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OpenClaw is changing my life

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Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#271

Post by natch »

escapecharacter wrote: post #90
meindnoch wrote: post #57

These are the same people who a few years ago made blogposts about their elaborate Notion (or Roam "Research") setups, and how it catalyzed them to... *checks notes* create blogposts about their elaborate Notion setups!

I’m working on a product related to “sensemaking”. And I’m using this abstract, academic term on purpose to highlight the emotional experience, rather than “analysis” or “understanding”. It is a constant lure products and tools have to create the feeling of sensemaking. People want (pejorative) tools that show visualizations or summaries, without thinking about the particular visual/summary artifact is useful, action…

Fascinating. If you're not aware of Jesse Schell's book on game design, even if your work is unrelated to games, I highly recommend taking a look. Would love to hear more about your work / product.

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#272

Post by port11 »

glaslong wrote: post #227
mancerayder wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you get bored with spending many years learning and becoming advanced or an expert in a system paradigm (like different hosting systems), a programming language (i.e. Perl), or a framework (pick your JS framework), only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later? And then in a job interview, when you try to sell yourself on your wisdom as expert on thing X, new to Y, they dismiss you because the 25 year…

N=1 but I do love constantly learning new things, and building small, purposeful, tailored products with small groups of people. I've gone back and forth across the lead and management lines many times now, and it is career limiting in many many ways. But it's too fulfilling to give up. And I swear there is magic in what small, expert groups are able to produce that laps large org on the regular.

From my (limited) experience, that magic is incredibly linked to autonomy and ownership.

Some research around British government workers found higher job satisfaction in units with hands-off managers. It resonates with my own career. I’m really excited and want to go to work when I’m on a small, autonomous team with little red tape and politics. Larger orgs simply can’t — or haven’t — ever offered me the same feeling; with some exceptions in Big 3 consulting if I was the expert on a case.

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#274

Post by MrJohz »

mancerayder wrote: post #237
glaslong wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N=1 but I do love constantly learning new things, and building small, purposeful, tailored products with small groups of people. I've gone back and forth across the lead and management lines many times now, and it is career limiting in many many ways. But it's too fulfilling to give up. And I swear there is magic in what small, expert groups are able to produce that laps large org on the regular.

isn't that more a question of company size and industry (i.e. less regulated than healthcare and financial services) than whether management is good or bad? I don't see why it contradicts my little rant above. Of course I also prefer small, nimble teams with lots of autonomy, with individuals who thrive being delegated only extremely broad tasks. The only part where I think there's a difference is the constantly lear…

I don't think having to practice at home and at weekends is necessarily a part of engineering though. Every place I've worked at, there have been ample opportunities to keep up-to-date on paid hours, be that in conferences, learning materials, trying out side projects or weird ideas in more niche technologies, etc.

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#275

Post by themafia »

i-blis wrote: post #165

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue. Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving…

Engineering, to me, is simply "the art of compromise."

You can't do that from a high level abstract position. You actually need to stand at the coal face and think about it from time to time.

This article encodes an entitled laziness that's destructive to personal skill and quality work.

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#276

Post by cmiles74 »

mancerayder wrote: post #206
i-blis wrote: post #165

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue. Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving…

Don't you get bored with spending many years learning and becoming advanced or an expert in a system paradigm (like different hosting systems), a programming language (i.e. Perl), or a framework (pick your JS framework), only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later? And then in a job interview, when you try to sell yourself on your wisdom as expert on thing X, new to Y, they dismiss you because the 25 year…

In my opinion, time spent learning Perl or an outmoded framework still helped me learn new things and stretch myself. A lot of that knowledge is transferable to other languages or frameworks. After learning QuickBasic and REXX it was pretty easy to pickup Ruby and Python. ;-)

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#277

Post by roncesvalles »

mancerayder wrote: post #206
i-blis wrote: post #165

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue. Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving…

Don't you get bored with spending many years learning and becoming advanced or an expert in a system paradigm (like different hosting systems), a programming language (i.e. Perl), or a framework (pick your JS framework), only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later? And then in a job interview, when you try to sell yourself on your wisdom as expert on thing X, new to Y, they dismiss you because the 25 year…

>only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later

Almost nothing goes obsolete in software; it just becomes unpopular. You can still write every website you see on the Internet with just jQuery. There are perfectly functional HTTP frameworks for Cobol.

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#278

Post by andai »

mettamage wrote: post #197
Maxion wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of more senior coders when they actively try vibe coding a greenfield project find that it does actually work. But only for the first ~10kloc. After that the AI, no matter how well you try to prompt it, will start to destroy existing features accidentally, will add unnecessary convoluted logic to the code, will leave benhind dead code, add random traces "for backwards compatibility", will avoid doing the correc…

I wonder if you can up the 10kloc if you have a good static analysis of your tool (I vibecoded one in Python) and good tests. Sometimes good tests aren't possible since there are too many different cases but with other forms of codes you can cover all the cases with like 50 to 100 tests or so

Could you elaborate on the static analysis?

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#279

Post by meetingthrower »

Nextgrid wrote: post #44
alpineman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right, but on the other hand once you have a basic understanding security, architecture, etc you can prompt around these issues. You need a couple of years of experience but that’s far less then the 10-15 years of experience you needed in the past. If you spend a couple of years with an LLM really watching and understanding what it’s doing and learning from mistakes, then you can get up the ladder very quickly…

I find that security, architecture, etc is exactly the kind of skill that takes 10-15 years to hone. Every boot camp, training provider, educational foundation, etc has an incentive to find a shortcut and we're yet to see one. A "basic" understanding in critical domains is extremely dangerous and an LLM will often give you a false sense of security that things are going fine while overlooking potential massive securi…

But if you are not saving "privileged" information who cares? I mean think of all the WordPress sites out there. Surely vibecoding is not SO much worse than some plugin monstrosity.... At the end of the day if you are not saving user info, or special sauce for your company, it's no issue. And I bet a huge portion of apps fall into this category...

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#280

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

I am currently in the process of setting up a local development environment to automate all my programming tasks (dev, test, qa, deploy, debug, etc; for android, ios, mac, windows, linux). It's a serious amount of effort, and a lot of complexity! I could probably move faster if I used AI to set it all up for me rather than setting it up myself. But there's significant danger there in letting an AI "do whatever it wants" on my machine that I'm not willing to accept yet, so the cost of safety is slowness in getting my environment finished.

I feel like there's this "secret" hiding behind all these AI tools, that actually it's all very complicated and takes a lot of effort to make work, but the tools we're given hides it all. It's nice that we benefit from its simplicity of use. But hiding complexity leads to unexpected problems, and I'm not sure we've seen any of those yet - other than the massive, gaping security hole.

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