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The first 40 months of the AI era

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Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#121

Post by dyauspitr »

SloppyDrive wrote: post #114
dyauspitr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But 3 Indians + AI means they don’t need any of you at all. This won’t go well in the long run.

Perhaps in the long run there will be very few developers globally; but in the short term, I see less and less use for the whole idea of low-cost outsourcing. The historical value of a low cost region is get crap work for few dollars. "Just barely good enough". AI can do this by itself. If you add AI to poor work, you get more extremely shit work for less dollars. If you add AI to a skilled worker you get a large vol…

You pay just enough for slop, you get slop. There are plenty of very good developers in India who still cost a tenth of your salary. I think I know which choice the corporations are going to go with.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#122

Post by looshch »

oceanplexian wrote: post #22

> (The) Output was coherent but its ‘style’ was very boring and overtly inoffensive, which was (and still is) a clear limitation of the technology. The style isn’t a limit of the technology, it’s a limit of the lobotomized models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The open source community has lots of models that are great at creative writing.

> The open source community has lots of models that are great at creative writing.

would you mind sharing some examples please?

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#123

Post by pjmlp »

DrBazza wrote: post #102
theteapot wrote: post #35

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…

> better API documentation and conventional coding tools Agreed, and it depends on the language I suppose. I'm a C++ developer and when you start working with templates even at a non-casual level, the compiler errors due to either genuine syntactic errors or 'seems correct but the standard doesn't support' can be infuriatingly obtuse. The LLM 'just knows' the standard (kind of, all 2k pages), and can figure out and f…

Depends on which C++ we are talking about.

You can have the Kotlin experience with a mix of static asserts, constexpr and concepts.

C++ IDEs also offer many goodies which those that insist in using vi and emacs keep missing out.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#124

Post by layer8 »

raincole wrote: post #85
theteapot wrote: post #35

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…

> I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. Probably negligible. It's not a problem you can solve by pouring more money in. Evidence: configuration file format. I've never seen programmers who enjoy writing YAML. And pure JSON (without comments) is simply not a format should be written by…

Programmers don’t enjoy writing things they have no good understanding of, and no good way to ascertain or predict in advance, how exactly it will behave. That’s at least partly due to poor documentation. Good documentation gives you a reliable conceptual model and makes you confident about how to use a tool.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#125

Post by layer8 »

conception wrote: post #76
skydhash wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they shipped anything that people are using? The concerns are different and creating something usable by people is why software engineering exists.

I think that’s where software engineering is not quite getting what’s happening right now. People keep asking where are the apps?where all this great code? And the answer is becoming that people aren’t building apps to sell to other people. They’re building the apps that they themselves want to use. I’ve made dozens of apps that I have no interest in distributing or using outside of friends and family. The AI coding…

Only technically-minded people will do that. Most people won’t (almost no one in my extended family I can think of would), but those still need software.

The only way this will go pervasively mainstream is if AI gets so good that it can autonomously recognize what tools a user would find useful, and would create it for them without specific prompting. That will pretty much be AGI.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#126

Post by deadbabe »

Bombthecat wrote: post #120
senfiaj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think this is always the case. We get more powerful tools that do the same thing in 5th amount of time, now we are asked to do 5x more. Capitlalism.

Without this, we wouldn't had bigger apartments, houses etc.

There is a housing shortage.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#127

Post by RuslanL »

Rapzid wrote: post #78
theteapot wrote: post #35

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…

I feel like Google search results have gotten tremendously worse over the past 2 years too. It's almost like you have to use AI search to find anything useful now. Which of course reduces traffic to sites and thus the incentives to create the content you're looking for in the first place :(

Does anyone know which tool can be best used instead of Google for "classic", non-AI googling?

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#128

Post by flogy »

heavyset_go wrote: post #33
tkgally wrote: post #18

Nice observation about AI-generated content: > I’ve had the idea that from a social perspective it’d be regarded like plastic surgery, in that it only looks weird when its over-done, or done badly.

An important aspect of comparison is that nobody is going to tell you that your surgery is noticeable or looks bad. Your friends, family, partners, coworkers, aren't going to say anything, neither are people you meet casually, certainly not service workers, strangers aren't going to pull you aside to tell you the truth about your nose job, etc. I hope the same social taboo doesn't transfer over to AI content. We shou…

I like the idea of promoting honest feedback on AI-generated content socially. My experience, especially on LinkedIn, is not only that it might be some sort of social taboo to do so, but also that the algorithm kind of hinders it: if you post something and you get comments from people obviously using AI bots to comment on other posts, you could either ignore it and tell the person, or just accept the fact that it probably is AI-written and still write an answer as if it were not. The issue with the algorithm is that it rewards the latter.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#129

Post by xnx »

theteapot wrote: post #35

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…

I can't speak for your efficiency, but for me it's now often easier to create a tool than find if one exists and learn how to use it.

I was able to one-shot a parameterized SVG template creator for a laser cutter. Unlikely I could have achieved the same with 40 hours of pure focus.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#130

Post by ido »

RuslanL wrote: post #127
Rapzid wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Google search results have gotten tremendously worse over the past 2 years too. It's almost like you have to use AI search to find anything useful now. Which of course reduces traffic to sites and thus the incentives to create the content you're looking for in the first place :(

Does anyone know which tool can be best used instead of Google for "classic", non-AI googling?

Kagi
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