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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#161

Post by 7777332215 »

inanutshellus wrote: post #101
Thanemate wrote: post #84

Funnily enough I saw this post as I was placing my HN account on hiatus, because I'm tired pretending that the quality of discourse is on par with what I've been used to read and participate in. We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone…

Ok but if you're a person that likes HN discourse but thinks "eternal september" has happened ... what's your plan? You'll still come here, read the comments, see something engaging and want to reply and... feel sad because shakes fist at [datacenter] clouds it's all just bots talking to each other anyway. Seems lame. Keep talking anyway.

I thought the same as the person you replied to. For me, the solution is to stop coming here as often and instead read traditional literature.

Soon to remove my access entirely to this website.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#162

Post by oblio »

tasuki wrote: post #134
Supermancho wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

> I've worked for 35ish companies It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills. I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!

If you include consulting that could easily be 10 companies a year...

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#163

Post by ch4s3 »

xnorswap wrote: post #31
farfatched wrote: post #18

> The AI industry is 99% hype; a billion dollar industrial complex to put a price tag on creation. At this point if you believe AI is ‘just a tool’ you’re wilfully ignoring the harm. > (Regardless, why do I keep being told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I decide not to buy something?) > The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates. This sort of reasoning is why you might have been…

Yes, declaring AI to be 99% hype just turns away people like me from what the author has to say. I was an AI sceptic for a long time until toward the end of last year when I seriously evaluated them, and came to realise it could add tremendous value. When someone comes along and declares that it's all hype, it goes against my experience that it's getting things done. I can also see the harm it does, and I hope the to…

>If it had a generous built in HTTP cache, and instruction to maximise use of the cache, then it could avoid a lot of re-fetching of content, which would help reduce the harms.

While this is a great idea, the harms are somewhat overblown. The big scare number for water consumption includes water used in power generation which itself includes evaporation from hydroelectric power.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#164

Post by chasd00 »

alfanick wrote: post #111

I quit. The clankers won. I don't see any proof that software development is not dead. Software engineering is not, and it's much more than writing code, and it can be fun. But writing code is dead, there is no point of doing it if an LLM can output the same code 100x faster. Of course, architecture and operations stays in our hands (for now?). Initially I was very sceptic, first versions of ChatGPT or Claude were ra…

i think these are great for people who already are senior developers with years of coding experience. I can use claudecode and then walk through the output and spot fix small mistakes or notice when it's going in the wrong direction and prompt it to fix. I think people without years of development experience using these tools can really screw themselves. The problem is every new grad is going to use claudecode right from the start without a decade of hand coding to develop that wisdom.

on the other hand, i can't help but think about ASM coders lamenting C and especially C++. Also, god help you if you tell an embedded developer you use micropython instead of C. Maybe a current chapter is closing and a new one is beginning and my part was in the last chapter just like them.

i'll end with saying i really like using AI for code, it's got me excited about technology again. So many projects that were out of reach due to time ( i have a family + stressful career ) are now back on the table like when i was in college with nothing but time on my hands.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#165

Post by qsera »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #159
qsera wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is saying that it cannot do what you say now. What I am saying is that once the high quality training data runs out, it will drop in its capabilities pretty fast. That is how I compare it to perpetual motion mechanism scams. In the case of a perpetual motion machine, it appear that it will continue to run indefinitely. That is analogous to the impression that you have now. You feel that this will go on and on…

Why would the capabilities drop instead of stagnate?

Because technologies, programming languages, best practices, won't stay frozen. If LLMs cannot catch up with it, I think it can be considered as a drop in capability. No?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#166

Post by cyanydeez »

flir wrote: post #30
cyanydeez wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure all this AI is built on top of Silicon valley's technobabble of "permanent underclass" which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology. But besides that, it's interesting so many people are willing to tailor their entire workflow and product to indeterminate machines and business culture. I recommend everyone stop using these infernal clou…

I'm pretty sure the -as-a-service stage is only temporary. The local models are only going to get better, and the improvement curve has to top out eventually. Maybe the cloud models will still give you a few extra percentage points of performance, especially if they're based on data sets that aren't available to the public, but it won't make much difference on most tasks and the local models will have a lot of advant…

It's definitely not temporary from POV the billionaires trying to carve out a worker-free lifestyle.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#167

Post by mchaver »

oompydoompy74 wrote: post #71

Good lord I’m going to have to figure out some way to filter Hacker News. I’m so tired of this same sort of article (and the opposite) being posted every day. AI isn’t going away. AI is better than you think it is. AI is probably also worse than you think it is. The world has nuance, so can we please all chill?

These conversations can add to the nuance. Anyway, you can just vibe code the filter you want and be done with it.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#168

Post by [deleted] »

Supermancho wrote: post #91
simonw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

[deleted]

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#169

Post by MrDarcy »

pfisherman wrote: post #131
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

Not sure why this would catch heat rationally speaking. It is quite clear in a professional setting effective use of coding agents is the most important skill to develop as an individual developer.

It’s also the most important capability engineering orgs can be working on developing right now.

Software Engineering itself is being disrupted.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#170

Post by dasil003 »

mcdeltat wrote: post #143
pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

I think your argument is predicated on LLM coding tools providing significant benefit when used effectively. Personally I still think the answer is "not really" if you're doing any kind of interesting work that's not mostly boilerplate code writing all day.

Define interesting. In my experience most business logic is not innovative or difficult, but there are ways to do it well or ways to do it terribly. At the senior levels I feel 90% of the job is deciding the shape of what to build and what NOT to build. I find AI very useful in exploring and trying more things but it doesn’t really change the judgment part of the job.
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