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Don't you mean extinct?

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#21

Post by skydhash »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #12
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

Just about every professional coding job I've ever had has had programmers eager to code more, complaining about how much rigmarole there is around making changes, complaining about constant meetings and endless bureaucracy around change management and requirements. Meanwhile business mostly saw programmer velocity and output as a problem and a business risk, as they struggled to keep up with the rate of change and k…

> My output sometimes rivals that of entire teams' I've been part of, mostly because I get to just code to my heart's content.

The fact is that often I code less than most of my peers. Because I prefer spending some time to design suitable data structures/algorithms for the problem at hand. I don't aim for perfection, just that it align with the business domain (and/or the interface) so that future works are proportional with the scope of change requests. This has reflected in small commits because the fundamental core of the business domain rarely changes (when they do, we have bigger problems than my writing speed).

So I've never seen the need to increase my writing speed, because there's never any need to do so. What I'd like to increase is the speed the Product team get back to me with answers to my questions. Because that's often the real bottleneck.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#22

Post by GolfPopper »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

Those who do not transform themselves into paperclip maximizers will become paperclips.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#23

Post by jonas21 »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

We have general expectations on the velocity an engineer should be able to work at. If it took someone 5 weeks to deliver the exact same feature another engineer could deliver in 1 week, that would be considered "falling behind" at most places. Would you disagree?

The notion of falling behind because you refuse to adopt an advance in the field seems both uncontroversial and not aggressive at all to me.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#24

Post by setheron »

I don't want to curate my own AGENTS file. I'd rather just copy someone else's verbatim similar to code formatting style.

Fabien, care to share your whole file? I'll plug it into my NixOS machine.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#25

Post by stickfigure »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

> Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what?

Customer meaningful features that move the needle on the business.

I think this is strictly true. And not because LLMs can write code faster. I think it's true even if you're still writing most of your code by hand and using the LLM as an assistant.

My anecdotal but decades-long observation is that most of the time=cost of a project comes not from writing code, but from dealing with "issues". Weird bugs, surprising behaviors, spec ambiguities, library defects, mysterious test failures, etc. Stuff that requires intense debugging and building out a mental map of code that might not even be yours. LLMs excel at this kind of thing, freeing you up to spend most of your time working on business logic.

This has certainly been my experience.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#26

Post by JodieBenitez »

tambourine_man wrote: post #17

Did Tippett enjoy working on the Dinosaur Input Device as much as he did with his go-motion technique? I see employability being discussed far more often than joy. If your motivation was selling as many clothes as possible, then the industrial textile revolution was miraculous. If you enjoyed knitting threads together, it was the crushing victory of mediocrity.

Some of my colleagues say they don't want to be "AI proofreaders", that they'd prefer to do something else. I can't really argue, they are entitled to their own desires of course. But I do enjoy the chat sessions with agents. It's like pair programming with superman.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#27

Post by bitwize »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

No, he is correct. LLMs have much larger working memories for the kind of details you work with in programming tasks. You are at an objective cognitive deficit by not taking advantage of this. Everybody knows what he means by left behind. When you program, you do so with a goal in mind, and you will not be able to reach that goal as quickly without LLMs. You will be outcompeted by those who use them, and this means that opportunities to contribute professionally, in open source, etc. will be closed to you.

This is the future. Adapt or die.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#28

Post by liveoneggs »

bitwize wrote: post #27
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

No, he is correct. LLMs have much larger working memories for the kind of details you work with in programming tasks. You are at an objective cognitive deficit by not taking advantage of this. Everybody knows what he means by left behind. When you program, you do so with a goal in mind, and you will not be able to reach that goal as quickly without LLMs. You will be outcompeted by those who use them, and this means t…

I use the 1M token opus claude for two days to build a dashboard and it forgets how to run the build script it wrote at the start of the project.

Man can it put together a react app lickety split, though

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#30

Post by saghm »

inglor_cz wrote: post #9
Krssst wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I dislike this kind of take so much. It keeps being repeated as a truthism and a way of putting down people that don't do what the speaker wants. It's fine to disagree, but there's no need to get such a threatening tone. A lot of tech jobs seem to be only about sheer output volume, with quality (maintenability, availability, security, generally understanding what the thing is doing) not mattering much. In that c…

My experience with regard to quality is quite the opposite. With LLM at my disposal, I had the time- and effort-budget to expand test suites considerably, I was even able to attack a somewhat thorny question of reproducible builds on MSVC, which is not exactly friendly towards determinism. These tasks would take me personally so much time that I would have to set them aside, at the cost of output quality.

Sure, but this is not at all uniform in how people use these tools any more than there was uniformity in how people balanced quality and speed before LLMs entered the picture. There was already a lot of variety in how some developers moved fast and broke things, others moved slow and fixed things, some would prototype new crazy ideas and others would spent time on the long tail of getting something from working adequately to being robust and polished.

This isn't to say that LLMs aren't impactful, but that there's an argument for viewing them less as being a fundamental shift in how our profession works and more as another tool we can use to pursue essentially the same goals more efficiently than before. Like any other tool that's worth having, they can do things our existing tools couldn't do as well, or else we wouldn't have added it to our toolbox, but you still need to be able to recognize when to use it and when not to (and potentially how to use it when you do).

I think that part of why these tools are so polarizing is that there was already some assymetry in how much longer it takes to clean up things than to create things that need to be cleaned up, so a new tool that makes everyone more productive has a lot of potential to exacerbate the existing imbalance. To make up some numbers for illustrative purposes, if someone introduced four new flaky tests in the time it took to fully diagnose and clean up one, and then LLMs came and made everybody twice as productive, now in the same amount of time someone might introduce eight flaky tests while you fixed two, so you're falling behind twice as fast. Unless the productivity gain disproportionately speeds up the people working on making things more robust and polished (which I find dubious; if anything I think the opposite seems more likely) or LLMs suddenly make everyone who didn't care about quality when rushing things out take it more seriously (which seems even more dubious), then LLMs don't improve the situation for people who already felt that the balance was slanted too heavily towards speed over quality.

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