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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#331

Post by KronisLV »

bandrami wrote: post #302
prescriptivist wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough? All I'm saying is you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent. It's not that I don't see value in the craft; it's just that value is less important. As far as the new paradigms, the new frameworks, new s…

> you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent I'm really not, though, any more than I "had to" learn JavaScript 20 years ago or blockchains 5 years ago (neither of which I did). Hell, I still use Perl day-to-day.

Good for you! Most people will, though. If I hadn't learnt JavaScript, I couldn't work on a large chunk of the projects that put bread on the table for the past 5-10 years.

If most folks don't learn AI (or its shortcomings and practicalities of it), then they will not be as competitive in the job market. Corpos don't care about the flaws.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#332

Post by waynesonfire »

sp1nningaway wrote: post #161
wcfrobert wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution to this is to prioritize. There isn't enough time in a person's life to learn everything anyways. Selectively pick and struggle through things you want to learn deeply. And let AI spoon-feed you for things you don't care as much about.

I've managed to go my whole career using regex and never fully grokking it, and now I finally feel free to never learn! I've also wanted to play with C and Raylib for a long time and now I'm confident in coding by hand and struggling with it, I just use LLMs as a backstop for when I get frustrated, like a TA during lab hours.

> my whole career using regex and never fully grokking it

Sorry to hear that, nobody ever told me either. Had you invested a bit of time earlier in your career, it would have paid dividends 100x fold. The key is knowing what’s wheat and what’s chaff. Regex is a wheat.

With that said, maybe you tried.. everyone has their limits.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#333

Post by bloomca »

20k wrote: post #197
mgraczyk wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learn a lot faster now with LLMs. You could learn the windows APIs much faster if you wanted to learn them

How is this faster than just reading the documentation? Given that LLMs hallucinate, you have to double check everything it says against the docs anyway

Windows APIs docs for older stuff from Win32 is extremely barebones. WinRT is better, but still can be confusing.

I think AI is really great to start with the systems programming, as you can tailor the responses to your level, ask to solve specific build issues and so on. You can also ask more obscure questions and it will at least point you at the right direction.

Apple docs are also not the best for learning, so I think as a documentation browser with auto-generating examples AI is great.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#334

Post by gbbloke »

hansmayer wrote: post #45
yanis_t wrote: post #35

They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction. Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the sam…

> Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same amount of bread with only 5 people. That is actually the case with a lot of bakeries these days. But the one major difference being,the baker can rely with almost 100% reliability that the form, shape and ingredients used will be ex…

"vibe-bake" is maybe the best thing I've heard in a long time. Thank you for that, you made my day!

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#335

Post by peteforde »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #320
peteforde wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, every time that this comes up. You're asking people who are experienced developers absolutely chewing through checklists and peeking at HN while compiling/procrastinating/eating a sandwich/waiting for a prompt to finish to not just explain but quantify what is plainly obvious to those people, every day. You want us to bring paper receipts, like we…

>It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, quite frankly there seems to be something incredibly frustrating in your life going on, but I'm not sure that the underlying cause of whatever is weighing on your mind at the moment is that I asked "how do you know that what you are feeling is actually true, in comparison to what studies show should be true?" (rephrased, as not reasonable to quote…

This takes the cake for one of the strangest replies I've ever received on here.

I'm not sure how or indeed why you draw lines from what I said to my life situation... which is relevant how?

What I apparently did not do a good enough job of conveying is that those "data from multiple sources" get cited and then people immediately reply with "those are old studies". It's circular in the same way that arguing with anti-vax people is circular.

The difference is that unlike vaccines, it's very easy for someone to see how productive they are when using LLMs properly. It's not a subtle difference.

Hence the frustration with people who keep insisting that we're imagining our own productivity. It's not a good faith inquiry.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#336

Post by peteforde »

KronisLV wrote: post #329
peteforde wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, every time that this comes up. You're asking people who are experienced developers absolutely chewing through checklists and peeking at HN while compiling/procrastinating/eating a sandwich/waiting for a prompt to finish to not just explain but quantify what is plainly obvious to those people, every day. You want us to bring paper receipts, like we…

> It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, every time that this comes up. You're asking people who are experienced developers absolutely chewing through checklists and peeking at HN while compiling/procrastinating/eating a sandwich/waiting for a prompt to finish to not just explain but quantify what is plainly obvious to those people, every day. You want us to bring paper receipts, like w…

Totally! Though I maintain that the only good aspect to microservices is that krazam video. You know the one.

