191–200 of 800 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm definitely having a blast, but I agree with the author. You're not going to get left behind, the "getting left behind" rhetoric was just cryptocurrency pump-and-dumpers. It's fine to wait and not engage if you don't want to.
I agree with you, which is why I think it's a straw man. How many real devs are actually banging the "you're getting left behind!" drums?
Consider that.
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…
Sometimes it is better to get into things early because it will grow more complex as time goes on, so it will be easier to pick up early in its development. Consider the Web. In the early days, it was just HTML. That was easy to learn. From there on, it was simply a matter of picking up new skills as the environment changed. I'm not sure how I would deal with picking up web development if I started today.
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…
*I should qualify that "using" CC in the strict sense has no learning curve, but really getting the most out of it may take some time as you see its limitations. But it's not learning tech in the traditional sense.
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…
What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…
It also seems like skills with particular tech (prompt engineering, harnesses, mixture of experts set ups) doesn't always necessarily pay off when there's a sea change. Hard to predict what you'll want in a few years anyway, right?
If you test specific features of those solutions over time you see very inconsistent results, lots of lies, and seemingly stable solutions that one-shot well but suddenly experience behaviour changes due to tweaks on the backend. Tuesdays awesome agent stack that finally works is loading totally different on Thursday, and debugging is “oh, sorry, it’s better now” even when it isn’t. Compression, lies, and external hosting are a bad combo.
Sometimes I imagine a world where computers executed programs the same way each time. You could write some code once and run it a whole calendar month later with a predictable outcome. What a dream, we can hope I guess.
> weaponisation of FOMO This is in an excellent characterization of the kind of marketing tactic I see all over social media right now and that I find absolutely disgusting. The keyword here is fear . Despite faux-positive veneer, the messaging around certain technologies (especially GenAI) is clearly designed to induce anxiety and fear, rather than inspire genuine optimism or pique curiosity. This is significant, be…
With AI people are able to say 'this is nonsense' without people getting the pitchforks out.
As for myself, I don't have the bandwidth to learn how to do clever things with AI. I know you just have to write a prompt and it all happens by magic, but I have been burned quite badly.
First off, my elderly father got tricked out of all of his money and my mother's savings, which were intended for my niece, when she comes of age. It was an AI chatbot that did the deed. So no inheritance for me, cheers AI, didn't need it anyway!
Then there was the time I wanted to tidy up the fonts list on my Ubuntu computer. I just wanted to remove Urdu, Hebrew and however many other fonts that don't have any use for me. So I asked Google and just copied and pasted the Gemini suggestion. Gemini specified command line options so that you could not review the changes, but the text said 'use this as you can review changes'. I thought the '-y' looked off, but I just wanted to do some drawing and was not really thinking. So I typed in the AI suggestion. It then began to remove all the fonts and the window manager, and the apps. It might as well have suggested 'sudo rm -fr /'.
This was my wakeup call. I am sure an AI evangelist could blame me for being stupid, which I freely admit to. However, as a clueless idiot, I have been copying and pasting from Stack Overflow for aeons, to never be tricked into destroying all my work.
My compromise is to allow some fun with cat pictures, featuring my uncle's cat, with Google Banana. This allows me to have a toe in the water.
Recently I went on a course with lots of people with few of them being great intellects. I was amazed at how popular AI was with people that have no background in coding. They have collectively outsourced their critical thinking to AI.
I did not feel the FOMO. However, I am old enough to remember when Word came out. I was at university at the time and some of my coursemates were using it. I had genuine FOMO then. What is this Word tool? I was intimidated that I had this to learn on top of my studies. In time I did fire up Word, to find that there was nothing to learn of note, apart from 'styles', which few use to this day, preferring to highlight text and making it bold or biglier. I haven't used a word processor in decades, however, it was a useful tool for a long time.
Looking back, I could have skipped learning how to use a word processor, to stick to vi, latex and ghostscript until email became the way. But, for its time, it was the tool. AI is a bit like that, for some disciplines, you can choose to do it the hard way, using your own brain, or use the new tools. However, I have been badly burned, so I am waiting it out.
I am actually surprised by people willingly trying to be more productive, like... machines. And then crying when machines are proven to be better at being machines than meatbags.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But will companies start hiring again? Anecdata, but the few people I know who were looking to switch gigs all had multiple offers within a few weeks. One thing they all had in common was taking a very targeted approach with their search and leveraging their networks. Not spamming thousands of resumes into the ether.
so you either are well connected or you starve, got it guess it's death and destitute for introverts edit: please explain the downvotes, i'm curious why you think i'm wrong if what op says it's true, that today only networking works, then it easily follows that if for some reasons you do not have a network then you don't get hired
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. In contrast to the current top comment [1], I don't think this is a wise assessment. I'm already seeing companies in my network stall hiring, and in fact start firing. I think if you're not trying to take advantage of this technology today then there may not be a place for you tomor…
> I find it hard to empathise with people who can't get value out of AI. It feels like they must be in a completely different bubble to me. I think it depends on why you do programming. I like programming for its own sake. I enjoy understanding a complex system, figuring out how to make change to it, how to express that change within the language and existing code structure, how to effectively test it, etc. I activel…
Unfortunately that doesn't change my outlook on where all this is headed.
To me the main question is the long term pricing. It is said that major providers more than break even on what they're charging. But at the same time that's not the point of capitalism, is it? The point is to charge close to the value you're providing. My lunch money is approximately $10 and I often blow through as much in Claude tokens generously provided by the company which hired me. But I'm not getting $10 value…