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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#451

Post by Havoc »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #369
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.

>yes you can do most things on an artisanal level... But who is going to pay for that?

Nobody. When I said artisanal I meant that there is no mainstream market for it.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#452

Post by mxkopy »

hexaga wrote: post #425
mxkopy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it could be the most important skill to have. The most common, and the most standardized one for sure, but if coding agents are doing fundamental R&D or running ops then nobody needs skills anyway. > As it turns out, neural nets “won” > The people who scoffed at neural nets and never got up to speed not so much. I get the feeling you don’t know what you’re talking about. LLMs are impressive but what hav…

Neural nets are used in way more applications than just LLMs. They did win. They won decisively in industry, for all kinds of tasks. Equating the use of one with the other is a pretty strong signal of: > you don’t know what you’re talking about Consider: Why did Google have a bazillion TPUs, anyway?

They are saying coding agents are winning similarly to NNs and that’s what I’m pushing back on

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#453

Post by ryandrake »

eudamoniac wrote: post #449
fragmede wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you take as evidence?

Any quality, useful (commercial) piece of software made with only AI code would suffice. Any successful AI-written indie game. Any successful AI-written library.

The proof should be in the pudding. Claude Code has been out for a year, and the boosters are saying they are orders of magnitude more productive, so we should have seen some kind of successful output within an order of magnitude of the time it would have taken to develop using traditional, non-LLM tools.

Where is the agent-coded Photoshop clone eating Adobe's lunch? Where is the agent-coded Quicken clone which puts the original out of business? Where is the agent-coded hit video game? All we are seeing so far are "Show HN" level projects.

The only thing LLMs seem to be speeding up is people's mouths.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#454

Post by therealdrag0 »

draxil wrote: post #133
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…

Useful tool, and if you're just scratching a small itch it's great. For any serious system you still need to understand and guide the code, and unless you do some of the coding.. You won't. It's just novelty right now is skewing our reasoning.

It’s still faster to use AI to generate code while reading and guiding the code. Hell even long before LLms I would write python scripts to generate boilerplate code etc. LLM can be used similarly as a productivity boost in serious systems.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#455

Post by falkensmaize »

stevepotter wrote: post #298
falkensmaize wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will still be turning out the same problematic code in a few years that they do now, because they aren’t intelligent and won’t be intelligent unless there is a fundamental paradigm shift in how an LLM works. I use LLMs with best practices to program professionally in an enterprise every day, and even Opus 4.6 still consistently makes some of the dumbest architectural decisions, even with full context, complete a…

I keep hearing “they aren’t intelligent” and spit out “crap code”. That’s not been my experience. LLMs prevented and also caught intricate concurrency issues that would have taken me a long time. I just went “hmmm, nice” and went on. The problem there is that I didn’t get that sense of accomplishment I crave and I really didn’t learn anything. Those are “me” problems but I think programmers are collectively grappling…

They are not intelligent. Full stop. Very sophisticated next word prediction is not intelligence. LLMs don’t comprehend or understand things. They don’t think, feel or comprehend things. That’s just not how they work.

That said, very sophisticated next word predictors can and sometimes do write good code. It’s amazing some of the things they get right and then can turn around and make the weirdest dumbest mistakes.

It’s a tool. Sometimes it’s the right tool, sometimes it’s not.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#456

Post by ikr678 »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #8

Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading. More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.

Another one is: Don't use GPS in your own city. Try to learn where you live. Read the map in advance if you are going somewhere new and memorise the turns.

A shocking number of my coworkers plot every single trip (even to work!) and claim this helps with traffic or undercover cameras or some other cope. But the traffic will be there regardless, and they shouldnt need Google Maps to remind them not to speed. They'd rather be glued to the screen than pay attention to their surroundings or learn any landmarks.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#457

Post by ikr678 »

flir wrote: post #30
cyanydeez wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure all this AI is built on top of Silicon valley's technobabble of "permanent underclass" which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology. But besides that, it's interesting so many people are willing to tailor their entire workflow and product to indeterminate machines and business culture. I recommend everyone stop using these infernal clou…

I'm pretty sure the -as-a-service stage is only temporary. The local models are only going to get better, and the improvement curve has to top out eventually. Maybe the cloud models will still give you a few extra percentage points of performance, especially if they're based on data sets that aren't available to the public, but it won't make much difference on most tasks and the local models will have a lot of advant…

As-a-service for infra maybe, but as-a-service for payment is here to stay.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#458

Post by qsera »

coldtea wrote: post #285
qsera wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not hallucinating... LLM hallucinating is not an edge case. It is how they generate output 100% time. Mainstream media only calls it "hallucination" when the output is wrong, but from the point of view of a LLM, it is working exactly it is supposed to....

> LLM hallucinating is not an edge case. It is how they generate output 100% time If enough of the time it matches reality -- which it does, it doesn't matter. Especially in a coding setup, where you can verify the results, have tests you wrote yourself, and the end goal is well defined. And conversely, if a human is a bullshitter, or ignorant, or liar, or stupid, it doesn't matter if they end up with useless stuff "…

>If enough of the time it matches reality...

But what is "enough of the time"?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#459

Post by coldtea »

qsera wrote: post #458
coldtea wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM hallucinating is not an edge case. It is how they generate output 100% time If enough of the time it matches reality -- which it does, it doesn't matter. Especially in a coding setup, where you can verify the results, have tests you wrote yourself, and the end goal is well defined. And conversely, if a human is a bullshitter, or ignorant, or liar, or stupid, it doesn't matter if they end up with useless stuff "…

>If enough of the time it matches reality... But what is "enough of the time"?

Does it have to be a specific number? Whatever you feel like its worth using it over not.

If I write code for medical devices I might not tolerate even one AI-induced issue. If I write glorified web apps, I could tolerate dozens of them as long as it still helps get stuff done faster when it works.

Your car fails ocassionally and needs service. If most of the time it gets you there, enough that you find it worth it over NOT having a car or buying a new one, then it's useful.

And unlike the car, you can do whatever review/verification/testing of the resulting AI code before you deploy it. And the code failing wont kill you or others (if you write trading software, medical devices firmware, or airplane code, you can always not use it).

You don't even need to let it rip on your system, can use it with user confirmation for any action or have it go in a sandbox.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#460

Post by moron4hire »

ryandrake wrote: post #435
moron4hire wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot more "yngmi" and "have fun being poor"-style attitude around here regarding LLM boosterism.

The thing I can't stand is the absolute certainty of the boosters. It's almost religious. AI is the future . AI will do this . AI will cause that . It is inevitable. Everything is obviously changing. They leave no room left for debate. No openness to pushback. And no evidence or proof. It just is because it is, and if you don't believe it, you're simply wrong. We saw the same sort of attitudes with blockchain and NFT…

Technojesus is going to save all the Claude Code users from never having learned how to invert a binary tree, amen64.
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