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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#211

Post by danielbln »

overgard wrote: post #173
gip wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction: soon (e.g. a few years) the agents will be the one doing the exploration and building better ways to write code, build frameworks,... replacing open source. That being said software engineers will still be in the loop. But there will be far less of them. Just to add: this is only the prediction of someone who has a decent amount of information, not an expert or insider

I really doubt it. So far these things are good at remixing old ideas, not coming up with new ones.

Generally us humans come up with new things by remixing old ideas. Where else would they come from? We are synthesizing priors into something novel. If you break the problem space apart enough, I don't see why some LLM can't do the same.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#212

Post by joquarky »

overgard wrote: post #175
oxag3n wrote: post #32

> We're thinking about AI wrong. And this write up is not an exception. Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there’s 90% less demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a spectrum." So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in near future (6-12 months accor…

The funny thing is I think these things would work much better if they WEREN'T so insistent on the agentic thing. Like, I find in-IDE AI tools a lot more precise and I usually move just as fast as a TUI with a lot less rework. But Claude is CONSTANTLY pushing me to try to "one shot" a big feature while asking me for as little context as possible. I'd much rather it work with me as opposed to just wandering off and wr…

Tell it to ask clarifying questions.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#213

Post by danielbln »

ok_dad wrote: post #210
danielbln wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude Code released just over a year ago, agentic coding came into its own maybe in May or June of last year. Maybe give it a minute?

It’s been a minute and a half and I don’t see the evidence you can task an agent swarm to produce useful software without your input or review. I’ve seen a few experiments that failed, and I’ve seen manic garbage, but not yet anything useful outside of the agent operators imagination.

Agent swarms are what, a couple of months old? What are you even talking about. Yes, people/humans still drive this stuff, but if you think there isn't useful software out there that can be handily implemented with current gen agents that need very little or no review, then I don't know what to tell you, apart from "you're mistaken". And I say that as someone who uses three tools heavily but has otherwise no stake in them. The copium in this space is real. Everyone is special and irreplaceable, until another step change pushes them out.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#214

Post by 9rx »

danny_codes wrote: post #187
imiric wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs are replaced when new technology is able to produce an equivalent or better product that meets the demand, cheaper, faster, more reliably, etc. There is no evidence that the current generation of "AI" tools can do that for software. There is a whole lot of marketing propping up the valuations of "AI" companies, a large influx of new users pumping out supremely shoddy software, and a split in a minority of users…

I was with you till like a month ago. Now I’m not so sure..

Current generation "AI" has already largely solved cheaper, faster, and more reliable. But it hasn't figured out how to curb demand. So far, the more software we build, the more people want even more software. Much like is told in the lump of labor fallacy, it appears that there is no end to finding productive uses for software. And certainly that has been the "common wisdom" for at least the last couple of decades; that whole "software is eating the world" thing.

What changed in the last month that has you thinking that a demand wall is a real possibility?

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#215

Post by benreesman »

benreesman wrote: post #203
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

I'm rounding the corner on a ground's up reimplementation of `nix` in what is now about 34 hours of wall clock time, I have almost all of it on `wf-record`, I'll post a stream, but you can see the commit logs here: https://github.com/straylight-software/nix/tree/b7r6/correct... Everyone has the same ability to use OpenRouter, I have a new event loop based on `io_uring` with deterministic playbook modeled on the Trini…

And it's teachable.

Here's a colleague who is nearly done with a correct reimplementation of the OpenCode client/server API: https://github.com/straylight-software/weapon-server-hs

Here's another colleague with a Git forge that will always work and handle 100x what GitHub does per infrastructure dollar while including stacked diffs and Jujitsu support as native in about 4 days: https://github.com/straylight-software/strayforge

Here's another colleague and a replacement for Terraform that is well-typed in all cases and will never partially apply an infrastructure change in about 4 days: https://github.com/straylight-software/converge

Here's the last web framework I'll ever use: https://github.com/straylight-software/hydrogen

That's all *begun in the last 96 hours.

This is why: https://github.com/straylight-software/.github/blob/main/pro...

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#216

Post by jimbokun »

finnjohnsen2 wrote: post #56
DrewADesign wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amplified means more work done by fewer people. It doesn’t need to replace a single entire functional human being to do things like kill the demand for labor in dev, which in turn, will kill salaries.

I would disagree. Amplified meens me and you get more s** done. Unless there a limited amount of software we need to produce per year globally to keep everyone happy, then nobody wants more -- and we happen to be at that point right NOW this second. I think not. We can make more (in less time) and people will get more. This is the mental "glass half full" approach I think. Why not take this mental route instead? We d…

I do wonder though if we have about enough (or too much) software.

I hear people complaining about software being forced on them to do things they did just fine without software before, than people complaining about software they want that doesn’t exist.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#217

Post by jimbokun »

kiba wrote: post #62
finnjohnsen2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree. Amplified meens me and you get more s** done. Unless there a limited amount of software we need to produce per year globally to keep everyone happy, then nobody wants more -- and we happen to be at that point right NOW this second. I think not. We can make more (in less time) and people will get more. This is the mental "glass half full" approach I think. Why not take this mental route instead? We d…

Jevon's paradox means this is untrue because it means more work not less.

Jevon’s Paradox is an important observation but I don’t think it’s an immutable law of the universe,

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#218

Post by jimbokun »

emp17344 wrote: post #68
DrewADesign wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amplified means more work done by fewer people. It doesn’t need to replace a single entire functional human being to do things like kill the demand for labor in dev, which in turn, will kill salaries.

This is incorrect. It’s basic economics - technology that boosts productivity results in higher salaries and more jobs.

Nah, most of it just gets returned to capital holders.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#219

Post by jimbokun »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #30
m_ke wrote: post #4

It's the new underpaid employee that you're training to replace you. People need to understand that we have the technology to train models to do anything that you can do on a computer, only thing that's missing is the data. If you can record a human doing anything on a computer, we'll soon have a way to automate it

Sure, but do you want abundance of software, or scarcity? The price of having "star trek computers" is that people who work with computers have to adapt to the changes. Seems worth it?

It’s not worth it because we don’t have the Star Trek culture to go with it.

Given current political and business leadership across the world, we are headed to a dystopian hellscape and AI is speeding up the journey exponentially.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#220

Post by jimbokun »

overgard wrote: post #178
dwohnitmok wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not anymore. This benchmark is for LLM chess ability: https://github.com/lightnesscaster/Chess-LLM-Benchmark?tab=r... . LLMs are graded according to FIDE rules so e.g. two illegal moves in a game leads to an immediate loss. This benchmark doesn't have the latest models from the last two months, but Gemini 3 (with no tools) is already at 1750 - 1800 FIDE, which is approximately probably around 1900 - 2000 USCF (about…

They have literally every chess game in existence to train on, and they can't do better than 1800?

Why do you think they won’t continue to improve?
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