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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#351

Post by KronisLV »

peteforde wrote: post #345
KronisLV wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't looked into 4.5 vs 4.6 in depth (since the latter seems good for my needs), but > but it's crazy expensive was something I struggled with until just going for the Max subscription and cancelling my other ones. I'm not sure what Anthropic is doing, but they're either making truckloads of money from those paying per-token (especially since you're not supposed to use subscriptions for server use cases --> devs c…

I don't get/like/want Claude Code. I do everything in Cursor, and I am very happy. I recommend it! And there's no time-based limits. You get deeply discounted API calls included in your monthly subscription, and then overage is billed at the same discounted rate. It's essentially committing to an "at least" amount per month in exchange for a preferred rate. I have a USD$200/month Cursor plan, and I do hundreds of hou…

That's pretty cool! I haven't really been a heavy user of Cursor, but found Cline/RooCode/KiloCode in VSC to be pretty good, while letting me preserve my existing setup and also easily switch between multiple providers, sometimes in the middle of some work, to let another model check the output of the first one!

I think most I ever spent per month was 300 USD, but I had to cut down on that and Anthropic's subscription being way more affordable than paying per token (alongside GitHub Copilot, which also has multiple model support and pretty generous limits alongside unlimited autocomplete), since I'm also helping a friend with expenses during their chemo and some other friends with some meds and stuff, even though policemen and teachers and others have way worse financial circumstances than software devs in Latvia, the economy here doesn't give that much breathing room for that kind of thing.

Oh for a while I was also using Cerebras Code which gives you really generous token limits (like 24M per day on the 50 USD per month tier), though the GLM 4.7 model I tried out still made me go back and work on fixing its output more often than I'd like. Eventually I kinda settled on SOTA.

That said, I do remember a post here on HN where some founders were thinking whether they should throw something like over 1000 USD at Anthropic (the API variety) per month and they realized that for them that amount of money was totally reasonable, compared to getting some junior devs or whatever.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#352

Post by bluefirebrand »

peteforde wrote: post #310
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I see a lot of posts about this, and I see a lot studies, also on HN, that show that this isn't the case. Now of the course the "this isn't the case" stuff is statistically, thus there can be individual developers whom are faster, but there can also be that an individual developer sometimes is faster and sometimes not but the times that they are fas…

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…

> You want us to bring paper receipts, like we have some incentive to lie to you

Of course you might be heavily financially invested in AI companies so you might indeed have an incentive to hype up the tech

Or you might be relying on your hype to drive traffic to your blog

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#353

Post by tern »

salawat wrote: post #330
tern wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be saying two things. For me, the answer is: I've been somewhere in the middle—working on real projects, sure. I've been employed as a software developer in the past, and I've worked with startups and corporations. I've also worked in academia. Have I spent years, personally grinding directly in the belly of the beast? No. I managed a small dev team in small startup once. Yeah, it's not the same thing. I…

I envy you to be honest. My muse doesn't bring me visions of sublime beauty. No melodies, landscapes, scenes or plays in the mind's eye. Just blueprints, system diagrams, feedback loops, crystalized reasoning, probable futures, things going wrong, breaking. Never in a way that seems to be communicable to galvanize more than a couple people who probably already know what I'm seeing deep down in their hearts. But... I'…

Appreciate this very direct and real share. I pray that you find your way to a more merciful part of this life game, or that somehow all that you're going through now is worth it for something later.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#354

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

simonw wrote: post #186
TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a developer who was made redundant, and I'm now casting around for an entirely new job because, likewise, I have no interest in working with AI. It sounds boring, and the concept squicks me out, to be honest.

Out of interest what kind of fields are you looking at? I expect there are going to be a bunch of people in similar situations to you over the next few years, I'm interested to know where they end up.

Currently computer networking or perhaps security. Or something else. In an ideal world, I go back to college and retrain as a sign language interpreter. But I can't afford that.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#355

Post by tern »

godelski wrote: post #301
tern wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, but I have subtle disagreements: > Why not read books, manuals, or take online classes? There is free access to all these things, the only cost is time and energy. Sure, but it's just way faster now . I can get the exact right piece of knowledge I need to advance my understanding on demand, rather than having to spend minutes or hours tracking down the right information, then scanning around the text to f…

> I can get the exact right piece of knowledge I need to advance my understanding on demand This is where I disagree. It would be different if these LLMs were acting as instructors and pushing you through courses designed for learning things, but this is more akin to looking at the section of a textbook that contains the exact paragraph you need. Or doing the same thing with a manual. I do not think this is the best…

Honestly, based on where this is going, I suspect we might agree more than it appears in this short exchange.

As for the point about complexity, I will meditate on it.

My first cut is that what you're getting at is something like: you're using "complexity" in the technical sense of the word, in which case we're in the realm of so-called "wicked problems" and such. There is some kind of 'making sense' that goes beyond 'mere ideas,' or at the very least something like "throw more minds and hands at the problem," in this context, is the wrong attitude.

In such a world, a machine that amplifies human effort (while obscuring it) is not the right tool for the job—more than likely you find yourself spinning around an attractor basin.

I personally have a tentative conclusion that I specifically am able to avoid this by amplifying certain strategies I've developed over my life, but really, I don't have solid confirmation yet.

