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Grief and the AI split

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#281

Post by skydhash »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #217
bandrami wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. My aversion to LLMs is much more that I have low risk tolerance and the tails of the distribution are not well-known at this point. I'm more than happy to let others step on the land mines for me and see if there's better understanding in a year or two.

I think there is more to it than that. I am a high quality/craftsmanship person. I like coding and puzzling. I am highly skilled in functional leaning object oriented deconstruction and systems design. I'm also pretty risk averse. I also have always believed that you should always be "sharpening your axe". For things like Java delelopment or things where I couldn't use a concise syntax would make extensive use of dyn…

> I'm looking at (or now debating with the AI) what is the best algorithm for something.

That line always makes me laugh. There’s only 2 points of an algorithm, domain correctness and technical performance. For the first, you need to step out of the code. And for the second you need proofs. Not sure what is there to debate about.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#282

Post by discreteevent »

simonw wrote: post #160
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see developers talking about this idea of intense and unimaginable excitement about AI. It seems orgasmic for them, like something the hardest drugs couldn't fulfill them. I find it very strange. What exactly is so exciting? I'm not disagreeing but when you say "opportunities I'm racing towards," what does that mean? This idea of "racing towards" sounds so frenetic, I struggle to know what that could mean? What I s…

Getting a 53% performance boost on a 20+ year old codebase by running a bunch of experiments is pretty exciting to me: https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/pull/2056

Developers make these kinds of improvements all the time. Are you saying that it would have been impossible without AI?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#283

Post by [deleted] »

wiseowise wrote: post #225
simianwords wrote: post #194

The split is about people who care about the commerce behind software development vs people who care about the craft. Commerce camp understands tradeoffs needed in a competitive environment. Cutting corners where possible, not being dogmatic about unit tests and clean code an so on. If you notice - the craft people rarely think about commerce because coding is an artistic expression.

Your generalization are as useful as me saying that people in the first camp are just sloppy workers who dump their subpar code on others in hope that they’ll never need to touch it again.

[deleted]

Re: Grief and the AI split

#284

Post by domlebo70 »

smackeyacky wrote: post #237
domlebo70 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm solving different problems to you, but I don't think I've seen a single "idiot moment" from Claude Code this entire week. I've had to massage things to get them more aligned with how I want things, but I don't recall any basic syntax or logic errors.

I saw a few (Claude Sonnet 4.6), easily fixed. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is that when you say it has screwed up it much less likely to go down a hallucination path and can be dragged back. Having said that, I’ve changed the way I work too: more focused chunks of work with tight descriptions and sample data and it’s like having a 2nd brain.

Very good way to describe it. I am enjoying Opus a lot.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#285

Post by chrisvalleybay »

khafra wrote: post #241
Gud wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real split is between the capital owners, who live on our labour, typically through inheritance of a piece of paper that says they own a percentage of what I make.

Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all. Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep hu…

I think there's a piece missing here. Capital owners are humans too, and what humans want (perhaps especially the ones who accumulate capital), is to be at the top of a hierarchy. But a hierarchy needs participants. If nobody else is playing the game, there's no top to be on top of. Strip away the people willing to compete, admire, envy, or just show up, and the whole structure collapses. It's not clear that a world of pure capital-on-AI-labor actually gives them what they're after. It sounds lonely and meaningless to me. I don't think that it would feed the black hole in their chests.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#286

Post by throw310822 »

oytis wrote: post #278

I think we should already get past pretending it's about people who just like typing words on their stupid mechanical keyboards. The real split is whether you like understanding systems and inventing new things or whether you are OK to delegate this part to someone else and are just happy to take credit for their success. With a small note that when someone else is a human, the credit can be justified if you mentored…

Disagree. I think it was always obvious to me that there are at two kinds of developers. To make an extreme example: developer A writes long, sometimes tedious, security-minded, thoroughly tested code, and has written the CI pipelines too. When tasked with some ticket, they'll develop it to the letter, not one inch further, and even if it makes zero sense from the point of view of the users. Developer B knows nothing of that, doesn't write tests, can't be arsed about security and has no idea of how to deploy stuff, but thinks backwards from what the users (or other developers, or their future self) might like a lot and tries to make that. Both have been useful, though the first kind usually much more appreciated (maybe because it's really essential, while type B's contributions are harder to measure).

Probably AI has come a little bit earlier for type A, but type B will follow soon anyway. In the meanwhile, they're enjoying the ride a bit more since AI takes care of all the tedious but essential details.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#287

Post by oytis »

simianwords wrote: post #222
wiseowise wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people think like you we won’t have jobs because everyone would fucking die when cars, MRI machines, nuclear power plans and ICBMs, airplanes, infra, payments start misbehaving. Now what?

this is a category error that i specifically called out in my comment.

What is the category of code that does not need quality? You need it to not interact with real world, with people's finances, with people's personal data. Basically it's the code that only exists for PMs to show to investors (in startups) and VPs (in enterprise), but not for real users to rely on.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#288

Post by adverbly »

oytis wrote: post #278

I think we should already get past pretending it's about people who just like typing words on their stupid mechanical keyboards. The real split is whether you like understanding systems and inventing new things or whether you are OK to delegate this part to someone else and are just happy to take credit for their success. With a small note that when someone else is a human, the credit can be justified if you mentored…

This says nothing about where people find enjoyment.

I like doing puzzles.

I like it more than planning.

At the end of the day, I'll do whatever builds the best thing, but I'll enjoy it more or less depending on what that involves.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#289

Post by wolvesechoes »

A_Duck wrote: post #259
wolvesechoes wrote: post #210

The real split is between people that believe technological progress is good by itself and by the law of nature it always makes life better and easier, and people that know the history and know that stuff like 8 hours workday wasn't spat out of steam machine - it had to be fought for through political struggle, because actual "natural" consequence of increased productivity was increase in workload.

Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News Perhaps one of the secondary effects of AI replacing developers will be mobilising a group of smart, motivated people to the left (It's always interesting to think of the secondary effects which kick in past a certain point of growth. High-multiple stock valuations often fail to take these into account. For the East India Company, for example — your company can…

> Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News

I am on this site because it is one of the less shitty places on the Internet (in terms of usability, privacy etc.) to have some form of discussion, but I never identified as a "hacker", "techie", "entrepreneur" or "temporarily embarrassed billionaire". AI didn't change my view on anything, except it has shown me how blind and naive people can be.

Of course I tend to focus on aspects that are being discussed here (context of software engineering).

Re: Grief and the AI split

#290

Post by [deleted] »

skydhash wrote: post #275
simianwords wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can always change it later. this is exactly the dogmatism i'm speaking about - you need to prioritise pushing things. the clean up can come later. ironically it is your camp that advices to not use microservices but start with monolith. that's what i'm suggesting here.

> you can always change it later. this is exactly the dogmatism i'm speaking about - you need to prioritise pushing things. the clean up can come later. Everyone that says this has not been the one that had to fix the code later. They have already moved to the next jobs (or have been fired). Engineers do know the tradeoff between quality and speed, and can do hack if that’s what needed to get the project to the finis…

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