181–190 of 214 posts
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This already happened with Linux where people with no understanding of electrical engineering got jobs memorizing abstractions. I look forward to a data driven system future where a few functions transform the machines electromagnetic geometry to solve a task based upon the most efficient energy model for solving a task as we continue to compress from the model all the non-essential syntax sugar of modern software. h…
Could you elaborate?
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> explosion of DevOps bullshit The fact that somebody can "be DevOps" or work as a "DevOps Engineer" is exemplary of the fact that DevOps as conceived and DevOps as practiced are two very different things. The former would be engineers taking ownership of deployment, collaborating horizontally, and practicing tight feedback loops. DevOps as practiced is the time-honored tradition of a dev team and a cloud team playin…
The platonic ideal of DevOps is fine, yes. The problem I’ve consistently run into is there is a vanishingly small percentage of devs who want to do Ops, or even consider that a server with real constraints is running their code. Performance takes a backseat to DX, which AFAICT is code for “I don’t want to do anything but write code and push.” I should note that I think this is fine, if and only if you have specialist…
This is because many tech orgs judge performance by "business impact" and dev and infra teams have different value propositions.
A dev writing and shipping features conspicuously demonstrates value because they write things that users pay for. Product features are novel and specific to a business; a developer can write "Built an automatic cardinal grammeter synchronizer that generates $100M in ARR" on their resume. There is essentially no upper bound on the dollar value of their impact.
Infra teams, on the other hand, have no direct way of quantifying their work. Even though their job is very necessary it's difficult to move the needle as far as cashflow is concerned. People tend to consider infrastructure a commodity so it ends up being one of those things that's only noticed if it breaks. A good day on an ops team means no trouble, not more money. The cherry on top of the sundae is that more users is more money which means more prestige for developers whereas more users means more load which means more problems for the infra and ops teams to contend with.
This incentive structure is why many devs would rather spend all of their time slinging code than worrying about k8s cluster nodes or IAM roles.
As a jack-of-all-trades I don't think this a healthy dynamic. I've led infra teams and dev teams both and know what it looks like on each side of the fence - a little consideration goes a long way and it's one of many reasons why I think that it's healthy for everybody to do a bit of everything in a tech org. People are much less likely to "play defense" if they understand a team's motivations and don't anticipate a negative interaction.
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People keep saying this kind of thing, but sorry, it's nonsense. Many of my colleagues that I most admire are benefiting greatly and increasingly from LLM tooling.
LLM tooling is useful. I have been using it on a daily basis for at least a year. I am maybe 10-20% more productive at certain tasks in the long run (which is pretty good!). Nowhere close to to the 10x or even 2x boost people are claiming. If LLMS were really making software developers 10x more productive over the last year, we would be seeing massive shifts in the industry. In theory either 90% layoffs or 10x produc…
The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with. Gross. Also: you could have said this about the spreadsheet.
Meanwhile, > 88% of the Excel spreadsheets have errors https://www.cassotis.com/insights/88-of-the-excel-spreadshee... How many companies mismanaged their finances because they had an enthusiastic spreadsheet user in charge? From that article, we know a country did.
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Meanwhile, > 88% of the Excel spreadsheets have errors https://www.cassotis.com/insights/88-of-the-excel-spreadshee... How many companies mismanaged their finances because they had an enthusiastic spreadsheet user in charge? From that article, we know a country did.
I agree that all of this is madness, but to be fair, 100% of computer programs have bugs, so I don't think this is any more damning than systematizing all of humanity's processes with computers.
An Excel sheet made by NASA as part of their official space operations, to that rigor will probably have 0 problems ever. But compared to typical software, just consider this: Excel sheets do not have a culture of any kind of testing. If the output looks plausible, move on. Garbage in, garbage processing, garbage out.
AI slop has a similar but not exactly the same problem: It's highly, highly likely a human "reviewing" the generated code will just nod their head and not think critically/independently, just accepting all things that are superficially plausible. That may be fine for your webdev CRUD but I sure hope those people are never given credentials that can access anything critical.
> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new und…
I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI…
This is incredible you would say that because you'll never guess what it reads like.
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What's more likely A) all of this money being funneled into tech to build out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, a month over month increasing user base buying subscriptions for these llm services, every company buying seats for LLM because of the value that it provides - these people are wrong B) yappers on hackernews that claim they derive no productivity boost out of llms while showing absolutely nothin…
Honestly millions of nobodies buying a product from a tech company is basically proof it's nonsense, in my limited mind. Which one have they bought in droves that actually had a massive impact on you as a developer?
i've made two QA roles obsolete on my team already...there's more to come
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> A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the expertise of other people I honestly really don't understand why this would be the case. Software isn't more complicated than any of the other aspects of the business. I think a "reasonably smart" CEO could just .…
If you run a trucking company, or a retail business, or a food company, etc. I believe you can understand to a fairly detailed level the logistics and “secret sauce” involved that makes the business tick, even if you are not the core employees operating with the skills and expertise. But if you are a non-technical CEO and your core business is, say, enterprise SaaS software, you don’t fundamentally understand what th…
Why the hell not? It's not that hard! I think this sounds like laziness, honestly.
It is no harder to understand how your enterprise SaaS software works than it is to understand what makes your retail business or trucking company tick. If you're running a company in a business, I really think you should understand how the important pieces of your business work... Is that really so controversial?
People think LLM is magic but its just engineering and we should treat like so, it has flaws, can be improved and in the end many times is just a tool for a job. Not the tool for all the jobs.
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Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.
What's more likely A) all of this money being funneled into tech to build out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, a month over month increasing user base buying subscriptions for these llm services, every company buying seats for LLM because of the value that it provides - these people are wrong B) yappers on hackernews that claim they derive no productivity boost out of llms while showing absolutely nothin…
What is populist is rarely what is correct in this context.