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Eight more months of agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: Eight more months of agents

#171

Post by lapcat »

duggan wrote: post #135
matsemann wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the sentiments I don't quite grasp, though. Why can't they just learn the tools when they're stable? So far it's been sooo many changes in workflows, basically relearn the tools every three months. It's maybe a bit more stabilized the last year, but still one could spend an enormous amount of time twiddling with various models or tools, knowledge that someone else probably could learn quicker at a later…

Not the person you asked, but my interpretation of “left in the dust” here (not a phrasing I particularly agree with) would be the same way iOS development took off in the 2010s. There was a land rush to create apps. Basic stuff like the flash light, todo lists, etc, were created and found a huge audience. Development studios were established, people became very successful out of it. I think the same thing will happe…

I’m not sure your analogy is applicable here.

The introduction of the App Store did not increase developer productivity per se. If anything, it decreased developer productivity, because unless you were already already a Mac developer, you had to learn a programming language you've never used, Objective-C, (now it's largely Swift, but that's still mainly used only on Apple platforms) and a brand new Apple-specific API, so a lot of your previous programming expertise became obsolete on a new platform. What the App Store did that was valuable to developers was open up a new market and bring a bunch of new potential customers, iPhone users, indeed relatively wealthy customers willing to spend money on software.

What new market is brought by LLMs? They can produce as much source code as you like, but how exactly do you monetize that massive amount of source code? If anything, the value of source code and software products will drop as more is able to be produced rapidly.

The only new market I see is actually the developer tool market for LLM fans, essentially a circular market of LLM developers marketing to other LLM developers.

As far as the developer job market is concerned, it's painfully clear that companies are in a mass layoff mood. Whether that's due to LLMs, or whether LLMs are just the cover story, the result is the same. Developer compensation is not on the rise, unless you happen to be recruited by one of the LLM vendors themselves.

My impression is that from the developer perspective, LLMs are a scheme to transfer massive amounts of wealth from developers to the LLM vendors. And you can bet the prices for access to LLMs will go up, up, up over time as developers become hooked and demand increases. To me, the whole "OpenClaw" hype looks like a crowd of gamblers at a casino, putting coins in slot machines. One thing is for certain: the house always wins.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#172

Post by kjksf »

korallus wrote: post #157
baq wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good LLM wielders run in widening circles and get to the goal faster than good old school programmers running in a straight line

Then where is all this new and amazing software? If LLM can 10x or 100x someones output we should've seen an explosion of great software by now. One dude with an LLM should be able to write a browser fully capable of browsing the modern web or an OS from scratch in a year, right?

That's a silly bar to ask for.

Chrome took at least a thousand man years i.e. 100 people working for 10 years.

I'm lowballing here: it's likely way, way more.

If ai gives 10x speedup, to reproduce Chrome as it is today would require 1 person working for 100 years, 10 people working for 10 years or 100 people working for 1 year.

Clearly, unrealistic bar to meet.

If you want a concrete example: https://github.com/antirez/flux2.c

Creator of Redis started this project 3 weeks ago and use Claude Code to vibe code this.

It works, it's fast and the code quality is as high as I've ever seen a C code base. Easily 1% percentile of quality.

Look at this one-shotted working implementation of jpeg decoder: https://github.com/antirez/flux2.c/commit/a14b0ff5c3b74c7660...

Now, it takes a skilled person to guide Claude Code to generate this but I have zero doubts that this was done at least 5x-10x faster than Antirez writing the same code by hand.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#173

Post by webdevver »

>I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing.

The 'fear' is about losing ones livelihood and getting locked out of homeownership and financial security. its not complicated. life is actually largely determined by your access to capital, despite whatever fresh coping strategy the afflicted (and the afflicting) like to peddle.

the quality of life versus capital availability is very non-linear. there is a step-change around the $500k mark where you reach 'orbital velocity', where as long as you dont suffer severe misfortune or make mistakes, you will start accelerating upwards (albeit very slowly.)

under that line, you are constantly having to fight 'gravity'.

basically everyone in tech is openly or quietly aiming to get there, and LLMs have made that trek ever more precarious than before.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#174

Post by jfreds »

mono442 wrote: post #154
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people are absolutely going to get left in the dust. In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.

Using these tools comes down to basically just writing what you want in a natural language. I don't think it will be a problem to catch up if they need to.

Context management, plan mode versus agent mode, skills vs system prompt, all make a huge difference and all take some time to build intuition around.

Not all that hard to learn, but waiting for things to settle down assumes things are going to settle down. Are they? When?

Re: Eight more months of agents

#175

Post by jfreds »

match_condition wrote: post #127
baq wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good LLM wielders run in widening circles and get to the goal faster than good old school programmers running in a straight line

Ah, right, so it's a "skill issue" when GPT5.3 has no idea what is going on in a private use case.

Literally yes

Re: Eight more months of agents

#176

Post by mkvoid »

sdoering wrote: post #140
entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

Quite a few - and I know I am only speaking for myself - live on my different computers. I created a few CLI tools that make my life and that of my agent smoother sailing for information retrieval. I created, inspired by a blog post, a digital personal assistant, that really enables me to better juggle different work contexts as well as different projects within these work contexts. I created a platform for a virtual…

If you recall it, would you mind sharing the blog post that inspired the digital personal assistant?

Re: Eight more months of agents

#177

Post by rtcoms »

arrrg wrote: post #151
entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before). I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything. Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewh…

For m, I'm demotivated to work on many ideas thinking that anyone can easily copy it or OpenClaw/Nanobot will easily replicate 90% of that unctionality.

So now need to think of different kind of ideas, something on line of games that may take multiple iteration to get perfected.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#178

Post by CGamesPlay »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #106

> Pay through the nose for Opus or GPT-7.9-xhigh-with-cheese. Don't worry, it's only for a few years. > You have to turn off the sandbox, which means you have to provide your own sandbox. I have tried just about everything and I highly recommend: use a fresh VM. > I am extremely out of touch with anti-LLM arguments 'Just pay out the arse and run models without a sandbox or in some annoying VM just to see them fail. W…

In case you missed the several links, exe.dev is his startup which provides sandboxing for agents. So it makes sense he wants to get people used to paying for agents and in need of a good sandbox.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#179

Post by jryan49 »

jfreds wrote: post #174
mono442 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using these tools comes down to basically just writing what you want in a natural language. I don't think it will be a problem to catch up if they need to.

Context management, plan mode versus agent mode, skills vs system prompt, all make a huge difference and all take some time to build intuition around. Not all that hard to learn, but waiting for things to settle down assumes things are going to settle down. Are they? When?

Someone will package up all that intuition and skills and I imagine people won't have to do any of these things in future.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#180

Post by arghwhat »

entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

The real outcome is mostly a change in workflow and a reasonable increase in throughput. There might be a 10x or even 100x increase in creation of tiny tools or apps (yay to another 1000 budget assistant/egg timer/etc. apps on the app/play store), but hardly something one would notice.

To be honest, I think the surrounding paragraph lumps together all anti-AI sentiments.

For example, there is a big difference between "all AI output is slop" (which is objectively false) and "AI enables sloppy people to do sloppy work" (which is objectively true), and there's a whole spectrum.

What bugs me personally is not at all my own usage of these tools, but the increase in workload caused by other people using these tools to drown me in nonsensical garbage. In recent months, the extra workload has far exceeded my own productivity gains.

For the non-technical, imagine a hypochondriac using chatgpt to generate hundreds of pages of "health analysis" that they then hand to their doctor and expect a thorough read and opinion of, vs. the doctor using chatgpt for sparring on a particular issue.

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