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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#491

Post by ryandrake »

skydhash wrote: post #437
marcd35 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this point. There is absolutely a 'left behind' gap that is under-explored. My last job was a cable technician - making house calls to fix wifi, satellite tv, phone issues. Mostly elderly residents. The majority of them all were computer and phone illiterate. They were slow adopters to the fast-moving technology and many of them did not know how to operate their devices after we (UI/UX/hardware/software…

But maybe it doesn’t matter that much to them. I don’t know how to skin a rabbit, but that knowledge could be handy in some situations. But I don’t see myself being in that situation other than accidentally. My mother has a phone, but only use it to call. She has never needed a computer even though I spent my teenage years glued to one. But I have like 1 percent of a skill in cooking.

Exactly. We look at older people and think “oh, look at those poor souls. They don’t know X and Y technologies and they keep doing things the old way! They must feel so left behind.” Nothing is further from the truth. My whole life I’ve lived in neighborhoods full of people 20+ years older than me and not once did I have a neighbor or friend who I thought was overwhelmed with the pace of modern life and upset about how different the world was becoming from what they are used to. This is a trope. People are resilient and adaptive, and as you get older you learn how to embrace new things that actually help and reject new things that don’t. As I get older, I find myself just not caring about a lot of things that younger people care about and not doing a lot of things they do. I don’t use social media, I still pay for things with cash and checks, I don’t understand or care about the Kardashians or reality tv. My phone is 8 years old. I listen to prog rock and new wave music, and I probably couldn’t name a single popular musical performer today (besides Taylor Swift because I have a daughter). I don’t feel even slightly “left behind” or “obsolete.”

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#492

Post by adampunk »

davebren wrote: post #330
adampunk wrote: post #44

[flagged]

> "it will be nearly impossible to learn them from scratch." Aren't the tools supposed to get easier to use, not harder? As far as I can tell all the expertise in using LLMs comes from already having the underlying skill in the domain.

>As far as I can tell all the expertise in using LLMs comes from already having the underlying skill in the domain.

How is it that you came to that conclusion?

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#493

Post by logicchains »

mekael wrote: post #299
postalcoder wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, which is why I think it's a straw man. How many real devs are actually banging the "you're getting left behind!" drums?

I had an heavy ai user on my team say that “those who learn how ti use the tools wont get fired, those who dont are gone”. I used it to generate a bunch of cfn and it worked fine from an example and a couple line prompt, doesnt seem that hard to learn to me. Now reviewing the 1k lines it generated and making sure its secure, thats going to take me longer than writing it by hand.

>Now reviewing the 1k lines it generated and making sure its secure, thats going to take me longer than writing it by hand.

Then you still need to learn how to use the tools to speed up reviewing the code.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#494

Post by mat_b »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #303
we_have_options wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been playing with it on weekends for the last few months. 9 out of 10 projects, it's failed. Projects as simple as "set up a tmux/vim binding so I can write prompts in one pane and run claude in the other". Fails. I've been coding for over 20 years. If there is no learning curve, why doesn't it work for me? You can't say I'm not using it right, because if that was true, then all I need to do is climb the learnin…

I've used Claude Code to do everything from vibe-code personal apps including a terminal on top of libghostty to building my perfect desktop environment on NixOS (I'd never used Nix until then). I'm not sure why it isn't working for you. Maybe your expectation is a perfect one-shot or else it has zero value, and nothing in between? But my advice is to switch gears and see the "plan file" as the deliverable that you'r…

> So, try brainstorming the issue with Claude Code, talk it through so it's on the same page as you, ensure it's done research (web search, docs) to weigh the best solutions, and then enter plan mode so it generates a markdown plan file. From there you can read/review,tweak the plan file. Or have it implement it. Or you implement it.

This is exactly the workflow that works very well for me in Cursor (although I don't use their Plan Mode - I do my version of it). If you know the codebase well this can increase your speed/productivity quite a bit. Not trying to convince naysayers of this, their minds are already made up. Just wanted to chime in that this workflow does actually work very well (been using it for over 6 months).

