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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#331

Post by BeetleB »

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.

While it's relevant to the particular submission, this type of comment is thrown around way too often.

Me boycotting some company's product due to bad practices (slavery, etc).

Response: You know your boycotting isn't going to change anything, right?

Me: Yes, and ....? I'm not trying to change the world.

I don't use FF as some form of protest. It's just a browser I like more.

I'm not anti-AI the way much of HN is, but let's pretend I am. If I ban AI generated content on my site[1], I'm not trying to change the world. Just controlling my site.

Getting more to your sentiment: The world/Internet is a vast place. If even 1000 people think like me, it's more than enough. For a number of years I had valuable online interactions via BBS's with a population It's like the constant "Emacs is dying" threads we used to have on HN, because the percentage of SO users using it kept dropping. When in reality, the absolute numbers kept increasing. Who cares if the world has moved on to VS Code? Emacs as an ecosystem was/is thriving!

[1] Assuming I live in a fantasy world where I can classify content accurately...

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#332

Post by satvikpendem »

malwrar wrote: post #47

I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore. Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, no…

HN comments have always been public, I don't really understand this thought process. The robots also aren't going to care about some individual user, it'd be more of an agglomeration of everyone's comments.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#333

Post by nunez »

bachmeier wrote: post #221
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a coding agent seems quite low skill to me. It’s hard to see it becoming a differentiator. Just look at the number of people who couldn’t code before and are suddenly churning out work to confirm that.

> Using a coding agent seems quite low skill to me. I agree if that's all you can do. Using a coding agent to complement a valuable domain-specific skill is gold.

Thus why many technical business-facing people are super excited about AI (at the cost of developers)

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#334

Post by nunez »

ozozozd wrote: post #227
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”…

There was a moment we thought JS had won. And then crypto. I personally believed low-level development was done.

Claude Code is written in TypeScript, which compiles to JS, so I think JS _did_ win...

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#335

Post by johnathandos »

cfiggers wrote: post #78
bitmasher9 wrote: post #8

Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading. More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.

> we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Here's my advice: if there's someone around you who can teach you, learn from them. But if there isn't anyone around you who can teach you, find someone around you who can learn from you and mentor them. You'll actually grow more from the latter than from the former, if you can believe that. I think there's a broad blindness in industry to the benefits of men…

See one, do one, teach one.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#336

Post by satvikpendem »

mmustapic wrote: post #125
kstenerud wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI makes the entirety of the software engineering profession available to you. All you have to do is ask the right way, and you can build in days what once took months or years. Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. Closed source is no longer the moat it was, an…

But I can't have the weights of the LLM model I'm using for this.

Open weight models exist.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#337

Post by satvikpendem »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #98
kstenerud wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI makes the entirety of the software engineering profession available to you. All you have to do is ask the right way, and you can build in days what once took months or years. Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. Closed source is no longer the moat it was, an…

> Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. Jesus christ. "The people who wanted everyone to have a home should be happy with the invention of the lockpick. You can just find a nice house and open the lock and move in. Ignore the lockpick company charging essentiall…

This argument commits the same fallacy as the argument against piracy; copying is not stealing, because the original still remains. A lockpicked and squatted house means someone else does not have that house, it's a zero sum game which information which is freely copyable does not align with.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#338

Post by kingkawn »

cdetrio wrote: post #236
kingkawn wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a catastrophic failure occurs we will have to return to first principles and re-derive the solutions. Not so bad, probably enlivening even to get to spin up the mind again after a break.

We found 500 zero-days in ten year old widely used open-source projects. Was that not a demonstration of the catastrophic failure of human debugging capability?

And yet the world keeps turning we’ll figure it out

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#339

Post by veidr »

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”…

It absolutely is, but the fundamental misunderstanding around this seems to be that "effectively using coding agents" is a superset of the 2023-era general understanding of "Senior Software Engineer".

At least when you're talking about shipping software customers pay for, or debugging it, etc. Research, narrow specializations, etc may be a different category and some will indeed be obsoleted.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#340

Post by rafterydj »

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 wildly dismissive of the foundation of the X$ billion dollar software industry. You think humans just stumbled into writing code by accident or something?

How does building agentic systems, a "really hard" problem, not just end up a "regular code" problem? Because that is what it is. A distributed systems problem with non-deterministic run lengths. How do you switch agent contexts? Similar to how you solve regular program context switching. How do you search tool capabilities and verify them? How do you effectively manage scheduled tasks?

Oh, look, you've just invented the operating system kernel. Suddenly, those 'dozen or two' experts don't seem so archaic after all!

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