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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#321

Post by tofuahdude »

samiv wrote: post #62
bogzz wrote: post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

I cannot but agree. It's a massive skill leveling where software development is transforming from high skilled coding to low skilled prompting. For an old dog like myself it feels an unjust rug pull.

Why unjust? Who promised you that the way software is made will stay static?

Our software industry has specialized, for decades, in "rug pulling" / changing / "disrupting" other industries on a massive scale.

I find it pretty ironic when engineers make these statements in that context.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#322

Post by JumpCrisscross »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #236
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone chasing those returns would be better off investing in index funds.

Index funds give you something like the expected value over a huge class of possible investments. What you aim for if you want to invest early is rather a probability distribution of - get rich with a small (but nevertheless realistic) probability p - get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little bit with probability 1-p This is a very different offering than the profit probability distribution that ind…

> What you aim for if you want to invest early

Sure. I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. Most new early-stage VCs do.

> get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little

Broadly speaking, when your investment outcomes don’t differentiate between anything and zero, you’re mostly going to get zero.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#323

Post by jayd16 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #177
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…

Almost everyone chasing those returns would be better off investing in index funds.

Sure, you could take calculated risks for predictable returns over a long enough time scale.

Or you could take what's in the box!!

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#324

Post by stackbutterflow »

genthree wrote: post #280
HolyLampshade wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool Cloud had a very similar vibe when it was really running advertising to CIO/CTOs hard. Everything had to be jammed into the cloud, even if it made absolutely no sense for it to be run there. This seems to come pretty frequently from visionless tech execs. They need to justify their existence to their boss, and thus try to show how innovative and/or co…

I think this is the result of a c-suite that has never actually done the work of the businesses they're running. The MBAificiation of management. Of course they constantly do brain-dead shit, they literally don't have a clue how anything actually works in "their" own business.

They've been vibe-driving businesses long before we've started vibe-coding software.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#325

Post by pgwalsh »

Solid piece, very wise. AI is fun but where I find it useful with code is first writing more thorough comments and then writing the base of your tests.

Writing the actual code that's efficient is iffy at times and you better know the language well or you'll get yourself in trouble. I've watched AI make my code more complex and harder to read. I've seen it put an import in a loop. It's removed the walrus operator because it doesn't seem to understand it. It's used older libraries or built-ins that are no longer supported. It's still fun and does save me some time with certain things but I don't want to vibe code much because it removes the joy out of what you're doing.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#326

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jayd16 wrote: post #323
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone chasing those returns would be better off investing in index funds.

Sure, you could take calculated risks for predictable returns over a long enough time scale. Or you could take what's in the box!!

Only if it’s leveraged.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#327

Post by anticorporate »

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 knew this canned rebuttal was coming and almost addressed it in my previous comment.

I've not found this to be true at all, for a variety of reasons. One of my moral principles that extreme wealth accumulation by any individual is ultimately harmful to society, even for those who start with altruistic values. Money is power, and power corrupts.

Also, the further from my immediate circle I focus my impact on, the less certainty I have that my impact is achieving what I want it to. I've worked on global projects, and looking back at them those are the projects I'm least certain moved the needle in the direction I wanted them to. Not because they didn't achieve their goals, but because I'm not sure the goals at the outset actually had the long term impact I wanted them to. In fact, it's often due to precisely what we're talking about in this thread: sometimes new things come along and change everything.

The butterfly effect is just as real with altruism as it is with anything else.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#328

Post by laserlight »

gradus_ad wrote: post #231
we_have_options wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did it not work after the first try and you gave up? Did it not produce any usable code that you could hand tweak or build off of? I want to understand your definition of "failed" here.

What's your definition of "working"? Do you consider it working, when you have to put more effort into prompting back-and-forth than writing it the old way?

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#329

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

theptip wrote: post #294
stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

Ok, here is the risk of being left behind - if we have moderately fast take-off, the 1-2 years required to upskill in AI might mean you find yourself unemployable when your role gets axed. I don’t think folks are taking seriously the possible worlds at the P(0.25) tail of likelihood. You do not get to pick up this stuff “on a timescale of my choosing”, in the worlds where the capability exponential keeps going for an…

I don't think there's such a thing as a "fast take-off" where human experience with 2026-era LLM coding remains economically relevant.
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