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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#301

Post by samiv »

bonoboTP wrote: post #174
jwolfe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it's a psychologically positive self identification to see yourself merely as a gatekeeper and toll extractor rent seeker who only makes a living by withholding agency and skill from others. That's an incredibly uncharitable reading of the parent comment. At no point in history prior to maybe this year could you argue that working in software was gatekeeping, toll extracting, or rent seeking. Being a…

They complained about the skill leveling where now lower skilled people can also do what needed higher skill before. You toiled to learn the craft, now there is a fast track to those results. That's what the rug pull is. Yes, producing software was value. (It of course still is as of today, we are talking about what may be coming). My plead is to continue searching for ways to contribute value. Don't resign to a feel…

The problem is that we don't live in a society where the benefits of new technology benefit all.

We're about to pull the rug underneath all knowledge workers. This will disrupt wage earners lives. This will disrupt the economy.

You might feel great about when things become cheaper but remember that when things are cheap it's only because costs are low and when costs are low the revenues are low and when revenues are low salaries are low too. Keep in mind that one party's cost is other party's revenue.

The economy is ultimately one large circle where the money needs to go around. You might think of yourself a winner as long as someone else's salary drops to zero and you still get to keep your income but eventually it will be you whose income will also be disrupted.

Just something to keep in mind.

And also we're going to just not rug pull on the individual knowledge workers but businesses too. Any software company with a software product will quickly find themselves in a situation where their software is worth zero.

Also this comment about gatekeeping is absolutely stupid. It's like saying trained doctors and medical schools are gatekeeping people from doctoring. It would be so much better if anyone could just doctor away, maybe with some tool assistance. So much fantastically better and cheaper? Right! Just lay off those expensive doctors and hire doctor-prompters for a fraction of the price.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#302

Post by lapcat »

adampunk wrote: post #267
lapcat wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it will be nearly impossible to learn them from scratch. Are you claiming that all future generations of would-be programmers are doomed?

I'm saying that there's a cost to waiting, just like there's a cost to jumping in early. The cost is SPECIFICALLY that it is harder to jump in to a mature field with its own jargon and concerns. The assumption I think folks are making is their engineering prowess will save them here: whatever complicated thing that matters in AI land will be easily visible to an rank outsider. The whole premise of "imma wait" is not…

> The cost is SPECIFICALLY that it is harder to jump in to a mature field with its own jargon and concerns.

Hasn't that been the case for decades? What specifically is different now, such that for some reason it's harder to jump in now than it was before?

If anything, LLMs are supposed to make things easier, aren't they?

> it's the implied "imma wait until everything falls apart, then we'll go back to what I know how to do." that people don't like saying.

You can read whatever assumption you want into the blog post, but it's not there in the words. You're dunking on a straw man.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#303

Post by hombre_fatal »

we_have_options wrote: post #212
gradus_ad wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's so easy to try something like Claude Code. It's not like you need to get up to speed. There is no learning curve*, that's the nature of AI. Just start using it and you'll see why it has attracted so much hype. *I should qualify that "using" CC in the strict sense has no learning curve, but really getting the most out of it may take some time as you see its limitations. But it's not learning tech in the tradi…

I've been playing with it on weekends for the last few months. 9 out of 10 projects, it's failed. Projects as simple as "set up a tmux/vim binding so I can write prompts in one pane and run claude in the other". Fails. I've been coding for over 20 years. If there is no learning curve, why doesn't it work for me? You can't say I'm not using it right, because if that was true, then all I need to do is climb the learnin…

I've used Claude Code to do everything from vibe-code personal apps including a terminal on top of libghostty to building my perfect desktop environment on NixOS (I'd never used Nix until then).

I'm not sure why it isn't working for you. Maybe your expectation is a perfect one-shot or else it has zero value, and nothing in between?

But my advice is to switch gears and see the "plan file" as the deliverable that you're polishing over implementation. It's planning and research and specification that tends to be the hard part, not yoloing solutions live to see if they'll work -- we do the latter all the time to avoid 10min of planning.

So, try brainstorming the issue with Claude Code, talk it through so it's on the same page as you, ensure it's done research (web search, docs) to weigh the best solutions, and then enter plan mode so it generates a markdown plan file.

From there you can read/review,tweak the plan file. Or have it implement it. Or you implement it. But the idea is that an LLM is useful at this intermediate planning stage without tacking on additional responsibilities.

I think by "no learning curve" they are referring to how you can get value from it without doing the research you'd need to use a conventional tool. But there is a learning curve to getting better results.

I learned my plan file workflow just from Claude Code having "Plan Mode" that spits out a plan file, and it was obvious to me from there, but there are people who don't know it exists nor what the value of it is, yet it's the centerpiece of my workflow. I also think it's the right way to use AI: the plan/prompt is the thing you're building and polishing, not skipping past it to an underspecified implementation. Because once you're done with the plan, then the impl is trivial and repeatable from that plan, even if you wanted to do the impl yourself.

