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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#301

Post by colechristensen »

coldtea wrote: post #192
colechristensen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself. I am still necessary 1% of the time for debug, design, and direction and those of not at all a shallow skill. I have some graduate algebra texts on the way my math friend is guiding me through because I have found a publishable result and need to shore up my background before writing the paper... It's not perpetual motion, it's very…

> This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself Is the world any better for them existing? The decline of coding and sw engineering skills in humans from outsourcing the practice of it to AI is it worth it and sustainable long term?

>Is the world any better for them existing? The decline of coding and sw engineering skills in humans from outsourcing the practice of it to AI is it worth it and sustainable long term?

The world is going to be no worse than it was when humans transitioned from writing assembly to writing compilers for high level languages. Assembly is still necessary, but not that often. In the same way writing code is going to become less necessary as tools are going to be written in higher level language in standards and requirements documents instead of code most of the time, with more specific exact coding only occasionally.

Programmers were mostly solving the same plumbing problems over and over in secret because of "proprietary" needs to hide your code, but one million separate integrations of your billing backend with Stripe didn't really add to humanity. We're cutting out the boring middle drudgery and human effort is going to be freed up to work on the edges of human knowledge instead of tromping around in the middle.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#302

Post by ej88 »

Bridged7756 wrote: post #277
catlifeonmars wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m just getting extremely lucky, but I don’t use AI to code at work and I’m still keeping up with my peers who are all Clauded up. I do a lot of green field network appliance design and implementation and have not felt really felt the pressure in that space. I do use Claude code at home maybe a couple hours a week, mostly for code base exploration. Still haven’t figured out how to fully vibe code: the generate…

In the future Claude will keep a tight ship on dissenters. If your monthly quota doesn't exceed the 10k worth of tokens your employer will be notified and you will be flagged as a "dissenter". Your lease will be cancelled, because who would trust someone ignorant enough to not use LLMs in their daily life, and you'll be vetoed from the field for life, for clanker companies will proclaim that anyone who doesn't use LL…

ai skeptic fanfic evolves in fascinating ways every day

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#303

Post by vdqtp3 »

turlockmike wrote: post #156
titzer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is bui…

How many kernel devs does the world need? A dozen or two? It will be the same with software. AI will be writing and consuming most software. We will be utilizing experiences built on top of that, probably generated in real time for hyper personalization. Every app on your phone will be replaced by one app. (Except maybe games, at least for a short while longer). Everyone's treating writing code as this reverent thing…

> How many kernel devs does the world need? A dozen or two?

You're low by several orders of magnitude. "The 2025 development cycle saw 2,134 developers contribute to [Linux] kernel 6.18" [1]

[1] https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-kernel-contributor...

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#304

Post by poody »

bonoboTP wrote: post #258
pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

I also remember a similar wave around 10-15 years ago regarding ML tooling and libraries becoming more accessible, more open source releases etc. People whose value add was knowing MATLAB toolboxes and keeping their code private got very afraid when Python numpy, scikit learn and Theano etc came to the forefront. And people started releasing the code with research papers on github. Anyone could just get that working…

This is so true... I am having issues with the change right now.. being older and trying to incorporate agentic workflow into MY workflow is difficult as I have trust issues with the new codebase.. I do have good people skills with my clients, but my secret sauce was my coding skilz.. and I built my identity around that..

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#305

Post by raincole »

staminade wrote: post #95

Anti-AI articles like this seem to be the new "Doing my part to resist big tech: Why I'm switching back from Chrome to Firefox" genre that popped up on HN for a decade or so. If it makes you feel better, great, but don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society.

This genre has always been very prevalent on HN. Move from cloud to on-premise. Move away from US-based services. Move away from Gmail. Move away from Github.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#306

Post by shmerl »

pfisherman wrote: post #131
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

I'd say viewing it as most important is pretty unprofessional. But isn't it the point of this extreme AI push? To replace professional skills with dummy parrots.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#307

Post by WarmWash »

qsera wrote: post #267
WarmWash wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What I am saying is that once the high quality training data runs out, it will drop in its capabilities pretty fast. That's more a misunderstood study that over time turned into a confidently stated fact. Yes, the model collapses if you loop the output to the input. But no, that's not how it's done. The reality is that all the labs are already using synthetic training data, and have been for at least a year now. It…

>using synthetic training data yea, look up how it is done. It is exactly how a perpetual motion machine scam would project an appearance of working like using a generator to drive a motor, and the motor driving the generator..something that would obscure the fact that there is energy loss happening along the way....

I'm confused with the point you are trying to make, because they are using synthetic data, and the models are getting stronger.

There is no "conservation of fallacy" law (bad data must conserve it's level of bad), so I'm struggling to connect the dots on the analogy, unless I ignore the fact that training on synthetic data works, is being used, and the models are getting better.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#308

Post by simianwords »

raincole wrote: post #305
staminade wrote: post #95

Anti-AI articles like this seem to be the new "Doing my part to resist big tech: Why I'm switching back from Chrome to Firefox" genre that popped up on HN for a decade or so. If it makes you feel better, great, but don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society.

This genre has always been very prevalent on HN. Move from cloud to on-premise. Move away from US-based services. Move away from Gmail. Move away from Github.

Was there one for memory managed languages like C# vs self managed like C/C++?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#309

Post by yabutlivnWoods »

Such a bizarre sentiment the web and internet as we know/knew them is some bastion of freedom and future for humanity.

According to the author AI is 99% hype.

That 1% of AI utility can unlock more for humanity than 99.999% of blogs; static text hosted from a laptop in a closet.

Odd ball position that cheap publishing via the web is a path to The Next Generation for humanity is 100% hype.

Other than feeding dopamine addiction humanity has not improved greatly since we read all those insipid posts on GeoCities no one remembers today.

It's all been 99%+ hype to feed Wall Street. Young GenX and older Millennials with tech jobs were temporary political pawns and gonna end up bag holders like may older GenXers and Boomers who lived through the car boom, the housing boom, the retail boom.

Same old human shit, different hype.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#310

Post by bit-anarchist »

Tomis02 wrote: post #283
hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we're still here right? We have more books and knowledge and capabilities than ever. Despite theoretically losing knowledge along the way, we're okay (mostly). Society can replace the systems it relies on. The replacement might not be the best, but it'll probably handle things until we can reinvent a newer, better system. It probably won't be easy, but you can't convince me that humanity suddenly cannot adapt and…

You could have lived 200 years. But instead, people decided they'd rather invest in crypto or LLMs instead. Maybe humans will still be here in a century. But you won't be. It didn't have to be this way.

I don't see how they are actually exclusive in the long-term. Crypto investment isn't that big, and LLMs, or AI in general, may provide support for better treatments, thus possibly allowing people to reliably live onto 200 years.
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