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Don't you mean extinct?

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Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#131

Post by My_Name »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #128
Chance-Device wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, also the whole motivated reasoning part, where people are quite reasonably terrified of losing their jobs and having no income and so deny the possibility. I think we tend to downplay the potential positives though. We may come to a point where we look back at the concept of work and see it as some kind of indentured servitude; the idea that you have to spent the majority of your waking hours serving someone els…

Such a utopian future is unlikely to materialize however. The salary that one gets paid is backed by the generated (and perceived) value of the work they did, and if people do not have anything to offer in form of labor, then it will create pressures to reduce any UBI style wages paid out, as well as provoke internal conflict as people try to come up with justifications for why they should have a larger share of said…

You seem to not know what UBI is. The U stands for Universal, meaning everyone gets the same. Universal Basic Income, a fixed amount of money everyone gets whether they work or not. Nobody gets 'a larger share'

Unlike work, where your wages are theoretically matched to your output, UBI is not.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#132

Post by wodenokoto »

ChiperSoft wrote: post #53

This analogy has layers that OP probably doesn't recognize. The film industry loves cgi because none of the digital vfx houses are unionized and they can treat the artists like crap. It severely devalued a ton of skilled labor around miniature and set design. Now, after 20 years of hard swing into cgi, people are starting to recognize just how much better movies from the practical era looked, and there is a push back…

Corridor crew just did a video on this animatronic controller, which they adored, both concept and lore.

They recreated one and had one of the stop motion guys from Jurassic park and another animator come visit and test it.

Their conclusion was that animating in blender with your mouse is still better, even though it was enjoyable to use the animatronic controller.

Their concept for the video was “look at this better way to animate that time forgot” and ended up concluding that “actually it isn’t better”

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#133

Post by strogonoff »

The argument that those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they “won’t be able to produce as much” hinges on more LoC being an objective good and typing speed being a bottleneck, which always struck me as a suspicious line of reasoning. In a well-thought-through architecture, you don’t need to type that much; add to that the observation that more LoC usually means more opportunity for error and the net effect suddenly becomes less obviously positive (and this ignoring other negative effects LLM-driven development might have on OSS ecosystem, such as GPL-washing).

Furthermore, when it does come to typing speed, good old non-LLM-powered autocomplete does still exist, and offers less opportunity for subtle errors within otherwise plausibly looking blocks of code.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#134

Post by bitwize »

overgard wrote: post #76
socalgal2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one does not require any death threats. It's a statement of where the world is going. Maybe you disagree. Come back to this thread in 3 year and see which POV was more correct. The * "LLMs suck, are stupid, I hate them, and I'm not using them" or * "LLMs are the future and if you don't adapt you'll left behind" I'm confident it's this 2nd option. Care to wager? People might be using hyperbole: "You'll be left be…

This whole you need to "adapt" to LLMs thing is bonkers to me, because there's practically no skill in using an LLM. It took me a weekend to learn how to use a coding harness, and the skill pretty much generalizes to all coding harnesses. The things that make me potentially good at using a coding harness are my preexisting engineering skills . I'm sorry, but I think if you believe that being on the cutting edge of kn…

> This whole you need to "adapt" to LLMs thing is bonkers to me, because there's practically no skill in using an LLM.

False. There was a person in this thread complaining about how the LLM forgot to run the build script it itself wrote. Yet people are effectively using LLMs to tackle highly complex, unusual work.

