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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#361

Post by [deleted] »

tasuki wrote: post #134
Supermancho wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

> I've worked for 35ish companies It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills. I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!

[deleted]

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#362

Post by doctorwho42 »

kstenerud wrote: post #83
mmustapic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the free software movement wants that the source code of the software you use be available to you to modify it if you wish. AI does not necessarily do that.

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…

Reengineering from scratch is different than being able to form an existing software.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#363

Post by benjiro3000 »

alfanick wrote: post #111

I quit. The clankers won. I don't see any proof that software development is not dead. Software engineering is not, and it's much more than writing code, and it can be fun. But writing code is dead, there is no point of doing it if an LLM can output the same code 100x faster. Of course, architecture and operations stays in our hands (for now?). Initially I was very sceptic, first versions of ChatGPT or Claude were ra…

[dead]

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#364

Post by SoftTalker »

rafterydj wrote: post #327
kjksf wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all so vague. "lack of investment in their skill". You just spent $250k and 5 years in college learning stuff. You get hired to do a job for money. What "investment" do you expect company to do? Give me number of weeks and amount of dollars per year and tell me how it stacks against $250k and 5 years that you just spent? If you want to learn on the job, shouldn't YOU be paying the company for teaching you, like…

This argument falls apart if you consider what field we're talking about. At what point would going to school for 5 years give you the whole education you actually needed? Does learning C in 1995-2000 prepare you for Rust in 2026? No, and it shouldn't, but work needs done, so _yes_ there is a dollar amount of value for educating your workforce that has already been vetted and already knows the context for your busine…

If all you got out of a Computer Science undergrad program was "learning C" you were severely shortchanged. An 8-week bootcamp could have done that.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#365

Post by tpdly »

trollbridge wrote: post #269
rekrsiv wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The endgame in programming is reducing complexity before the codebase becomes impossible to reason about. This is not a solved problem, and most codebases the LLMs were trained on are either just before that phase transition or well past it. Complexity is not just a matter of reducing the complexity of the code, it's also a matter of reducing the complexity of the problem. A programmer can do the former alone with th…

No kidding. So far the complexity introduced by LLM-generated code in my current codebase has taken far more time to deal with than the hand-written code. Overall, we are trying to "silo" LLM-generated code into its own services with a well-defined interface so that the code can just be thrown away and regenerated (or rewritten by hand) because maintaining it is so difficult.

Yeah, same. I like the silo idea, I'll have to explore that.

I'm relieved to hear this because the LLM hype in this thread is seriously disorienting. Deeply convinced that coding "by hand" is just as defensible in the LLM age as handwriting was in the TTY age. My dopamine system is quite unconvinced though, killing me.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#366

Post by SoftTalker »

bobthepanda wrote: post #359
SoftTalker wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those things will be necessary if progress continues as it has. The AI will do all of that. In fact it will generate software that uses already proven architectures (instead of inventing new ones for every project as human developers like to do). The testing has already been done: they work. There are no vulnerabilites. They are able to communicate with stakeholders (management) using their native language, n…

Humans are still in the loop as the final signoff responsible for liability, and to do an audit you’ll need someone who knows what they’re looking at.

Liabilty will be waived in the terms of use.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#367

Post by TomasBM »

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…

I agree with the sentiment, but I think the problem is much wider.

Managers at companies are just doing what they've optimized their careers for: maintaining some edge over some competition, at some cost. What is pure FOMO to you or me, is good strategy to anyone trying to win [1]. In other words, FOMO was always the strategy.

This self-reinforcing loop is also not going away. There hasn't been any real evidence that any part of knowledge work, including coding, cannot be automated [2]. Even if human-level quality or cost-effectiveness takes 10 more years, all tasks are functionally solved or about to be. I don't like it, but it's true.

The big problem is that the people who are removed from this loop, who have the time to understand its effects and the power to make changes, are doing fuck-all.

So, whether the loop stops for a while or speeds up even more, we're fucked until we figure out how to detach full-time employment from survival.

[1] I believe this is called meta in PvP games; even if you want to subvert the meta, you gotta know it well first.

[2] Although it could just be my impression, and I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#368

Post by array_key_first »

SoftTalker wrote: post #358
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel . What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one: - Able to review the ou…

None of those things will be necessary if progress continues as it has. The AI will do all of that. In fact it will generate software that uses already proven architectures (instead of inventing new ones for every project as human developers like to do). The testing has already been done: they work. There are no vulnerabilites. They are able to communicate with stakeholders (management) using their native language, n…

If this is the case then none of us will have jobs; we will be completely useless.

I think, most likely, you'll still need developers in the mix to make sure the development is going right. You can't just have only business people, because they have no way to gauge if the AI is making the right decisions in regards to technical requirements. So even if the AI DOES get as good as you're saying, they wouldn't know that without developers.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#369

Post by doctorwho42 »

Havoc wrote: post #66

> The only winning move is not to play. Alas I think tech crowd have collectively painted humanity into a corner where not playing is not an option anymore. The combination of having subverted copyright and enabled cheap machine replication kills large swaths of creativity. At least as a viable living. One can still do many things on an artisanal level certainly and as excited as I am about AI it’s hard not to see it…

The problem is worse than that though, yes you can do most things on an artisanal level... But who is going to pay for that? What happens when head count drops, you get less capital in the hands of working class... And no matter your opinions on the wealthy, they don't have the need or desire for 5% of the population doing artisanal level work for them at a living wage.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#370

Post by lelandbatey »

SoftTalker wrote: post #358
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel . What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one: - Able to review the ou…

None of those things will be necessary if progress continues as it has. The AI will do all of that. In fact it will generate software that uses already proven architectures (instead of inventing new ones for every project as human developers like to do). The testing has already been done: they work. There are no vulnerabilites. They are able to communicate with stakeholders (management) using their native language, n…

> They work

For some definition of work, yes, not every definition. Their product is not without flaw, leaving room at for improvement, and room for improvement by more than only other AI.

> There are no vulnerabilities

That's just not true. There's loads of vulnerabilities, just as there's plenty of vulnerabilities in human written code. Try it, point an AI looking for vulns at the output of an AI that's been through the highest intensity and scrutiny workflow, even code that has already been AI reviewed for vulnerabilities.

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