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The Industrialization of IT

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Re: The Industrialization of IT

#41

Post by immibis »

0xEF wrote: post #36
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #25

I wish people would stop making predictions about LLMs so confidently. Some people confidently predict that LLMs will never be able to replace capable engineers, and other people equally confidently predict that we'll all be out of a job in five years. The reality is that we don't know. We don't know what the ceiling is for LLM programming ability. We don't know how much better they can get without scaling up the har…

Correct. But... We _do know_ that companies are typically driven by greed and profit, so if it is possible for them to replace their human workers with something that does a similar level of work but also does not require a paycheck, we would be absolute fools to assume that they won't do everything in their power to make that a reality, regardless of the understood reliability of LLMs.

We also know that incompetent management is widespread, so many companies would replace their humans workers with LLMs even if it is not possible, and we know many investors are also incompetent, so these companies might even be allowed to continue to exist and might even grow really big.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#42

Post by immibis »

jsk2600 wrote: post #38
senko wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is about right 1% of the time I have an app where people scan their retail/restaurant/cafe receipts and store them. I use Gemini 2.0 for OCR. It is right more than 99% of the time. I would be making many more errors transcribing the receipts manually. AIs are a different kind of tools, for a different kind of problems, with a different kind of failure cases.

OCRs are quite different from AI/ML, which the parent comment is referring to. In fact, OCR existed way before the current AI wave.

OCRs are AI/ML in the sense it meant to everyone before 2020.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#43

Post by [deleted] »

lordkrandel wrote: post #5

Also, calculators did millions of operations, but the were 99.999999% right all the time. That's what set the apart from human people: eternal reliability 24/7. AI is about right 1% of the time, a human is needed to recognise when the machine is wrong, and it keeps repeating the same mistakes when identified and corrected. People WISH it was like a calculator, but you know, magic thinking doesn't make things happen.

[deleted]

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#44

Post by seestem »

lordkrandel wrote: post #5

Also, calculators did millions of operations, but the were 99.999999% right all the time. That's what set the apart from human people: eternal reliability 24/7. AI is about right 1% of the time, a human is needed to recognise when the machine is wrong, and it keeps repeating the same mistakes when identified and corrected. People WISH it was like a calculator, but you know, magic thinking doesn't make things happen.

> AI is about right 1% of the time

just write another prompt

edit to say:

One of the best skills for developers is to lookup information using search engines. All the information is out there already you just need an understanding what you are looking for. This is similar to painting the colors are there already but not everyone is a good painter. LLMs empower skilled developers and do the boilerplate work usually done by mediocre developers. Later on it will depend on who can write the best prompt but that requires understanding.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#46

Post by senko »

jsk2600 wrote: post #38
senko wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is about right 1% of the time I have an app where people scan their retail/restaurant/cafe receipts and store them. I use Gemini 2.0 for OCR. It is right more than 99% of the time. I would be making many more errors transcribing the receipts manually. AIs are a different kind of tools, for a different kind of problems, with a different kind of failure cases.

OCRs are quite different from AI/ML, which the parent comment is referring to. In fact, OCR existed way before the current AI wave.

In case it wasn't clear, I'm using "OCR" in my comment above for "reading and interpreting textual documents provided as images", not as a reference to a specific tech such as Tesseract.

In the app, I am, in fact, using AI/ML tech and I'm saying it's very accurate for my use case, as a counterpoint to the parent comment which says AI works in 1% cases, maybe.

But since you brought it up, this workflow works better than the supposedly "99.999999% right all the time" traditional code (traditional OCR tools).

Hope this clears it up.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#47

Post by bryanrasmussen »

swexbe wrote: post #26
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 10 average devs can produce hundreds of thousands of lines of buggy, poor performance code that implement thousands of features poorly in the same amount of time the senior developers could implement tens of thousands of lines of great code that implement hundreds of features perfectly. But what if the three senior devs could produce thousands of lines of great code that implement thousands of features perfectly.…

Typing shouldn't be what's taking up most of your time if you are a great dev writing great code.

which kind of typing are we talking about here? if it's the kind that my hands do on a keyboard that is obviously not what is meant by writing code.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#48

Post by ghaff »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #33
fhd2 wrote: post #4

Tangential, but an entry level developer at 190k USD per year seems nuts, is that really a reasonable number? From a quick search, I find numbers below 100k USD for the bay area, which seems more reasonable. In a well off European country, you'd pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at will and all that, but >4x? Not sure how to back that u…

I'm not sure many are hiring European devs at all at the moment, not sure what the US market is like.

Definitely not what they were, especially for more junior developers as I understand it. And I assume total comp is somewhat depressed too if only because of the stock market.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#49

Post by lordkrandel »

joelthelion wrote: post #13

> In 2025, the engineer probably beats Gemini. Sure, great. But in 2030, who wins this hypothetical? I don't think we need to wait for 2030. Today, using aider/cursor and Gemini-pro-2.5, I'm pretty sure a team of two or three senior developers with great domain knowledge would be competitive with a team of 10 average devs. Being a small, close-knit team has a lot of advantages. And LLMs can help close the productivit…

I think you're building a 100x tech debt with that.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#50

Post by franktankbank »

0xEF wrote: post #36
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #25

I wish people would stop making predictions about LLMs so confidently. Some people confidently predict that LLMs will never be able to replace capable engineers, and other people equally confidently predict that we'll all be out of a job in five years. The reality is that we don't know. We don't know what the ceiling is for LLM programming ability. We don't know how much better they can get without scaling up the har…

Correct. But... We _do know_ that companies are typically driven by greed and profit, so if it is possible for them to replace their human workers with something that does a similar level of work but also does not require a paycheck, we would be absolute fools to assume that they won't do everything in their power to make that a reality, regardless of the understood reliability of LLMs.

Unless its too expensive or just doesn't work well. Although in entrenched fields like healthcare that act with impunity I guess an LLM would make a slightly cheaper firewall between the industry and the customers you "serve".
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