221–230 of 386 posts
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If the bunch of graphics cards becomes truly more efficient, business owners who want to hire humans will not be able to compete.
The rules are made by a consortium of business owners, if they didn't want it that way then it wouldn't be that way.
AI won't be put in important positions of responsibility within an organization because AI providers will never accept liability for bad decisions. You can't fire Claude if it fucks up, and it's got very limited ability to learn from its mistakes. It's also incapable of making good decisions where doing so requires synthesizing more than a few hundred thousand tokens worth of domain knowledge/experience in something…
What's the difference between "firing" Claude vs moving to a model from a different provider? The latter seems very analogous to firing an employee for performance and backfilling with someone new.
Re the rest, it's just not my experience that models become incapable of making good decisions in cases where input token count > the context window, but ymmv based on domain.
A very extreme example of this: a couple years ago when GPT 4 was state of the art and the 32K context variant was gated to design partners I worked at an EdTech company in the college admissions space that wanted to produce quarterly reports on student progress for parents. That involved crunching a LOT of data (multiple hours of meeting transcripts per week, very detailed notes about student activities, their general profile - UK and US admissions function very differently!)
It was a difficult problem, but we _did_ manage to produce these reports 4K output tokens at a time at a level of quality that exceeded what humans could do internally, and models+the surrounding tooling have only gotten better since then.
I work at a dev agency, most of our clients are start ups that need to go into the market quickly. We've used agentic development for about a year and a half now and our roles have changed drastically during that time. I can't speak to the volume of projects flowing in (as I do not know the exact numbers) but from what I can see all that has changed is the expectations for what can be delivered. And instead of 5 peop…
I agree with a lot that you say and notice similar trends in our work. I am a little skeptical about this one though: "You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things, so it's not like you need to rely on anyone else." One of the reasons for devs to work in company is not that they can't deliver the work themselves. It's that they don't have the connections to…
Being a sole-proprietorship means doing things you aren't skilled in and, most likely, not interested in doing. When I did it, I had a horrid work-life balance and I would not recommend it.
We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we becom…
Who would profit from such a company?
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Exactly. I see software engineering going the way of accounting or lawyer. Every business needs an accountant and a lawyer on hand. In the past, hiring one software engineer to build custom software for your small or midsized business was not worth it. What can one software engineer build? Maybe an MVP in a year? No chance it was worth it for the vast majority of businesses. Outside of corporations or tech companies,…
“ However, the top devs will earn more than ever. ” No they won’t. Productivity does not determine the wage rate.
Junior wages won’t change, and may even get lower.
But, at least at present, the top devs are earning more than ever as their skills are much more leveraged.
I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
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“ However, the top devs will earn more than ever. ” No they won’t. Productivity does not determine the wage rate.
curious as to why most top swe comp comes from equity in the company, which benefits from productivity not only that but the leveraged nature of swe means top performers are in perpetual shortage and low performers contribute negative productivity anecdotally weve seen comp rise as the best candidates have multiple competing offers as well as the freedom to start their own business
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TBF the anti-AI artists are insisting AI will never create great works of art. I disagree. But I do agree with Richard Sutton that it would need a reward function steering it towards a popular perception of great art, whatever that may be. I can approximate that with sampling and using my subjectivity to pick the ones I like most and then iterate on variants thereof until I am exhausted/satisfied. That's not the same…
AI is unlikely to ever create great works of art because art is not, and has never been just about technical excellence; it is fundamentally a human thing: one human communicating to another. Just even knowing that some art was AI produced is enough to not see it as great: there is no human story or experience behind it, no human context, etc. You can definitely appreciate it in the category of AI work, however. AI s…
Reverse centaur indeed.
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I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious. The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized soft…
> I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI People can't be bothered to cook for themselves, and often order crappy, unhealthy food that costs 10 times as much just so they don't have to cook. Now they're going to build their own software every time they think the…
In other words, when will we really see a transition from "yet another token generator" to something that appears to coherently observe, perceive, form intent, plan, and act in a way that is compatible with an existing, long-running human context?
(And, also, do this with enough determinism to be a viable product and not some gaping liability...)
We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we becom…
>e.g. front-end web development It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want. I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more ge…
Idk, I like AI when it works, but it drives me insane when it keeps making errors. I've had a few errors which I figured out from documentation fairly quickly, provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.
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I don't get this reasoning, and yet it is pervasive. Just because non-engineering people come up to you with apps they have created does not mean AI has or will replace software engineers. Consider: - I can read about my symptoms from Dr. Google, try a lifestyle change, herbal remedy, or over-the-counter drug, and that may actually work. This does not mean in the slightest that doctor are being made obsolete - I can…
I guess maybe it's your definition of 'software engineers' ; if you meant that to mean people who know what they are doing, then there is a massive gap. However if you mean people who are hired as software engineer/developer then it's already replacing many and will replace many more. Many of these are worth absolutely nothing and never have been. They survived because software was considered magic and they talk a lo…
Bad “software engineers” have always existed. That hasn’t changed.