"I like fixing thorny bugs". Not me. Any tool that can get me to the solution faster is always welcome. IME, AI does well handling the boring parts.
AI is turning us into glue
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Re: AI is turning us into glue
#12On the plus side, at least when I'm old and not so mentally sharp, my personal AI can tell me when I'm being scammed or why the wifi isn't working.
Re: AI is turning us into glue
#13I’ve been having a different experience. Asking Claude to fix the bug again and again is annoying, so I’m still working on “pull pieces at a time, understanding each” so I do fix the bug myself when it’s faster to do so. In fact, the majority of times I’ve been using the LLM to build tiny libraries for me to avoid the need for the LLM in the running app. Kind of like StackOverflow on steroids. I don’t feel as the glue, but only having a superior tooling to get info I need fast.
Re: AI is turning us into glue
#14Really enjoyed this post. > Putting aside existential risks, I don't see a future where a lot of jobs don't cease to exist. I'm personally betting on the plateau effect with LLMs. There are two plateaus I see coming that will require humans to fix no matter what we do: 1. The LLMs themselves plateau. We're already seeing new models get worse, not better at writing code (e.g., Sonnet 3.5 seems to be better than 3.7 at…
On your second point - I don’t agree that humans in general will plateau. I think instead the _gap_ between humans who crave to create and learn, and those who are ostensibly potatoes, will be magnified.
I see it a bit like the creator economy, where you have these maker vs consumer tranches of people.
Re: AI is turning us into glue
#15Really enjoyed this post. > Putting aside existential risks, I don't see a future where a lot of jobs don't cease to exist. I'm personally betting on the plateau effect with LLMs. There are two plateaus I see coming that will require humans to fix no matter what we do: 1. The LLMs themselves plateau. We're already seeing new models get worse, not better at writing code (e.g., Sonnet 3.5 seems to be better than 3.7 at…
Reminds me of these stories (the Asimov one I've posted before):
- "Profession", by Isaac Asimov: http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio...
- "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi (the story of that title)
Re: AI is turning us into glue
#16"I like fixing thorny bugs". Not me. Any tool that can get me to the solution faster is always welcome. IME, AI does well handling the boring parts.
And both are valid. Some people like building new products and features, some would rather fix existing ones.
Re: AI is turning us into glue
#17AI is unlikely to take away jobs from software engineers. There’s no natural upper bound on the amount of software people can consume - unlike cars, food or houses. Software engineers ultimately are people with “will to build”. Just as hedge fund people have a “will to trade”. The code or tooling is just a means to an end.
Huh, I have the opposite feeling- that people already have most of the software they want a this point.
Think about your browsing history over the last year. You’ve probably consumed an obscene amount of React components, maybe millions.
Your car has way more code than a decade ago and so does your TV.
These things might make you miserable but it’s still “demand” in the economic sense of the term. It keeps developers employed.
Re: AI is turning us into glue
#18The "glue" comment here reflects a view from someone who does mostly software work. That's been the situation since mechanized production lines were first built. The job of the humans is not direct labor. It's to monitor the machinery, restart it, and fix it.
Power looms were probably the first devices like this. Somebody has to thread the loom, but then it mostly runs by itself.[1] Production lines with lots of stations will have shutdowns, where a drill bit broke or there's dirt on a lens or some consumable ran out. Exceptions are hard to automate, and factory design focuses on minimizing exceptions and bypassing stuck cells.
It's helpful to understand how a factory works when watching how software development is changing. There's commonality.
So the phrase "vibe coding" is only two months old.[2] How widespread will it be in two years?
Re: AI is turning us into glue
#19Really interesting that I have so far had hardly any use for code generators except when some glue was needed. Possibly this new revolution may be headed in multiple conflicting directions simultaneously?
Re: AI is turning us into glue
#20Hot take: we were already glue. We take in ideas / directives from product people and turn that into instructions for a computer to use to build a software package.
The only difference in a “vibe coding” world is that now these “instructions” that we pass to the computer are in English, not Java.