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The Bitter Prediction

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Re: The Bitter Prediction

#51

Post by gadilif »

lloeki wrote: post #9
gadilif wrote: post #4

I can really relate to the feeling described after modifying save files to get more resources in a game, but I wonder if it's the same kind of 'cheating'. Doing better in a game has its own associsted feeling of achievement, and cheating definitely robs you of that, which to me explains why playing will be less fun. Moving faster on a side project or at work doesn't feel like the same kind of shortcut/cheat. Most of…

> Moving faster on a side project or at work doesn't feel like the same kind of shortcut/cheat. Depends whether you're in it for the endgame or the journey. For some the latter is a means to the former, and for others it's the other way around.

I see your point, and tend to agree. However, at least for the time being, I see the AI tools not inherently different than refactoring tools which were available over a decade ago. It helps me move faster, and I feel like it's one more tool I need to master, so it will be useful in my toolbox.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#52

Post by tasuki »

zwnow wrote: post #44
falcor84 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most devs that use AI blindly trust it instead of questioning what it produces. Without the punctuation, I first read it tautologically as "Most devs that use AI blindly, trust it instead of questioning what it produces". But even assuming you meant "Most devs that use AI, blindly trust it instead of questioning what it produces", there's still a negative feedback loop. We're still at the early experimentation phas…

A dystopia in which ill look for a new career. Using AI to generate code sucks the joy out of the job.

> A dystopia in which ill look for a new career.

What makes you think that will be necessary?

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#53

Post by mjburgess »

fhd2 wrote: post #36
mjburgess wrote: post #11

All articles of this class, whether positive or negative, begin "I was working on a hobby project" or some variation thereof. The purpose of hobbies is to be a hobby, archetypical tech projects are about self-mastery. You cannot improve your mastery with a "tool" that robs you of most of the minor and major creative and technical decisions of the task. Building IKEA furniture will not make you a better carpenter. Why…

> I have not seen a single take by an experienced software engineer have a "sky is falling" take, Let me save everybody some time: 1. They're not saying it because they don't want to think of themselves as obsolete. 2. You're not using AI right, programmers who do will take your job. 3. What model/version/prompt did you use? Works For Me. But seriously: It does not matter _that_ much what experienced engineers think.…

> You're not using AI right

I use AI heavily, it's my field.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#54

Post by dinfinity »

cardanome wrote: post #19

A relative known youtuber called the primeagen has recently done a challenge sponsored by Cursor themselves where he and some friends would "vibe code" a game in a week. The results were pretty underwhelming. They would have been much faster not using generative Ai. Compared what you see from game jams where sometimes solo devs create whole games in just a few days it was pretty trash. It also tracks with my own expe…

To be fair, the whole "vibe coding" thing is really really new stuff. It will undoubtedly take some time to optimize how to actually effectively do it.

Recently, we've seen a lot of a shift in insight into not just diving straight into implementation, but actually spending time on careful specification, discussion and documentation either with or without an AI assistant before setting it loose to implement stuff.

For large, existing codebases, I sincerely believe that the biggest improvements lie in using MCP and proper instructions to connect the AI assistants to spec and documentation. For new projects I would put pretty much all of that directly into the repos.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#55

Post by fhd2 »

mjburgess wrote: post #53
fhd2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have not seen a single take by an experienced software engineer have a "sky is falling" take, Let me save everybody some time: 1. They're not saying it because they don't want to think of themselves as obsolete. 2. You're not using AI right, programmers who do will take your job. 3. What model/version/prompt did you use? Works For Me. But seriously: It does not matter _that_ much what experienced engineers think.…

> You're not using AI right I use AI heavily, it's my field.

