I'm not following the logic here. There are tons of free tier AI products available. That makes the world more fair for people in very poor countries not less.
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The Bitter Prediction
31–40 of 189 posts
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#32A relative known youtuber called the primeagen has recently done a challenge sponsored by Cursor themselves where he and some friends would "vibe code" a game in a week. The results were pretty underwhelming. They would have been much faster not using generative Ai. Compared what you see from game jams where sometimes solo devs create whole games in just a few days it was pretty trash. It also tracks with my own expe…
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I used it as an example because the event was sponsored by Cursor so I figured they had an interest in making the product look good. And they really failed at this.
The again primeagen is pretty critical of vibe coding so it was super weird match up anyway. I guess they decided to just have some fun. Maybe advertise the vibe coding "lifestyle" more so than the technical merit of the product.
Oh, it isn't the usual content for primeagen. He mostly reacts to other technical videos and articles and rants about his love for neovim and ziglang. He has ok takes most of the time and is actually critical of the overuse of generative Ai. But yeah, he is not a technical deep dive youtuber but more for entertainment.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#33All articles of this class, whether positive or negative, begin "I was working on a hobby project" or some variation thereof. The purpose of hobbies is to be a hobby, archetypical tech projects are about self-mastery. You cannot improve your mastery with a "tool" that robs you of most of the minor and major creative and technical decisions of the task. Building IKEA furniture will not make you a better carpenter. Why…
I think it also misses the way you can automate non-trivial tasks. For example, I am working on a project where there is tens of thousands of different data sets each with their own meta data and structure but the underlying data is mostly the same. But because the meta data and structure are all different, it’s really impossible to combine all this data into one big data set without a team of engineers going through each data set and meticulously restructuring and conforming said metadata to a new monolithic schema. However I don’t have any money to hire that team of engineers. But I can massage LLMs to do that work for me. These are ideal tasks for AI type algorithms to solve. It makes me quite excited for the future as many of these kind of tasks could be given to ai agents that would otherwise be impossible to do yourself.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#34To me it’s the exact opposite. I was writing code for the past 20+ years and I recently realized it’s not the act of writing code I love, but the act of creating something from nothing. Over the past few months I wrote two non-trivial utility apps that otherwise I would most probably not write because I didn’t have enough time to do that, but Cursor + Claude gave me the 5x productivity boost that enabled me to do so,…
Same here. I do not usually enjoy programming as an craft but the act of building something is what is loveable experience.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#35> Not only that, the generated code was high-quality, efficient, and conformed to my coding guidelines. It routinely "checked its work" by running unit tests to eliminate hallucinations and bugs. This seems completely out of whack with my experience of AI coding. I'm definitely in the "it's extremely useful" camp but there's no way I would describe its code as high quality and efficient. It can do simple tasks but it…
Which model and tool are you using? There's a whole spectrum of AI-assisted coding.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#36All articles of this class, whether positive or negative, begin "I was working on a hobby project" or some variation thereof. The purpose of hobbies is to be a hobby, archetypical tech projects are about self-mastery. You cannot improve your mastery with a "tool" that robs you of most of the minor and major creative and technical decisions of the task. Building IKEA furniture will not make you a better carpenter. Why…
> I have not seen a single take by an experienced software engineer have a "sky is falling" take,
Let me save everybody some time:
1. They're not saying it because they don't want to think of themselves as obsolete.
2. You're not using AI right, programmers who do will take your job.
3. What model/version/prompt did you use? Works For Me.
But seriously: It does not matter _that_ much what experienced engineers think. If the end result looks good enough for laymen and there's no short term negative outcomes, the most idiotic things can build up steam for a long time. There is usually an inevitable correction, but it can take decades. I personally accept that, the world is a bit mad sometimes, but we deal with it.
My personal opinion is pretty chill: I don't know if what I can do will still be needed n years from now. It might be that I need to change my approach, learn something new, or whatever. But I don't spend all that much time worrying about what was, or what will be. I have problems to solve right now, and I solve them with the best options available to me right now.
People spending their days solving problems probably generally don't have much time to create science fiction.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#37All articles of this class, whether positive or negative, begin "I was working on a hobby project" or some variation thereof. The purpose of hobbies is to be a hobby, archetypical tech projects are about self-mastery. You cannot improve your mastery with a "tool" that robs you of most of the minor and major creative and technical decisions of the task. Building IKEA furniture will not make you a better carpenter. Why…
I've used Claude-Code & Roo-Code plenty of times with my hobby projects.
I understand what the article means, but sometimes I've got the broad scopes of a feature in my head, and I just want it to work. Sometimes programming isn't like "solving a puzzle", sometimes it's just a huge grind. And if I can let an LLM do it 10 times faster, I'm quite happy with that.
I've always had to fix up the code one way or another though. And most of the times, the code is quite bad (even from Claude Sonnet 3.7 or Gemini Pro 2.5), but it _did_ point me in the right direction.
About the cost: I'm only using Gemini Pro 2.5 Experimental the past few weeks. I get to retry things so many times for free, it's great. But if I had to actually pay for all the millions upon millions of used tokens, it would have cost me *a lot* of money, and I don't want to pay that. (Though I think token usage can be improved a lot, tools like Roo-Code seem very wasteful on that front)
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#38[deleted]
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#39I may be old, but I had the same feeling for low-level code. I enjoyed doing things like optimizing a low-level loop in C or assembly, bootstrapping a microcontroller, or writing code for a processor which didn't have a compiler yet. Even in BASIC, I enjoyed PEEKing and POKE'ing. I enjoyed opening up a file system in a binary editor. I enjoyed optimizing how my computer draws a line.
All this went away. I felt a loss of joy and nostalgia for it. It was bitter.
Not bad, but bitter.
Re: The Bitter Prediction
#40I'm not following the logic here. There are tons of free tier AI products available. That makes the world more fair for people in very poor countries not less.
Lots of models are free, and useful even, but the best ones are not.
I'm not sure how much RAM is on the average smartphone owned by someone earning $5/day*, but it's absolutely not going to be the half a terabyte needed for the larger models whose weights you can just download.
It will change, but I don't know how fast.
* I kinda expect that to be around the threshold where they will actually have a smartphone, even though the number of smartphones in the world is greater than the number of people