141–150 of 1001 posts
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
Same here, although hopefully won't be retiring soon. What's missing from this is that iconic phrase that all the AI fans love to use: "I'm just having fun!" This AI craze reminds me of a friend. He was always artistic but because of the way life goes he never really had opportunity to actively pursue art and drawing skills. When AI first came out, and specifically MidJourney he was super excited about it, used it a…
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
I echo another reply here, if anything my experience coding feels even more valuable now. It was never about writing the code—anyone can do that, students in college, junior engineers… Experience is being able to recognize crap code when you see it, recognizing blind alleys long before days or weeks are invested heading down them. Creating an elegant API, a well structured (and well-organized) framework… Keeping it a…
It's a lot of fun. I'm also an old timer. I think it's also somewhat addictive. I wonder if that's part of what's at play here. A coworker that never argues with you, is happy to do endless toil... sometimes messes up but sometimes blows your mind...
I'm not a SWE. I'm a mechanical engineer who spends his life in excel. So when I first made my own node editor app and then asked Claude to read that for my workflow in my second project.... I felt like God herself.
I have this idea that probably violates some law of computing but I am really stubborn to make it happen somehow. I want a game that generates its own mechanics on the fly using AI. Generates itself live. Infinite game with infinite content. Not like no mans sky where everything is painfully predictable and schematic to a fault. No. Something that generates a whole method of generating. Some kind of ultra flexible co…
Then you could open voting up to a community for a weekly mechanics-change vote (similar to that recent repo where public voting decided what the AI would do next), and AI will implement it with whatever changes it sees fit.
Honestly, without some dedicated human guidance and taste, it would probably be more of a novelty that eventually lost its shine.
But I have been haranguing Claude/Gemini to help me on an analog computer project for some months now that has sent me on a deep dive into op-amps and other electronics esoterica that I had previously only dabbled a bit in.
Along the way I've learned about relaxation oscillators, using PWM to multiply two voltages, integrating, voltage-following…
I could lean on electronics.stackexchange (where my Google searches often lead) but 1) I first have to know what I am even searching for and 2) even the EEs disagree on how to solve a problem (as you might expect) so I am still with no clear answer. Might as well trust a sometimes hallucinating LLM?
I guess I like the first point above the best—when the LLM just out of the blue (seemingly) suggests a PWM multiplier when I was thinking log/anti-log was the only way to multiply voltages. So I get to learn a new topology.
Or I'm focused on user-adjustable pots for setting machine voltages and the LLM suggests a chip with its own internal 2.45V reference that you can use to get specific voltages without burdening the user to dial it in, own a multimeter. So I get to learn about a chip I was unfamiliar with.
It just goes on an on.
(And, Mr. Eater, I only let the magic smoke out once so far, ha ha.)
“Oh shit, Hey Babe did you close my laptop?”
My not-very-technical friend as we returned home from a Sunday afternoon trip to the park with the kids to find his Claude Code session had been thwarted.
I’m a 13 year lurker, first time commenter (Not sure why this post compelled me). I don’t think this is a genuine take. I don’t see how a 60 year old has any kind of joy for actual software creation suddenly from llms. It might be a joy in seeing software automatically be created but it’s definitely not doing the work. (I may be biased, I left the field 5 years ago) I doubt he’s spending any time fixing the software…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Today every single software engineer has an extremely smart and experienced mentor available to them 24/7. They don't have to meet them for coffee once a month to ask basic questions. That said, I still feel strongly about mentorship though. It's just that you can spend your quality time with the busy person on higher-level things, like relationship building, rather than more basic questions.
How would this affect future generations of ... well anyone, when they have 24/7 access to extremely smart mentor who will find solution to pretty much any problem they might face? Can't just offload all the hard things to the AI and let your brain waste away. There's a reason brain is equated to a muscle - you have to actively use it to grow it (not physically in size, obviously).
But I can tell you that, just like with most things in life, this is yet another area where we are increasingly getting to do just the things we WANT to do (like think about code or features and have it appear, pixel pushing, smoothing out the actual UX, porting to faster languages) and not have to do things most people don't want to do, like drudgery (writing tests, formatting code, refactoring manually, updating documentation, manually moving tickets around like a caveman). Or to use a non tech example, having to spend hours fixing word document formatting.
So we're getting more spoiled. For example, kids have never waited for a table at a restaurant for more than 20 mins (which most people used to do all the time before abundant food delivery or reservation systems). Not that we ever enjoyed it, but learning to be bored, learning to not just get instant gratification is something that's happening all over in life.
Now it's happening even with work. So I honestly don't know how it'll affect society.