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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#211

Post by znpy »

Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

> The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked.

I feel what you write, but then again: every now and then i write small greasmonkey scripts to remove annoyances from webpages, and to do so i have to look at the html and the kind of trash you describe is already there.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#212

Post by r_lee »

DarkTree wrote: post #59
sarreph wrote: post #18

I agree with the author that -- right now -- we're still in the part of the AI adoption / product development curve that it's an extreme force multiplier. I like to think of it as a normal distribution, the further away a programmer is to the right of the mean, the more their benefit. It's almost like it's their standard deviation squared (σ²). So someone like Matt Perry (as OP mentioned), who is a >99.99% programmer…

> How much longer is knowing what you're doing going to be a moat? To me, I don't see how this will ever not be an advantage. All software requires constraints. Some of those constraints might be objective (scale, performance, etc.) but a lot of them are subjective and require active decision making (architecture, UI, readability). So if there was only one way to do something or only one desired output, then yes I th…

> Now whether that is valued from a business/industry perspective is a question that I think we all know the answer to unfortunately.

sounds like "no moat" to me

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#213

Post by jmmv »

keybored wrote: post #98

> I want to talk a bit about AI and the related shifts in the tech industry. I know this is top-of-mind for lots of y’all, and you might be wondering if it even makes sense to learn new programming skills in this environment. Y’all sound the same: > Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth: AI models have become shockingly good at completing a wide variety of programming tasks. They’re certainly not perfect, but in ma…

> More Inevitabilism posting with the “not happy with” but is-what-it-is washing of your hands

OK so, _realistically_, what can you do that will make any meaningful difference?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#214

Post by QuercusMax »

hollowturtle wrote: post #164
akersten wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly a maintenance dead end. In the Tailwind thread the other day I was explicitly told that the intended experience of many frameworks is "write-only code" so maybe this is just the way of the future that we have to learn to embrace. Don't worry how it's all hooked u…

I'm pretty you wouldn't want the same for code that runs healthcare, banks or transport. Only useless shitty web projects could embrace what's you're saying. And no there's no "Claude review the code and improve it" magical formula

I work in the health software space and there are tons of internal tools which aren't production code that can benefit massively from throwaway "write-only code". Putting a web UI on top of a management CLI tool so support ops can run things without needing an oncall engineer can be a huge win. I recently built a testing UI that doubles a demo-scenario-setup tool. Is it well-engineered? Who cares - it pokes the right things into the database and runs the right backend tasks, and has helped me catch and fix dozens of real bugs in the UIs that customers see.

There is an enormous untapped market for crappy low-effort apps which previously weren't worth the time - but with the effort so low put together a simple dashboard or one-off tool it becomes much more attractive.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#215

Post by vb-8448 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71
vb-8448 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With enough time (and tokens), they'll eventually recover. It's essentially a "brute force" approach, but in most cases, they only need to succeed once.

> With enough time (and tokens), they'll eventually recover The article’s point is this is not true. They wind up in bullshit attractors where they hit a wall and then get lost within their muddled context window. > they only need to succeed once Yet they don’t. Not on their own. Like, you haven’t had an LLM get stuck in a stupid loop where you point out the flaw and then it gets unstuck?

In a ralph loop you start any iteration from scratch and feed the prompt with last X iterations in order to avoid getting stuck.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#216

Post by holoduke »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

Ai is a hammer. Use it right and it makes you very powerful. But it's not an easy tool.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#217

Post by bluejellybean »

genxy wrote: post #155
reactordev wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the juxtaposition the general public is in. They don’t have advanced tech skills to know any better so they see an output that they can’t produce from their skills and think it’s great. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What does the code look like?

Both had a working prototype. The flaw everyone is making is that they are over focusing on the artifact and not that they have a shared tangible object that they can both editorialize and iterate on. These systems should allow rapid iteration on discovery and thinking. One can now make a prototype a day that would have taken a week. That means that we should be able to converge on a much better design in the same am…

Road to hell is paved with a lot of 'shoulds' reality is a very different place filled with piles of trash and half baked ideas.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#218

Post by NiloCK »

simonw wrote: post #136
keybored wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t just quit the “career” that I’ve spent years building (for what else?). I’ll just fade somewhat gradually into unemployment, I imagine.

I firmly believe that your existing skills and experience are more valuable in a world where the AI tools can speed up the bit where you type the code.

It's great that you believe this, but are you hiring?

I don't intend this to read as pure snark, but someone's abstract value isn't much good to them if the job market itself can't / won't recognize it.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#219

Post by echelon »

miyoji wrote: post #197
simonw wrote: post #121

The more time I spend accelerating my work with AI tools the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually is. Sure, Claude Code and Codex can write (most of) the code for me - but the amount of technical knowledge I need to decide what and how to build remains enormous. As an example: I'm working on a system right now that works like Claude Artifacts, allowing custom HTML+JS apps…

> It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable. 1. Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I don't like finding the magic incantation that gets the machine to write the correct code. I don't like correcting the machine when it gets thi…

> Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code.

I'm your exact opposite.

I've felt like code is 1960's punch card tech my entire career. I've always wanted to do more.

So much of coding is plumbing. Or paying attention to tiny little details. Or hunting down stupid bugs. Or changing requirements and refactoring. That shit sucks. All of it.

I've never had so much fun with software. It's starting to feel like magic. And because we possess deep understanding, we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this.

The AST is not the objective. The finished product is. Our DNA is by all accounts filled with garbage. Let your feelings about code purity and sanctity go. It's the job to be done that matters.

Code is not holy. In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things. Treat it that way today. Means to an end.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#220

Post by techblueberry »

zephen wrote: post #205
techblueberry wrote: post #133

I had this observation talking to Claude one time. I forget the context exactly but I said something like: Me: Isn’t it crazy that X is better than Y. Claude: what an insightful critique, Y is better than X because of x, y, and z reasons. - And this answer from Claude was good. Thoughtful, well-reasoned. But it was opposite the point I wanted to make so I said : Me: “oh, you heard me say Y is better than X, I actuall…

It is a well-known trope that LLMs are prediction engines. But, to get the best out of them, you really have to consider what that means in the small. They are predicting, to a first order of approximation, what you want or expect them to answer. Its response to your first prompt is hilarious, because the LLM completely misunderstood you and based its prediction on what it thought you wrote. Its response to your seco…

Yeah I think this concerns me in two fronts and this specific tendency may be the line in the sand separating LLMs from AGI.

On the getting work done front, if what you’re trying to do is remotely subjective, than you really need to be sure you’re asking it the right thing and not expecting it to correct you and provide capital T truth.

On the social element. Like wow using it as a therapist or a mentor or to bounce ideas off of. What a huge trap if you expect it to correct you with a semblence of objective reality.

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