struggle to match when you are actively depersonalising your own effort by handing it to Claude.

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

#277

Post by entrope »

dofm wrote: post #251
brandonmenc wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently tried to encourage my smart, technical, but not-programmer friend to build an app using LLMs and he was just like, "I still have no idea where to even start." People talk a lot about how "real programmers" used to have to clean up or actually deploy everyone's half-baked MS Access app, and that sort of thing will probably still be the case for a while.

> to clean up or actually deploy everyone's half-baked MS Access app So we are switching to LLMs to be fucking miserable in our jobs?

The whole point of the MS Access reference is that similar situations have been tropes since at least the 1990s. Bad code generated by someone who doesn't know how to program well -- whether that person is supposed to be a professional programmer but is incompetent, or has a different job -- is nothing new, and neither is having competent programmers clean it up. LLMs probably generate more of it, but can also fix a lot of it, or at least patch it up.

A year ago, LLMs were not useful for me as a programmer. Now they are: the models are better, they can use long contexts more effectively, and the harnesses are better at helping the models. Nowadays my job is mostly not programming, but LLMs let me organize and prepare tools in spare time rather than needing days or weeks of attention. I would not trust them on a 200k+ line project -- and Claude Opus 5 has issues even on 50k LOC projects -- but they absolutely can help given good direction and a narrow enough scope.

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

#278

Post by epihelix »

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…

> 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?

Because it's not (yet) that easy, especially if we're talking a complex and genuinely useful app. Agentic coding is fast, but it's not magic.

> I’m a critical user, not a categorical denier. But there are certain categories where I see the current AI face a wall: fitting new ideas, or existing code into an existing architecture particularly.

Exactly. Which is why Joe Average still will have little to no luck vibe coding anything serious or novel. You still (IME) need a lot of active guidance, still need to push away from dead ends and propose alternative algorithms, and it takes hundreds of prompts to go from concept to what I would consider beta. (But, this is just my own experience, and it's possible I'm doing it wrong?)

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

#279

Post by hgcfeccg »

jazzypants wrote: post #256
magicalist wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=4959…

It's a pretty bad sign when you need to resort to this kind of comment stalking to try to find ammunition for a general argument. This user could be a complete con man, and it still wouldn't invalidate the core thesis of LLMs providing business value.

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