371–380 of 1001 posts
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Do you trust the assembly your compiler puts out? The machine code your assembler puts out? The virtual machine it runs on? Thousands of lines of code you've never looked at...
"Trust"? God no. That's why I have a debugger
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
I understand your feelings. You spent years working hard to learn and master a complex craft, and now seeing that work feel almost irrelevant because of AI can be deeply unsettling. However, this can also be an opportunity to gain some understanding about our nature and our minds. Through that understanding, we can free ourselves from suffering, find joy, and embrace life and the present moment as it is. I am just fi…
While I think rationally what you said is good and makes sense, at the same time it feels like it says you should forget your roots and be this impermanent being existing in the present and only the present. I value everything about my life, the past, my role models when I was a kid, my past and current skills, all friends from all ages, my whole path essentially. When considering current choices I have to make, I feel more drawn to think "What has been my path and values previously, and what makes sense now?" instead of forgetting the past and my ego and just hustling with the $CURRENT technology.
At least that's how I have thought about my ego when I have tried to approach it with topics like these. It might allow me to make more money in the present if I just disidentified with it, but that thought legitimately feels horrifying because it would mean devaluing my roots.
Interested to hear your take on this.
Same here - it's like programming with a couple of buddies. Occasionally they goof off and wreck everything, but we put it back together and end up with a finished project. I'm literally going through my backlog of projects from the early 80s! There are parts of each of these projects that were black holes for me - just didn't know enough to get a toe hold. With Karl (that's my agent) he explains everything I don't u…
I've caught Claude making the gravest anti pattern mistakes using Elixir and trying to get it to correct them makes the whole thing worse.
It's ok for smaller scoped stuff but actual architectural changes come out worse than before more often than not.
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
On the plus side you're retiring soon... imagine if your were a graduate today
A real-life scene that made me chuckle last weekend… “Oh shit, Hey Babe did you close my laptop?” My not-very-technical friend as we returned home from a Sunday afternoon trip to the park with the kids to find his Claude Code session had been thwarted.
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> why would anyone want to fire me? Because they can hire some "prompt engineer" to "steer the AI" for $30-50k instead of $150-$250k.
Anyone that only costs $30k-50k would either be doing this part-time, or have some limit that prevented them from earning $150k-250k.
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a negative way. I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge only because: - book writing and authorship was democratized away from the church and academia - web content publication and p…
This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking.
LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.
You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.
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how is 2-3 centralized providers of this new technology "democratization"?
You're right! And cars when they were invented didn't give increased mobility to millions of people, because they came from just a few manufacturers. Cell phones made communication easier for exactly zero people even though billions have been sold. Why? Because they come from just a few different companies.
As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…
> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as…
Programming was already “democratized” in the sense that anyone could learn to program for free, using only open-source software. Making everyone reliant on a few evil megacorporations is the opposite of democratization.
Maybe the internet has made me too cynical, and I'm glad people seem to be having a good time, but at time of posting I can't help but notice that almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded. Still better than the breathless announcements of the death of software engineering, but quite similar in tone.