In any event, I'm enjoying the experiment, but I'll reflect on why you seem to be certain about it.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#356

Post by inder1 »

The "K-shaped workforce" framing is real and probably underappreciated. Senior engineers get more out of AI because they can evaluate the output, catch the architectural mistakes, and debug the edge cases. Juniors using AI to write code they can't read aren't building the debugging instinct that makes senior engineers valuable. That gap compounds over 2-3 years. The question isn't whether to use AI. It's whether you're actually understanding what it produces.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#357

Post by peteforde »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #352
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…

> You want us to bring paper receipts, like we have some incentive to lie to you Of course you might be heavily financially invested in AI companies so you might indeed have an incentive to hype up the tech Or you might be relying on your hype to drive traffic to your blog

I don't have an investment portfolio, and I don't have a blog. But I appreciate that you're actually thinking about what I said, so thanks for that.

That said, if I did have a blog, the amount of negative attention that AI gets these days is not going to have the desired effect.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#358

Post by peteforde »

KronisLV wrote: post #351
peteforde wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get/like/want Claude Code. I do everything in Cursor, and I am very happy. I recommend it! And there's no time-based limits. You get deeply discounted API calls included in your monthly subscription, and then overage is billed at the same discounted rate. It's essentially committing to an "at least" amount per month in exchange for a preferred rate. I have a USD$200/month Cursor plan, and I do hundreds of hou…

That's pretty cool! I haven't really been a heavy user of Cursor, but found Cline/RooCode/KiloCode in VSC to be pretty good, while letting me preserve my existing setup and also easily switch between multiple providers, sometimes in the middle of some work, to let another model check the output of the first one! I think most I ever spent per month was 300 USD, but I had to cut down on that and Anthropic's subscriptio…

I read that same post, and for me it wasn't just something I remember; it had a profound impact on how I came to be typing at you casually about how I have spent up to $700 a month on Opus tokens in Cursor (which absolutely lets you switch between providers... I just really like Opus 4.5!)

To me, all of the switching between dev environments + all of the time spent undoing errors causes by less powerful models has a huge time cost; not to be cliche that means it's very expensive to use error prone models and obsess over trying all of the new half-baked things (I've never even heard of most of the stuff you mentioned, lol). Like, if I spend an hour of my time mucking around with some tool, that's a good chunk of the $200/month I commit to Cursor.

Anyhow, at the real risk of sounding like an unpaid Cursor salesman, IMO it's worth every penny. For me, the jury is still out on whether people find Opus 4.6's 5x context to be valuable enough to pay significantly more for it over 4.5, which again is rated as being slightly better at agentic coding than 4.6. Since agentic coding is what I do....

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#360

Post by godelski »

tern wrote: post #355
godelski wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can get the exact right piece of knowledge I need to advance my understanding on demand This is where I disagree. It would be different if these LLMs were acting as instructors and pushing you through courses designed for learning things, but this is more akin to looking at the section of a textbook that contains the exact paragraph you need. Or doing the same thing with a manual. I do not think this is the best…

Honestly, based on where this is going, I suspect we might agree more than it appears in this short exchange. As for the point about complexity, I will meditate on it. My first cut is that what you're getting at is something like: you're using "complexity" in the technical sense of the word, in which case we're in the realm of so-called "wicked problems" and such. There is some kind of 'making sense' that goes beyond…

I agree and think we're mostly on the same page fwiw. But there are parts I disagree with. We are more aligned than misaligned. But I do want to clear some things up

  > you're using "complexity" in the technical sense of the word
Unfortunately complexity is a bit more complex than this and I think it's leading to some miscommunication. Even in technical settings complexity is overloaded. Something can be computationally complex but easy to understand. Something can be conceptually complex, but trivial to compute. I do really mean "complexity is complex".

But I am using it in both senses. I'll make a pretty straight forward argument here. As we advance on any given topic it becomes harder to advance, right? Just take something simple like playing a video game. You start from nothing and then you get a lot better simply by figuring out the controls. But as you progress towards the "professional" level it both gets computationally harder to advance (it requires more time and training) as well as conceptually harder (as little details and the number of things you need to consider increases). You have to process more information and you have to account for more information. Another way to see this is with a mathematical example: a Taylor Series. A first order approximation is relatively easy to compute but it quickly grows as you want your accuracy to increase. And the relationship isn't linear...

  > I personally have a tentative conclusion that I specifically am able to avoid this by amplifying certain strategies I've developed over my life
I can't answer this. I'm just some dude on the internet and have no idea about you. So my response shouldn't be taken in that way.

What I can do is ask an important question. Are you able to confirm you are unique or are you just tricking yourself?

Either could be true, right? I mean we put mental defenses around us all the time. There's so much crazy shit we treat as mundane. I mean just a solar flare being the size of a dozen earths and we treat it like our little minds can comprehend that and make it mundane. We like to convince ourselves that we understand things much better than we actually do. It's normal, but recognition of it is important to help us continue moving forward, right? To question what we believe. Since our understanding is never perfect, there's always more, but our brains like to feel done as that feels accomplished.

It certainly does not help that we're working with tools that are trained for human preference. I use them too. I am an AI researcher even. But I think we also need to be careful. The same objective we use to train these systems to be accurate and sound natural in their speech also maximizes their ability to deceive us. It is a really tricky thing, so I think it is also something we need to be extremely cautious about. If we don't believe we could be the fool then that makes us the biggest fool of them all, right? So how do we find out if we've been fooled or not? I don't think that's so easy and I honestly don't have an answer. There's a lot of complexity to this as you dig in and... complexity is complex.

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