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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#221

Post by alfiedotwtf »

SoftTalker wrote: post #132
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“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.

> I'm not using LLMs at all

You’re deliberately disadvantaging yourself by a mile. Give it a go

… the first one’s free ;)

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#222

Post by jstanley »

muldvarp wrote: post #60
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“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…

> IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. How are we building _for_ ourselves when we literally automate away our jobs? This is probably one of the _worst_ things someone could do to me.

This is kind of a myopic view of what it means to be a programmer.

If you're just in it to collect a salary, then yeah, maybe you do benefit from delivering the minimum possible productivity that won't get you fired.

But if you like making computers do things, and you get joy from making computers do more and new things, then LLMs that can write programs are a fantastic gift.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#223

Post by dr_dshiv »

morshu9001 wrote: post #154
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“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…

Yeah, I'll gladly AI-gen code, but I still write docs by hand. Have yet to see one good AI generated doc, they're all garbage.

Agree. I also wonder whether this helps account for why some people get great value from AI and some terrible value.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#224

Post by morshu9001 »

kakacik wrote: post #213
friendzis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment your code departs from typical patterns in the training set or ("agentic environment") LLMs fall over at best (i.e. can't even find the thing) or do some random nonsense at worst. IMO LLMs are still at the point where they require significant handholding, showing what exactly to do, exactly where. Otherwise, it's constant review of random application of different random patterns, which may or may not satis…

A contrarian opinion - I also didn't jump the train yet, its even forbidden in our part of company due to various regulations re data secrecy and generally slow adoption. Also - for most seasoned developers, actual dev activity is miniscule part of overall efforts. If you are churning code like some sweatshop every single day at say 45 its by your own choice, you don't want to progress in career or career didn't push…

There have been times when something was very important and my ability to churn out quick proof of concept code (pre AI) made the difference. It has catapulted me. I thought talking was all-important, but turns out, there's already too much talk and not enough action in these working groups.

So now with AI, that's even quicker. And I can do it more easily during the half relevant part of meetings, which I have a lot more of nowadays. When I have real time to sit and code, I focus on the hardest and most interesting parts, which the AI can't do.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#225

Post by friendzis »

kakacik wrote: post #213
friendzis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment your code departs from typical patterns in the training set or ("agentic environment") LLMs fall over at best (i.e. can't even find the thing) or do some random nonsense at worst. IMO LLMs are still at the point where they require significant handholding, showing what exactly to do, exactly where. Otherwise, it's constant review of random application of different random patterns, which may or may not satis…

A contrarian opinion - I also didn't jump the train yet, its even forbidden in our part of company due to various regulations re data secrecy and generally slow adoption. Also - for most seasoned developers, actual dev activity is miniscule part of overall efforts. If you are churning code like some sweatshop every single day at say 45 its by your own choice, you don't want to progress in career or career didn't push…

> What I want to say - that miniscule part of the day when I actually get my hands on the code are the best.

And if you are not "churning code like some sweatshop every single day" those hours are not "hey, let's bang out something cool!", it's more like "here are 5 reasons we can't do the cool thing, young padawan".

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#226

Post by fnord123 »

jibal wrote: post #153
bawolff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. I think you should say succesful "general purpose technologies". What you describe is what happens when things work out. Sometimes things stall at step 1, and the technol…

Yeah, that comment is heavy on survivor bias. The universal theme is that things go the way they go.

This is why TFA used Segway as an example.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#227

Post by [deleted] »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #178
code51 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised these pockets of job security still exist. Know this: someone is coming after this already. One day someone from management will hear about a cost-saving story at a dinner table, the words GPT, Cursor, Antigravity, reasoning, AGI will cause a buzzing in her ear. Waking up with tinnitus the next morning, they'll instantly schedule a 1:1 to discuss "the degree of AI use and automation"

> Know this: someone is coming after this already. Yesterday, GitHub Copilot declared that my less-AI-weary friend’s new Laravel project was following all industry best-practices for database design as it storing entities as denormalized JSON blobs in a MySQL 8.x database with no FKs, indexes, constraints, all NULL columns (and using root@mysql as the login, of course); while all Laravel controller actions’ DB querie…

[deleted]

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#228

Post by HPsquared »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #127

AI is not overhyped. It's like saying going to the moon is overhyped. First of all this AI stuff is next level. It's as great, if not greater than going to space or going to the moon. Second the rate at which is improving makes it such that the hype is relevant and realistic. I think what's throwing people off are two things. First people are just over exposed to AI. So the overexposure is causing people to feel AI i…

The Nixon shock same soon after the moon and space euphoria ended.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#229

Post by simianwords »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #91

I'd like more people to talk about AI and surveillance. I think that is going to be one of it's biggest impacts on society(ies). We are a decade or two in to having massive video coverage, such that you are probably on someone's camera much of your day in the world, and video feeds that are increasingly cloud hosted. But nobody could possibly watch all that video. Even cameras specifically controlled by the police, i…

I find it truly strange that people hold both positions simultaneously

- AI is good enough to do "bad" things as to scare us

- AI is also bad enough to do "good" things as to be undesireable otherwise

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#230

Post by lbreakjai »

lomase wrote: post #205
bluefirebrand wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Productivity gains are real in current form of LLM I haven't found that to be true I'm of the opinion that anyone who is impressed by the code these things produce is a hack

I just started a project, they fired the previous team, I am possitive they used AI. The app is full of bugs and the client will never hire the old company again. Whoever says is time to move to LLMS is clueless.

Humans are very capable of creating bugs. This in itself is not a tell.
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