The part before "But seriously" was sarcasm. I find it very odd to assume that a professional developer (even if it's not what they would describe as their field) is using it wrong. But it's a pretty standard reply to measured comments about LLMs.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#56

Post by cardanome »

pornel wrote: post #28

AI will be cheap to run. The hardware for AI is getting cheaper and more efficient, and the models are getting less wasteful too. Just a few years ago GPT-3.5 used to be a secret sauce running on the most expensive GPU racks, and now models beating it are available with open weights and run on high end consumer hardware. Few iterations down the line good-enough models will run on average hardware. When that Xcom game…

I wouldn't be so optimistic.

Moore's law is withering away due to physical limitations. Energy prices go up because of the end of fossil fuels and rising climate change costs. Furthermore the global supply chain is under attack by rising geopolitical tension.

Depending on US tariffs and how the Taiwan situation plays out and many other risks, it might be that compute will get MORE expensive in the future.

While there is room for optimization on the generative AI front we are still have not even reached the point were generative AI is actually good at programming. We have promising toys but for real productivity we need orders of magnitude bigger models. Just look how ChatGPT 4.5 is barely economically viable already with its price per token.

Sure if humanity survives long enough to widely employ fusion energy, it might become practical and cheap again but that will be a long and rocky road.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#57

Post by zwnow »

tasuki wrote: post #52
zwnow wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dystopia in which ill look for a new career. Using AI to generate code sucks the joy out of the job.

> A dystopia in which ill look for a new career. What makes you think that will be necessary?

Because I dont want to work with AI agents? I like my work to be fun, as in "I could bear working 8 hours a day with this." I like thinking about the problems and solutions and how that translates to code. I like implementing it with my own hands. Substitute that with writing prompts and I'll look for a different career thats actually fun.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#58

Post by joelthelion »

IshKebab wrote: post #48
joelthelion wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which model and tool are you using? There's a whole spectrum of AI-assisted coding.

ChatGPT, Claude (both through the website), and Github Copilot (paid if it makes any difference).

Try Aider with Gemini 2.5.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#59

Post by pornel »

cardanome wrote: post #56
pornel wrote: post #28

AI will be cheap to run. The hardware for AI is getting cheaper and more efficient, and the models are getting less wasteful too. Just a few years ago GPT-3.5 used to be a secret sauce running on the most expensive GPU racks, and now models beating it are available with open weights and run on high end consumer hardware. Few iterations down the line good-enough models will run on average hardware. When that Xcom game…

I wouldn't be so optimistic. Moore's law is withering away due to physical limitations. Energy prices go up because of the end of fossil fuels and rising climate change costs. Furthermore the global supply chain is under attack by rising geopolitical tension. Depending on US tariffs and how the Taiwan situation plays out and many other risks, it might be that compute will get MORE expensive in the future. While there…

LLMs on GPUs have a lot of computational inefficiencies and untapped parallelism. GPUs have been designed for more diverse workloads with much smaller working sets. LLM inference is ridiculously DRAM-bound. We currently have 10×-200× too much compute available compared to the DRAM bandwidth required. Even without improvements in transistors we can get more efficient hardware for LLMs.

The way we use LLMs is also primitive and inefficient. RAG is a hack, and in most LLM architectures the RAM cost grows quadratically with the context length, in a workload that is already DRAM-bound, on a hardware that already doesn't have enough RAM.

> Depending on US tariffs […] end of fossil fuels […] global supply chain

It does look pretty bleak for the US.

OTOH China is rolling out more than a gigawatt of renewables a day, has the largest and fastest growing HVDC grid, a dominant position in battery and solar production, and all the supply chains. With the US going back to mercantilism and isolationism, China is going to have Taiwan too.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#60

Post by [deleted] »

exfalso wrote: post #21

I'm more and more confident I must be doing something wrong. I (re)tried using Claude about a month ago and I simply stopped using it after about two weeks because on one hand productivity did not increase(perhaps even decreased), but on the other hand it made me angry because of the time wasted on its mistakes. I was also mostly using it on Rust code, so I'm even more surprised about the article. What am I doing wro…

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