I do get frustrated when I see people not using Plan steps, copy/pasting from web front-ends or expecting to one-shot their entire codebase from a single dense prompt. It's problematic because it's not immediately obvious whether someone is still arguing like it's late 2024, you know what I mean?

Also, speaking for myself I can't recommend that anyone use anything but Opus 4.5 right now. 4.6 has a larger context window, but it's crazy expensive when that context window gets actually used even while most agree that these models get dumber when they have a super-large context. 4.5 actually scores slightly better than 4.6 on agentic development, too! But using less powerful models is literally using tools that are much more likely to produce the sorts of results that skeptics think apply across the board.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#337

Post by bandrami »

KronisLV wrote: post #331
bandrami wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent I'm really not, though, any more than I "had to" learn JavaScript 20 years ago or blockchains 5 years ago (neither of which I did). Hell, I still use Perl day-to-day.

Good for you! Most people will, though. If I hadn't learnt JavaScript, I couldn't work on a large chunk of the projects that put bread on the table for the past 5-10 years. If most folks don't learn AI (or its shortcomings and practicalities of it), then they will not be as competitive in the job market. Corpos don't care about the flaws.

That's not really true yet; most of the companies are being a lot more hesitant than individual developers (the companies have legal and TCO worries the devs themselves don't). It's possible what you're describing will become true, but that's not the present

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#338

Post by brabel »

pydry wrote: post #40
brabel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote code by hand for 20 years. Now I use AI for nearly all code. I just can’t compete in speed and thoroughness. As the post says, you must guide the AI still. But if you think you can continue working without AI in a competitive industry, I am absolutely sure you will eventually have a very bad time.

>I just can’t compete in speed and thoroughness I certainly know engineers for which this is true but unfortunately they were never particularly thorough or fast to begin with. I believe you can tell which way the wind is blowing by looking at open source. Other than being flooded with PRs high profile projects have not seen a notable difference - certainly no accelerated enhancements. there has definitely been an ex…

I've been by far the fastest engineer everywhere I've worked. I've produced 1000s of lines of code in a single day when I was really into it. I have nearly 500 Github repositories and almost all of them is a real open source application that does something useful. Think what you want though.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#339

Post by remus »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #320
peteforde wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, every time that this comes up. You're asking people who are experienced developers absolutely chewing through checklists and peeking at HN while compiling/procrastinating/eating a sandwich/waiting for a prompt to finish to not just explain but quantify what is plainly obvious to those people, every day. You want us to bring paper receipts, like we…

>It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, quite frankly there seems to be something incredibly frustrating in your life going on, but I'm not sure that the underlying cause of whatever is weighing on your mind at the moment is that I asked "how do you know that what you are feeling is actually true, in comparison to what studies show should be true?" (rephrased, as not reasonable to quote…

To lay it out, Im pretty firmly pro-AI.

Putting it succinctly, these kind of conversations feel weird because it's like asking whether carpenters are faster using power tools or hand tools. If you've used power tools it's obvious they make work a lot faster. Maybe there were some studies around the time power tools were introduced looking at the productivity of carpenters, if those studies had results saying the productivity gains weren't obvious in the data that means you have a problem with your study and the data you have collected (which is totally understandable, measuring imprecise things like productivity accurately is really hard). You have to look at the evidence in front of you though, try telling the guy with a chainsaw that he's actually no more productive than he was when he was using an axe and he'll laugh at you.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#340

Post by hansmayer »

maltelau wrote: post #328
therealdrag0 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh accuracy and reliability is a different topic hashed out many times on HN. This thread is about productivity. I’m a staff engineer and I don’t know a single person not using AI. My senior engineers are estimating 40% gains in productivity.

And every time the issue is side-stepped by chatbot proponents. Accuracy and reliability are necessary to know real productivity. If you have produced code that doesn't work right, you haven't "produced" anything (except in the economic sense of managing to get someone to pay for it). For example, if you produce 5x more code at 5% reliability, the net result is a -75% change in productivity (ignoring the overhead cos…

Exactly this. High productivity if all you do is generate slop and brainrot videos. If you are going to generate code with it... well how productive was the genius at the AWS who used Kiro to cause that December outage ? 3 years ago that would have been a career-ending choice of productivity tools.
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