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#495

Post by daveguy »

muskstinks wrote: post #397
xondono wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends very much on your line of work. As a freelancer I do a bit of everything, and I’ve seen places where LLM breezes through and gets me what I want quickly, and times where using an LLM was a complete waste of time.

But this learning is also value. Without playing around with it, you wouldn't know when to use an LLM and when not.

But the models change every 3-6 months. What's the use of learning what they can and can't do when what they can and can't do changes so frequently?

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#496

Post by jghn »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #476
lionkor wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently involved in the hiring process in our company, selecting engineers for my team. If someone applies who has the programming language we ask for in their CV, they get a first interview. If they can read code, and write VERY basic code, they will get through at least the first 2 rounds without any issues. If people put down the AI, and actually learn how to write a `for` loop, they would be more hire-able…

OP was saying the only way to get hired is through work connections of course if the process doesn't involve networking then we don't have a problem, we agree on that

> OP was saying the only way to get hired is through work connections

That is not at all what I said. Please do not misrepresent.

I said they took a targeted approach *and* exercised their networks. Those are two separate things.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#497

Post by ErroneousBosh »

kaffekaka wrote: post #490
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. I can't really agree. I've never seen anything from an LLM that I would consider even helpful, never mind transformative. How are you supposed to use them?

Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM? That seems such a black and white statement that I get confused. I am conservative regarding AI driven coding but I still see tremendous value. It makes me want to ask you: do you ever see helpful things from your colleagues at all?

> Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM?

No, not at all. I may be using it wrong.

I put in "write me a library that decodes network packets in " and it had no idea where to start.

What part of it is it supposed to do? I don't want to do any more typing than I have to.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#498

Post by aquariusDue »

bdangubic wrote: post #438
mekoka wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It will grow more complex" is never a good reason to get into things early. It's just your mind playing FOMO tricks on you. Many developers who picked up the web in the early years struggle with (front-end) web development today. It doesn't matter if they fetched jQuery or MooTools from some CDN as it was done in the mid 00s. Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-en…

> Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals. The best professionals did not fall for insanity of the modern front-end dilettante and continued hacking shit without that insanitity. > You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today. which will be outdat…

Yeah, I still get use out of XMLHttpRequest to this day good thing I got in early and variable hoisting isn't gonna get me! /s

A lot of snark aside there's a bit of a false dichotomy (I think) here at work. Whenever or wherever your jumping in point is into $something it will always pay dividends to learn the fundamentals of that $something well and unless you interact with older iterations on that $something then you'll never have to bother learning the equivalent of Grunt, Gulp, Stylus, Nunjuncks and so on for that $something.

With that being said it's also good to put aside time once a year to check out a good recommended (and usually paid) course from an established professional aimed at busy professionals.

As for LLMs I feel it's slowly becoming a thing big enough where people will have to consider where to focus their energy starting with 2027. Kinda like some people branched from web development into backend, frontend and UI/UX a good while back. Do you want to get good at using Claude Code or do you want to integrate gen AI features at work for coworkers to use or customers/users? It's still early days just like when NodeJS started gaining a lot of traction and people were making fun of leftpad.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#499

Post by marand23 »

neya wrote: post #259

> I'm OK being left behind, thanks! > It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful. > I took part in a vaccine trial > Getting Jabbed With EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE! This is such a weird article. The author presents so many contradictory anecdotal experiences against the author's own conclusion.

I think he used it as a counter-example where it made sense to him to be early. But you don't always have to be early, is his point, I think.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#500

Post by abustamam »

stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

Broadly speaking I agree. But the reality for many SWEs is that if they don't learn new AI tools they'll get let go. It's use AI or be replaced by AI (or, more accurately, be replaced by someone using Ai) for many folks.

I think it's a luxury to be able to ignore a trend like AI. crypto was fine to ignore because it didn't really replace anyone, but Ai is a different beast

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