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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#341

Post by CharlieDigital »

wiseowise wrote: post #240
CharlieDigital wrote: post #5

The divide is a matter of perspective. I'm a 23+ year dev; among the highest level ICs in my org. It's still craft, its just that the craft is different. I don't write *.ts, *.cs files anymore; I write *.md files that other devs are using, that we're using as guardrails, that ensures that we minimize the slop while increasing speed and basically lift every developers level up by several notches. I went from building…

> I write *.md files that other devs are using, that we're using as guardrails, that ensures that we minimize the slop while increasing speed and basically lift every developers level up by several notches. > > among the highest level ICs in my org. Checks out. Real straight shooter with upper management written all over him.

If the whole team of junior and mid level devs are all using agents to code, then the only answer is to make sure they are doing it well.

I don't think it's hard to grasp that this is how senior ICs can have the biggest impact now.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#342

Post by koenschipper »

cableshaft wrote: post #216
vaylian wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Left behind" in terms of speed or are there other aspects that people are missing out on?

Speed has a lot to do with it, yeah. A.I. is now often doing in 5-10 minutes what would take me hours on my own for any given task (well based on the last couple of weeks at least, I wasn't doing much agent based A.I. coding before that). I was pretty much having a real-time conversation with my superiors, showing them updates just a couple of minutes after they suggested them, for a feature the other day, getting fe…

Yes, absolutely agree. I have that feeling too that we have to keep up that pace. But it is not realistic that everything can happen at that same speed.

How do you deal with that feeling?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#343

Post by bluefirebrand »

marssaxman wrote: post #340
rdevilla wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Claude, lift these weights for me."

We have machines lift weights for us all the time. Claude is a forklift for the mind, perhaps?

Using forklifts has made us overall less healthy and less physically fit than moving things by hand

Will LLMs, "the forklifts of the mind" make us less mentally fit?

Seems like a pretty likely outcome to me

Re: Grief and the AI split

#344

Post by tovej »

FabianCarbonara wrote: post #218

For me AI unlocked building things I just couldn't before. My creativity and ingenuity now have an outlet that wasn't possible without agentic coding tools. That's genuinely exciting. But I also keep wondering: how long until the level of abstraction I'm working at now gets automated too?

Is it really valid to call it "ingenuity" if you weren't able to execute projects before?

Gen-AI has not enabled me to develop anything I wasn't able to do before, and I consider myself to be an average developer.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#345

Post by bluefirebrand »

snek_case wrote: post #305
khafra wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all. Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep hu…

> imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans around, doing human things. It's not the AI you have to convince, it's your government and the people running tech companies. Dario Amodei was cheering for AI to take all programming jobs (along with the others). If that happened, it would be an unmitigated disaster for millions of people. Imagine a student who comes out of a CS major with tons of student debt. How…

> Imagine a student who comes out of a CS major with tons of student debt. How much sympathy does Dario feel for this person? Getting him to STFU would be a good first step.

I don't need to imagine this student, I'm friends with some who are going through this right now. They graduated almost a year ago and haven't found work yet. One of them jokes about suicide often and I don't know how to help him

The social contract between labour and capital has been frayed for a long time, but it is near breaking now. It's going to get worse, maybe a lot worse, before it gets better. If it ever does get better

Re: Grief and the AI split

#346

Post by reportgunner »

calebkaiser wrote: post #337
oytis wrote: post #278

I think we should already get past pretending it's about people who just like typing words on their stupid mechanical keyboards. The real split is whether you like understanding systems and inventing new things or whether you are OK to delegate this part to someone else and are just happy to take credit for their success. With a small note that when someone else is a human, the credit can be justified if you mentored…

It's funny how "the real split" is always between the intellectually and morally superior (me) and the inferiors (them).

I never asked for this.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#347

Post by bluefirebrand »

eloisius wrote: post #258
khafra wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all. Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep hu…

I, for one, am looking forward to me and a band of my closest friends and family raiding heavily fortified data centers guarded by Boston Dynamics robot dogs to steal clean drinking water for our underground village. We might even hit a caravan of autonomous trucks carrying cricket protein powder in the same night.

If I were 20 years younger maybe, but nowadays I'm too old for that

Re: Grief and the AI split

#348

Post by skydhash »

simonw wrote: post #325
discreteevent wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers make these kinds of improvements all the time. Are you saying that it would have been impossible without AI?

That codebase existed for 20 years and had contributions from nearly 200 people. Sure, they could have come up with those optimizations without AI... but they didn't. What's your theory for why that is?

Maybe because it’s a non issue. I saw that those improvements are in the order of micro seconds, while the transfer time of a page is measure in 1/10 seconds or even several seconds. Even a game engine have something like 15 ms to have a frame ready (60hz).

Re: Grief and the AI split

#349

Post by oytis »

marssaxman wrote: post #340
rdevilla wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Claude, lift these weights for me."

We have machines lift weights for us all the time. Claude is a forklift for the mind, perhaps?

That has become pretty controversial recently, but I think the difference is that in software development, building knowledge is the work. You write software and simultaneously build expertise in your team regarding what the software does that allows you to maintain it and move forward.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#350

Post by gilbetron »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #189
rudedogg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real divide is over quality and standards. We all have different thresholds for what is acceptable, and our roles as engineers typically reflect that preference. I can grind on a single piece of code for hours, iterating over and over until I like the way it works, the parameter names, etc. Other people do not see the value in that whatsoever, and something that works is good enough. We both are valuable…

> Also, theres the pace of advancement of the models. Many people formed their opinions last year, and the landscape has changed a lot. People have been saying this every year for the last 3 years. It hasn't been true before, and it isn't true now. The models haven't actually gotten smarter, they still don't actually understand a thing, and they still routinely make basic syntax and logic errors. Yes, even (insert yo…

I swear some people are using some other tech than I'm using the past few months. Where I work, Claude Code is developing major changes to our very large code base (many repos, millions upon millions of lines of really important code) and pushing to prod regularly. Even the most bearish of engineers are now using it to ship important code daily. It still has issues and you have to know how to use it, but it is a shocking productivity increase (although Amdahl's Law applies for software engineering, too. Coding is only a relatively small percentage of what is done)
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