181–190 of 467 posts
Very good article. With regards to the guy being a designer, he is IMHO still correct with regards to layouts. Currently LLMs ares till pretty clueless about layouts. Also SWE is much more then coding. Even in the coding area there is much more room for improvement. The idea that you would not need Software Engineers soon, is brain dead.
Edit: in the context of SWE at least
"The best case scenario is that AI is just not as valuable as those who invest in it, make it, and sell it believe." This is the crux of the OP's argument, adding in that (in the meantime) the incumbents and/or bad actors will use it as a path to intensify their political and economic power. But to me the article fails to: (1) actually make the case that AI's not going to be 'valuable enough' which is a sweeping and…
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…
I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true. And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.
Your reasoning would be fine if there were a clear distinction, like between a microwave and a grill. What we actually have is a physical system (the brain) that somehow implements what we know as the only approximation of general intelligence and artificial systems of various architectures (mostly transformers) that are intended to capture the essence of general intelligence. We are not at the microwave and the gril…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.
It's time to jump on the train. I'm a cranky, old, embedded SWE and claude 4.5 is changing how I work. Before that I laughed off LLMs. They were trash. Claude still has issues, but damn, I think if I don't integrate it into my workflow I'll be out of work or relegated to work in QA or devops(where I'd likely be forced to use it). No, it's not going to write all your code for you. Yes your skills are still needed to d…
Claude 3.5 was actually where it could generate simple stuff. Progress kind of tapered off since tho, Claude is still best but Sonnet 4.5 is disappointing in that it does't fundamentally bring me more than 3.5 did it's just a bit better at execution - but I still can't delegate higher level problems to it.
Top tier models are sometimes surprisingly good but they take forever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All I see it doing, as a SWE, is limiting the speed at which my co-workers learn and worsening the quality of their output. Finally many are noticing this and using it less...
Your probably bosses think it's worth it if the outcome is getting rid of the whole host of y'all and replace you with AWS Elastic-SWE instances. Which is why it's imperative that you maximize AI usage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true. And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.
Your reasoning would be fine if there were a clear distinction, like between a microwave and a grill. What we actually have is a physical system (the brain) that somehow implements what we know as the only approximation of general intelligence and artificial systems of various architectures (mostly transformers) that are intended to capture the essence of general intelligence. We are not at the microwave and the gril…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your reasoning would be fine if there were a clear distinction, like between a microwave and a grill. What we actually have is a physical system (the brain) that somehow implements what we know as the only approximation of general intelligence and artificial systems of various architectures (mostly transformers) that are intended to capture the essence of general intelligence. We are not at the microwave and the gril…
It's a quick analogy, don't pick it apart. To other readers it's boring. It communicates his point fine.
The second part is boring. Advertisers are always pushy. It's their work. The interesting part is how much truth in their statements and it depends on the first part.