The existence of skill issues implies that skill is needed. This is THE skill that will separate the wheat from the chaff in a software engineering context. There's a reason why Steve Yegge said you're a bad engineer if you're writing code in an editor. It's because you've punted on developing the skillset that will make you vastly more effective.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#136

Post by My_Name »

overgard wrote: post #124
My_Name wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until this year, you would have been right, but in May, the Erdős unit-distance conjecture was disproven by an AI. This required novel thought and reasoning, not just recombining already known facts. The view that they are only statistical prediction machines is becoming increasingly disconnected from their current abilities. I probably should have put the word 'easily' before readable. After all, if it is valid code…

None of that changes that it's a statistical prediction machine. This isn't me speculating, it's just literally what it is. You can buy a book on how to implement one (I have one!) The fact that it solved a math problem doesn't change that, it just means it was trained on enough math to be able to apply a known technique. These things aren't magic. Also, I'm really suspicious of any result that comes from OpenAI. AFA…

You said "they reproduce what they're trained on"

The problem was unsolved, it solved it when it was not possible for it to be trained on the solution, therefore your other claim that "they're always going to produce the most "average" code" does not hold up, they can come up with better code than they were trained on precisely because they can apply known techniques to write better code than existed in their training data. The book you have is out of date and does not apply to recent improvements in the field.

The unit distance problem had no known answer and no roadmap. The model identified the problem, chose its own approach, and produced the proof.

I am not convinced by either your logic or your argument from incredulity. Neither prove your position.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#137

Post by jmcqk6 »

lnrd wrote: post #7

> Writing every line by hand is no longer the norm. Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much > It remains important to be able to read the code and understand the architecture. As a result, I reduce my velocity by iterating over my PR until it reaches the same level of quality I would have produced "by hand" I do that too and when I do it I'm not sure anymore if I'…

I've been thinking of it as a "conservation of cognition". there is some fundamental about of cognition that needs to be spent in order to keep things moving. LLMs do not reduce that, they only change it.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#138

Post by andrekandre »

nkrisc wrote: post #38
stickfigure wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? Customer meaningful features that move the needle on the business. I think this is strictly true. And not because LLMs can write code faster. I think it's true even if you're still writing most of your code by hand and using the LLM as an assistant. My anecdotal but decades-long observation is that most of the time=cost of a project comes not from writing code, but…

Realistically, has the volume of code that can be produced ever been the bottleneck? In every job I’ve ever had, it was never that the devs couldn’t write enough code fast enough, it was everything else that slowed them down, mostly other people.

n=1 but every job i've ever been at was time to code was like 10 or 15% of available time; its all the useless meetings/busywork caused by corporate structure and bad specs etc

llm's cant solve your organization issues...

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#139

Post by KronisLV »

WJW wrote: post #33
marginalia_nu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just about every professional coding job I've ever had has had programmers eager to code more, complaining about how much rigmarole there is around making changes, complaining about constant meetings and endless bureaucracy around change management and requirements. Meanwhile business mostly saw programmer velocity and output as a problem and a business risk, as they struggled to keep up with the rate of change and k…

> My output sometimes rivals that of entire teams' I've been part of That's not very hard with many of the teams I've seen, with or without LLMs. Though the old adage of "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together" still applies.

> If you want to go far, go together

Unless you encounter circumstances where it's death by committee (or something similarly bad), but overall I agree! It's just that you don't have the bad environment risk/problem when it's just you.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#140

Post by KronisLV »

DangitBobby wrote: post #35
liveoneggs wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the 1M token opus claude for two days to build a dashboard and it forgets how to run the build script it wrote at the start of the project. Man can it put together a react app lickety split, though

The Claude file, documentation, and memories you leave in the project are part of the harness. Most of Claude's forgetfulness can be eliminated with strategic placement of documentation. After you've got that figured out, you'll have to compact the session long before it forgets because it starts getting sloppy and slow at high context. With your guidance it will basically keep its own harness updated for you as the…

I'd suggest CLAUDE.md or README.md (and just write in CLAUDE.md that instructions are in README.md, if they're also supposed to be used by human devs) for scripts and other operative instructions.

Ideally also the PLAN MODE for any long form work within the same session, possibly with sub-agents or dynamic workflows to not pollute the main context too quickly.

It also has a memory mechanism but holy shit is it annoying when it saves meaningless stuff that quickly becomes outdated.

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