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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#141

Post by JumpCrisscross »

keybored wrote: post #134
simonw wrote: post #121

The more time I spend accelerating my work with AI tools the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually is. Sure, Claude Code and Codex can write (most of) the code for me - but the amount of technical knowledge I need to decide what and how to build remains enormous. As an example: I'm working on a system right now that works like Claude Artifacts, allowing custom HTML+JS apps…

I can’t just quit the “career” that I’ve spent years building (for what else?). I’ll just fade somewhat gradually into unemployment, I imagine.

> can’t just quit the “career” that I’ve spent years building

One, I think the talk about AI replacing developers is tripe. We’re still correcting the post-Covid hiring binge.

Two, even if that level is breached, I’d consider your skillset more broadly than what you can literally do right now. Organizing people and technical systems is hard. And the article highlights how that doesn’t seem to be something AI is focused on improving on right now. (Would take larger context windows. Which would make inference more expensive.)

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#142

Post by giancarlostoro »

ar_lan wrote: post #137
giancarlostoro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, have Claude review the code, tell it to be critical and that it needs to be easier to understand, follow Clean Code, SOLID principles and best practices. Lie to it, say you got this from a Junior developer, or "review it as if you were a Staff Level Engineer reviewing Junior code" the models can write better code, just nobody tells them to.

Why wouldn't Claude just impose this same loop in the code it writes - or better, write better code before it needs such review?

I assume it would involve wasting a lot more tokens reasoning about this. It is known that GPT uses less tokens than Claude, but Claude uses them to reason about problems more, which is part of its "secret sauce" and why so many swear by Claude Code.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#143

Post by reactordev »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

This is the juxtaposition the general public is in. They don’t have advanced tech skills to know any better so they see an output that they can’t produce from their skills and think it’s great. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What does the code look like?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#144

Post by giancarlostoro »

therouwboat wrote: post #135
giancarlostoro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, have Claude review the code, tell it to be critical and that it needs to be easier to understand, follow Clean Code, SOLID principles and best practices. Lie to it, say you got this from a Junior developer, or "review it as if you were a Staff Level Engineer reviewing Junior code" the models can write better code, just nobody tells them to.

Is this a joke? Smartest people on the planet never thought about telling AI to just write better code?

You forget that this all takes tokens from the model, so it has to be very stingy and whatever it comes up with "first" is what it goes with. I've seen people do the same as me, tell the model NOT TO GUESS but to do research first, which yields better output and saves time. Models today are better when they review the context directly, the focus shifted from it knowing everything in its training data to being able to dynamically learn new things and use that information in a meaningful way.

For example, I built up a programming language from scratch with Claude, it knows nuances about my languages syntax, and can write code in my language effectively. I did it mostly as a test. It definitely helped that my language is heavily mostly Python based.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#145

Post by y1n0 »

ar_lan wrote: post #137
giancarlostoro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, have Claude review the code, tell it to be critical and that it needs to be easier to understand, follow Clean Code, SOLID principles and best practices. Lie to it, say you got this from a Junior developer, or "review it as if you were a Staff Level Engineer reviewing Junior code" the models can write better code, just nobody tells them to.

Why wouldn't Claude just impose this same loop in the code it writes - or better, write better code before it needs such review?

Because language models don’t think before doing, they think by doing.

Maybe a more idealized training set could improve things, but at least for today’s SOTA, you have to get the shitty first draft out and then improve it.

Harnessing makes a difference, but it’s only shuffling around when and where the tokens get generated. It can trade being slower by doing a hidden first draft and only showing the output after doing a self review. But the models still need to generate it all explicitly.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#146

Post by albedoa »

akersten wrote: post #23
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

> The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly a maintenance dead end. In the Tailwind thread the other day I was explicitly told that the intended experience of many frameworks is "write-only code" so maybe this is just the way of the future that we have to learn to embrace. Don't worry how it's all hooked u…

I'm looking at that Tailwind thread. Do you really think that your comment here is a fair assessment of what you were told there? Come on now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166334

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#147

Post by zaphar »

muldvarp wrote: post #102
zaphar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly every argument that hinges on the word "yet" is just an example of over-extrapolation[0] at play. 0: https://www.fallacyfiles.org/overxtra.html

But saying "LLMs are not good at architecture so software engineering has a bright future" is _also_ extrapolation.

Anyone who claims to know the correct strategy to be best positioned for the future is lying or misinformed. The most you can reasonably say is that for the moment an LLM in the hand of an non-expert or naive user is unlikely to produce high quality results or create an absurd boost in productivity. We can make reasoned decisions now and continue to monitor things.

It would be just as unwise to ignore the progression of LLM agents as it would be to over-index on them.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#148

Post by simonw »

runarberg wrote: post #58
snide wrote: post #7

I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification. What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI…

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant This is a testable hypotheses with severe lack of citations. Intuition would argue the opposite. We learn by using our brains, if we offload the thinking to a machine and copy their output we don‘t learn. A child does not learn multiplication by using a calculator, and a language learner will not learn a new language by…

This seems to me like one of those things where people go into it with widely different initial assumptions.

1. AI is for cheating and doing the work for you. Obviously it won't help you learn faster because you won't have to do any thinking at all.

2. AI is an always-available question answering machine. It's like having a teaching assistant who you can ask about anything at any time. This means you can greatly accelerate the process of learning new things.

I'm in team 2, but given how many people are in team 1 (and may not even acknowledge team 2 as even being a possibility) I suspect there may be some core values or different-types-of-people factors at play here.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#149

Post by bluefirebrand »

xnx wrote: post #12

An "elephant in the room" is a big topic that no one is talking about. Everyone is talking about AI. Better headline: "Why AI Multiplies Developer Skills Rather Than Replacing Them"

The outcome is the same, though

Fewer developers required to achieve the same things means a lot of people are going to be unemployed

It also means that the people who remain will likely be paid less. Why would you pay a senior salary when you could pay a junior salary plus AI subscription and get "the same result"?

I think Software Devs are in for a rough time. I've been doing this for 15 years now, and I'm not looking forward to it. I'm honestly thinking about re-skilling to a different industry. Even if it pays less, it's probably worth it to sit out this shitshow.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#150

Post by neals »

Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

Very recognizable and hard to reason about! I did something similar, but while looking at the code, it looked so procedural, hardly abstract, no vision. How was I ever going to maintain this? I guess Ai will do it forever?
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