You can see the fear all around this thread. And, tbh, it makes total sense.
There is nothing we can do to stop this dropping ball, we can accept it or leave the room but the industry has changed for all of us. I mean, you can use it one way or another but the concept of critical thinking is our only survival tool if your relaying on a it job this days. How long it will last? Who cares, we're fucked anyways...
Two kinds of AI users are emerging
231–240 of 358 posts
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#232The "upside" description: On the other you have a non-technical executive who's got his head round Claude Code and can run e.g. Python locally. I helped one recently almost one-shot converting a 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model to Python with Claude Code. Once the model is in Python, you effectively have a data science team in your pocket with Claude Code. You can easily run Monte Carlo simul…
I work in finance and we have prod excel spreadsheets. Those spreadsheets are versioned like code artifacts, with automated testing and everything. Converting them to real applications is a major part of the work the technology division does. They usually happen because some new and exciting line of business is started by a small team as a POC. Those teams don't get full technology backing, it would slow down the ear…
I too have seen such things.
My experience being they are an exception rather than the rule and many more businesses have sheets that tend further toward Heath Robinson than would be admitted in public.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Add this configuration variable for this entry point; split this class into two classes, one for each of the responsibilities that are currently crammed together; update the unit tests to reflect these changes, including splitting the tests for the old class into two different test classes; etc” Granted I'm way behind the curve, but is this not how actual engineers (and not influencers) are using it? I heavily micro…
You could hardly believe that this is how actual engineers are using it if you only browsed HN. Maybe HN is only influencers?
Maybe Anthropic has a social media team and internet forums like HN are easily manipulable?
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#234I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…
> The second group is one that thinks talking to a chatbot will replace senior developer No one is going to replace senior developers. But senior developer pay WILL decrease relative to its historical values.
Not really. If pay decreases it's because you're not required anymore or less, which is contrary to what has been shown. IF educating and enabling juniors etc. is not handled correctly, then senior pay will explode, because whilst they are much more efficient, their inherent knowledge is required to produce sustainable results.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#235I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…
I think you miss one third user. That's a developer generating entire systems and still have an understanding on the output. The dev person is in control of the architecture, code quality, functional quality and more. These persons are still rare. But I have seen them already. They are the new 10x developers.
I have been diving deeply in the Rust community and ecosystem and really enjoyed reading the decade of real engineering poor into it, from RFCs to std, critical crates such as serde, and testing practices. What a refreshing world.
Compared to the mess created by Node.js npm amateur engineers, it really shows who is 10x or 100x.
Outsourcing critical thinking to pattern matching and statistical prediction will make the haystacks even more unmanageable.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#236I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…
The same person might be both kinds of users, depending on the topic or just the time of the day
It's almost as if categorization is often an oversimplification.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#237> I helped one recently almost one-shot[3] converting a 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model to Python with Claude Code. I'm sure Claude Code will happily one-shot that conversion. It's also virtually guaranteed to have messed up vital parts of the original logic in the process.
To be fair, he said almost one-shot. It's like a CPU that's almost 100% reliable... in that it fails only once every 1 million clock cycles.
For a 4 GHz CPU that’s 4 failures a second..
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#238I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…
I started to outsource thinking at my job as my company made it very clear that they do not want/cant afford thinking engineers. Thinking requires time and they want to deliver quickly. So they cater towards the very realistic deadlines our PMs set for features (/s). Funnily enough the features have to be implemented ASAP according to the customers, but the customer feedback takes like 6 months due to them using the…
What do you really care? Its a job.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#239I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…
To me this misses a third group, those using these tools as a series of virtual teammates, a mock team member with which to ping pong possibilities. This is actually the greatest use case I see, and interact with.
To me, this is the first use case, depending on whether you're aware of its shortcomings or not.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#240I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…
What about the type of user that uses thinking/reasoning to produce more advanced tooling in order to outsource more and more of their thinking and skillsets to it? Because I myself and many others that I know fall into that category.