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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#371

Post by daemin »

baxtr wrote: post #340
beachy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend built a construction management SaaS entirely via Claude. It looked damned impressive, and it kind of worked to demo, but he is in no way a programmer, though he understood the problem domain very well. I asked a few basic questions: - where is the data stored? - How would you recover from a database failure? - does it consume tokens at runtime? - what is the runtime used at the back end? - why are the web…

Sounds like it was a prototype to validate an idea? I think at validation stage technical details like that shouldn’t matter. All that matters is there market demand for this. If yes, go and build it properly.

Sadly I don't think management would go and build it properly, this sort of thing happens frequently where the prototype is put directly into production because why waste time redoing something that already exists and works. Just got to clean it up a bit, round off some sharp corners, and put it into production post-haste.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#372

Post by kamaal »

wcfrobert wrote: post #42

> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive." Great article. The "elongation" of workplace artifact…

>>The "elongation" of workplace artifacts resonated with me on such deep level.

Bulk of pretty much every thing is fluff. Not just work place artifacts.

In many ways this is the root of all complexity.

“Anything more than the truth would be too much.”

- Robert Frost

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#373

Post by danaw »

reenorap wrote: post #241
sedatk wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't matter if it's slop as long as it works I agree with most of what you said, but that statement doesn't take the time dimension into account. Slop accumulates, and eventually becomes unmanagable. We need to teach AI to become lean engineers too.

I have only seen AI make codebases better, and I'm talking about it making some pretty nuanced changes. I think mass-rewriting of projects is possible these days with AI.

just last week AI led a developer on our team to brick our git history when he was attempting to fix a deploy. he's not a git expert but an llm should of not led him that far astray, no?

i see on a weekly basis where if an llm was left to do what its initial direction was without human oversight it would have broken otherwise working programs

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#374

Post by fmx »

Merad wrote: post #186
danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

> intelligent autocomplete I'm curious how much value others are finding in this. Personally I turned it off about a year ago and went back to traditional (jetbrains) IDE autocomplete. In my experience the AI suggestions would predict exactly what I wanted < 1% of the time, were useful perhaps 10% of the time, and otherwise were simply wrong and annoying. Standard IDE features allowing me to quickly search and/or bro…

Even worse, I've seen the JetBrains AI auto-complete insert hard-to-spot bugs, like two nested for loops with i and j for loop index variables, where the inner loop was fairly complex and incorrectly used i instead of j in one place.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#375

Post by danaw »

reenorap wrote: post #219

The cope-ism in this blog post is palpable. The author is genuinely offended that someone who doesn't know how to code is daring to invade his turf. It's pretty sad that this is how he is reacting. I, for one, welcome the new paradigm shift of vibe coders entering the field. I still think I have a competitive advantage with my 30+ years of coding experience, but I don't think it's wrong for vibe coders to enter my tu…

i too find lots of value in llms but your example describes a scenario a programmer could have also easily solved and maybe even had writing it correctly in the first or second shot.

that isn't to say an llm can't be useful but your post implies it's inevitable that llms will replace humans entirely from writing code, which i think is incredibly optimistic at best.

that said we will see!

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#377

Post by vasco »

daveevad wrote: post #346
dr_kiszonka wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work under the assumption that the primary audience of everything I write at work is an AI. Managers will take what I send and have it summarized and evaluated by some chatbot or agent. (Of course, I cannot send them the summary myself.) So like ATS checkers for resumes, I find myself needing an AI checker for my text. Ultimately, we will have AI write everything for another AI to parse, which will be a massive was…

I'll argue there's potentially a standards based advantage at the end when this all shakes out. It will probably take a couple hundred years but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this :)

I'm also sure about things that will happen after me and my whole audience are dead.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#378

Post by lowbloodsugar »

groos wrote: post #272

As I am continually amazed at how well Claude 4.7 deals with highly complicated C++ code, I am also becoming painfully aware of the developing situation mentioned in this article: I no longer completely understand the code it is editing, not because I'm incapable of doing it, but because I have not authored the changes. I am trading throughput for understanding, and, eventually, judgment.

That’s entirely on you. You can take the time to understand it before moving on to the next task. I say this with sympathy and understanding.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#379

Post by vasco »

kccqzy wrote: post #181
rororournouh wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m given to understand that Anthropic uses something called Constitutional AI, where there is a central document of desirable and undesirable qualities (as well as reinforcement learning) whereas OpenAI relies more heavily on direct human feedback and rating with human trainers evaluating responses and the model conforming to those preferences. I also much prefer the output of Claude at present.

Yeah and for much of the HN crowd, we aspire to have better tastes than the average. So if the supervised learning uses average human trainers it will most likely be seen as having poor taste for much of HN.

Speak for yourself my taste is average and I aspire for it to remain so.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#380

Post by lowbloodsugar »

graphememes wrote: post #296
dnnddidiej wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you hire an Engineer in your team. You find out he can't code. Yout have 4 major projects due this quarter. Are you going to become his 1-1 tutor from zero to 10 yoe hero coder in 3 months. Because he doesn't need help, he needs a time machine. (slop intended)

if they have an idea that will make money or improve something, sure, also hire better and fire faster

New here? Ideas are fucking cheap. “I have an amazing idea!” Let me guess, you just need a coder, any coder will do they’re all the same, to turn your amazing idea into a product, and you’ll give me a couple of bucks to do it. lol.
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