I'm way past the point of arguing anything here, just trying to help.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#304

Post by asim »

I'm healthily skeptical of new technology. Meaning I'm not the early adopter. But I've also found over the years I don't get left behind. I become curious at the time things are stabilising. Maybe on the cusp where there's still a lot of pushback but there's also clear value. Crypto in 2014-2017. AI in 2023-2024. You don't have to feel FOMO but if you're a technologist, if you have a healthy desire to evolve, change and learn then you'll naturally pick things up. I went from total crypto skepticism in 2014 to investing most of what I had. I went from total AI skepticism to doing RAG for the Quran and agentic tech for the small web. I think there's value in staying true to who you are but also naturally discovering and learning on your own timeline.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#305

Post by throwaway29130 »

afpx wrote: post #270
augusto-moura wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…

It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.

Brutal. But probably all too common. One of my clients has very suddenly gone all-in on agentic AI and they're in this crazy hurry. (Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.)

This started literally two weeks ago and a couple of days ago I talked to one of the admin people who wanted an update on the progress I'd made with sanding off some of the rough edges of the very rough implementation that the managing partner had put in place (he bought a Mac Mini, put OpenClaw on it, then gave it admin access to a whole pile of stuff!) I said I needed a couple more days. "Okay," she said, "but I need this quickly, because we're firing people next week."

They have literally gone from no agentic AI, to discovering OpenClaw, to firing people, in a two-week time span.

When economists say that the predicted job losses as a result of AI have not yet shown up in the data, I'm genuinely befuddled. Either we don't have long to wait to start seeing them, or there's something wrong with the data, because you can't tell me what I just described above is an isolated phenomenon.

I also have to say: I've always enjoyed working with this client, but this experience has been a huge turnoff on a number of different levels.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#306

Post by ashwinsundar »

0x3f wrote: post #207
anticorporate wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be financial value in being early (if you're lucky), but there are other values in waiting. My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. I try to stay comfortable enough financially to have the luxury to make the decisions that allow me to keep doing things I care about when the opportunities come along. Deciding whether something new is the right p…

> My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. In the vast majority of cases, financial returns help maximize your impact on the things you care about. Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. The only real exceptions are things that spec…

I didn't realize maximizing money is the way to achieve moral excellence. It's interesting how Puritanical the EA folks are

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#307

Post by lionkor »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #182
jghn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But will companies start hiring again? Anecdata, but the few people I know who were looking to switch gigs all had multiple offers within a few weeks. One thing they all had in common was taking a very targeted approach with their search and leveraging their networks. Not spamming thousands of resumes into the ether.

so you either are well connected or you starve, got it guess it's death and destitute for introverts edit: please explain the downvotes, i'm curious why you think i'm wrong if what op says it's true, that today only networking works, then it easily follows that if for some reasons you do not have a network then you don't get hired

I'm currently involved in the hiring process in our company, selecting engineers for my team. If someone applies who has the programming language we ask for in their CV, they get a first interview. If they can read code, and write VERY basic code, they will get through at least the first 2 rounds without any issues.

If people put down the AI, and actually learn how to write a `for` loop, they would be more hire-able than 50% of candidates.

> "Guess it's death [...] for introverts"

There is a meritocracy somewhere in our capitalist system. Not everyone participates, but it exists.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#308

Post by bleuarff »

postalcoder wrote: post #173
stavros wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely having a blast, but I agree with the author. You're not going to get left behind, the "getting left behind" rhetoric was just cryptocurrency pump-and-dumpers. It's fine to wait and not engage if you don't want to.

I agree with you, which is why I think it's a straw man. How many real devs are actually banging the "you're getting left behind!" drums?

I don't know for devs, but that's the message we get from upper management.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#309

Post by benhurmarcel »

jghn wrote: post #104
wolframhempel wrote: post #50

There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush Of course, you could just as well have - become an Acti…

A friend told me about bitcoin in early 2010, back when the coins were effectively free. I laughed at the idea and called it stupid. I still think it's stupid, but I'd be a whole lot richer if I went along with it at the time!

You would probably have sold early for a relatively small amount too.

I bought 10ish BTC at some point for almost nothing, sold them for a low 4-digit amount thinking they were stupid anyway. I still think they were stupid but it turns out they could have paid off my house easily. Oh well.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#310

Post by coldpie »

sd9 wrote: post #249
coldpie wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, then, you can actually empathize with people who don't get value from it :) I used to enjoy the work, now I don't, so I'm posting on HN and daydreaming about other careers, instead of doing something useful.

Yeah, maybe empathise was the wrong word. I certainly empathise with the feelings, I just struggle to see how people cannot use it to get more done. I'm also daydreaming about other careers instead of doing something useful.

> I just struggle to see how people cannot use it to get more done.

To be blunt about it, there's a decent chance I'll be quitting this job later this year, largely because of the AI push. I just hate these tools and I do not want to work this way. Losing an employee is a pretty big cost to the company. I guess the AI stuff is probably worth it to them, but there's a downside to it, too.

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