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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

#131

Post by Summershard »

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…

We definitely must come from different cultures because I raised my eyebrow quite high reading your comment.

My family, close friends, and my partner will definitely tell me when I neglect or abuse my mental and physical health. This includes bad decisions about the way I look.

And every time they do this I am thankful to them, because they usually notice these things way sooner than I would have.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#132

Post by efromvt »

nunez wrote: post #79
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…

This is facts. All of this talk about putting agent skills directly into repos (as Markdown!) is maddening. "Where were LITERALLY ALL OF YOU whenever the topic of docs as code came up?" This is doubly maddening with NotebookLMs. They are becoming single sources of knowledge for large domains, which is great (except you can't just read the sources, which is very "We will read the Bible to you" energy), but, in the pas…

I've chose to embrace the silver lining where there is now business backing to prioritize all the devx/documentation work because it's easier to quantify the "value" because LLM sessions provide a much larger sample size than inconsistent new hire onboarding (which was also a one-time process, instead of per session).

I do think people are going way overboard with markdown though, and that'll be the new documentation debt. Needs to be relatively high level and pointers, not duplicate details; agents can parse code at scale much faster than humans.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#133

Post by sdevonoes »

All my colleagues that feel super productive pushing code written by LLMs share the same traits: they never really cared much about quality. And nowadays nobody wants to review their code/docs because it’s just painful. Heck, not even they are reviewing their supposedly own stuff. PRs with dozens of changes the author doesn’t even understand? Won’t touch that. An RFC of 30 pages of which the author didn’t write a single line? Won’t read that

And they write hundreds of MD files (for skills) that never break. No sense of accountability.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#135

Post by sdevonoes »

SloppyDrive wrote: post #60

The biggest positive I have seen is not so much in the new tools, but in new ways to convince the higher ups to do sensible things. We always find that small teams of locals can do much much more than a team with an unlimited number of low cost "developers". Not just because the competence of low cost devs is poor, but also the structure of how you work changes for the worse with a bigger team, for the worse with a d…

> So we have been able to argue things like add one local + ai is better than about 20-100 Indians

And you just say this like it’s nothing. Lack of respect to tons of Indian people who work in IT, of which I have had the pleasure to work with.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#136

Post by RHSman2 »

andai wrote: post #50
Hekkova wrote: post #39

I would agree with the utility of Claude and Claude Code. Claude feels like your own executive assistant, sales team and IT department. Combine that with Claude Code and you can build some incredible things. Myself as an example, I used Claude to advise me on starting a business and building a MVP. After a few weeks of refinement I was able to create something I never could have done without Claude. It is a game chan…

Several of my friends who don't know any programming are creating video games and music software with AI agents. Much of what they are doing is incomprehensible to me. I often find that being a programmer is actually holding me back in this regard, because I feel the need to understand everything the code is doing, as well as the specialized knowledge (e.g. the math involved in audio processing and sound effects). Wh…

Ai rewards the curious

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#137

Post by tracnar »

nunez wrote: post #79
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…

This is facts. All of this talk about putting agent skills directly into repos (as Markdown!) is maddening. "Where were LITERALLY ALL OF YOU whenever the topic of docs as code came up?" This is doubly maddening with NotebookLMs. They are becoming single sources of knowledge for large domains, which is great (except you can't just read the sources, which is very "We will read the Bible to you" energy), but, in the pas…

Haha indeed. At work suddenly documentation and APIs are important, but it's all for/behind "skills". Before it was always "sure, that would be nice"...

I do welcome the improvements to doc and APIs this brings though!

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#138

Post by calcpocket »

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 :(

I totally agree with you, this reduces the traffic to sites but also there were lots of website that information wasn't true or correct.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#139

Post by andai »

d675 wrote: post #77
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'm an early-mid career SDET/SRE. Currently building a full web app with rest AP integrations, looks great and works great. Lots of functionality, useful and being hardened all b/c of AI. It's going to be live with customers soon I hope. AI is not a feature of the product. GTM will be interesting, have some good ideas. It's really up to you to be clever. I've never used Js/Ts/node/these apis etc. I started programmin…

What is GTM? (Also had to google several of the other acronyms)

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#140

Post by andai »

sph wrote: post #109
andai wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several of my friends who don't know any programming are creating video games and music software with AI agents. Much of what they are doing is incomprehensible to me. I often find that being a programmer is actually holding me back in this regard, because I feel the need to understand everything the code is doing, as well as the specialized knowledge (e.g. the math involved in audio processing and sound effects). Wh…

> Several of my friends who don't know any programming are creating video games and music software with AI agents. I've seen a few live streams vibecoding video games on Twitch, and it was so hilariously bad and cringe-inducing I am back working on (hobby) game dev, my hopes restored, at least for the immediate future. I also like how that entire field, gamers and devs, compared to regular software engineering, is so…

>my hopes restored

What happened to your hope previously?

Did you get discouraged by the idea that it was now easier for other people to make games?

I'm curious about this anti-AI sentiment you're talking about in the games world. I'm not really part of any gamedev communities, but I did make some simple browser games myself, including a multiplayer game. (In early 2024 I was doing a game jam every week!)

I didn't use much AI at the time, maybe copy-pasted a few snippets from ChatGPT, and that really felt like cheating!

I'm getting back into game dev now, after becoming a lot more comfortable with AI programming tools. I haven't really used AI for game dev, but I imagine they'd be helpful with some aspects like debugging, and the usual code snippets (tab complete etc).

The games my friends are making are text-based, "choose your own adventure" type games (interactive fiction?), so it's pretty straightforward for LLMs. I don't imagine they'd do very well with realtime stuff though, at least not without very heavy hand holding.

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