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Believe the Checkbook

robertgreiner.com

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Re: Believe the Checkbook

#51

Post by gopher_space »

skybrian wrote: post #21
RandallBrown wrote: post #7

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

I'm retired now, but I spent many hours writing and debugging code during my career. I believed that implementing features was what I was being paid to do. I was proud of fixing difficult bugs. A shift to not writing code (which is apparently sometimes possible now) and managing AI agents instead is a pretty major industry change.

Anything you do with AI is improved if you're able to traverse the stack. There's no situation where knowing how to code won't put you above peers who don't.

It's like how every job requires math if you make it far enough.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#52

Post by ctoth »

jgeada wrote: post #22
gowld wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this thinking. How many hours per week did you spend coding on your most recent project? If you could do something else during that time, and the code still got written, what would you do? Or are you saying that you believe you can't get that code written without spending an equivalent amount of time describing your judgments?

All you did was changing the programming language from (say) Python to English. One is designed to be a programming language, with few ambiguities etc. The other is, well, English. Speed of typing code is not all that different than the speed of typing English, even accounting for the volume expansion of English -> . And then, of course, there is the new extra cost of then reading and understanding whatever code the…

The thing about this metaphor that people don't seem to ever complete is.

Okay, you've switched to English. The speed of typing the actual tokens is just about the same but...

The standard library is FUCKING HUGE!

Every concept that you have ever read about? Every professional term, every weird thing that gestures at a whole chunk of complexity/functionality ... Now, if I say something to my LLM like:

> Consider the dimensional twins problem -- how're we gonna differentiate torque from energy here?

I'm able to ... "from physics import Torque, Energy, dimensional_analysis" And that part of the stdlib was written in 1922 by Bridgman!

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#53

Post by keyle »

skybrian wrote: post #21
RandallBrown wrote: post #7

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

I'm retired now, but I spent many hours writing and debugging code during my career. I believed that implementing features was what I was being paid to do. I was proud of fixing difficult bugs. A shift to not writing code (which is apparently sometimes possible now) and managing AI agents instead is a pretty major industry change.

As someone not close to retirement yet, it's a very sad shift.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#54

Post by grugagag »

glitchc wrote: post #48
ryandrake wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual act of typing code into a text editor and building it could be the least interesting and least valuable part of software development. A developer who sees their job as "writing code" or a company leader who sees engineers' jobs as "writing code" is totally missing where the value is created. Yes, there is artistry, craftsmanship, and "beautiful code" which shouldn't be overlooked. But I believe that beauti…

Excellent point. Why are folks downvoting this?

Maybe they’re AIdiots?

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#55

Post by zmj »

Do people reading this post not understand that this is the output of a prompt like 'analyze with arriving at '? Tighten up your epistemology if you're arguing with an author who isn't there.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#56

Post by JSR_FDED »

fwip wrote: post #41
fwip wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it smells an AI slop article, so it's hard to expect much coherence.

I guess y'all disagree? > The Bun acquisition blows a hole in that story. > That contradiction is not a PR mistake. It is a signal. > The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. > They didn’t buy a pile of code. They bought a track record of correct calls in a complex, fast-moving domain. > Leaders don’t express their true beliefs in blog posts or conference quotes. They express them in hiring plans, acquis…

No no I agree: “No negotiations. No equity. No retention packages.”

I don’t know if HN has made me hyper-sensitized to AI writing, but this is becoming unbearable.

When I find myself thinking “I wonder what the prompt was they used?” while reading the content, I can’t help but become skeptical about the quality of the thinking behind the content.

Maybe that’s not fair, but it’s the truth. Or put differently “Fair? No. Truthful? Yes.”. Ugh.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#57

Post by jmtulloss »

al_borland wrote: post #35
aaroninsf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No shade on your skills, but for most problems, this is already false; the solutions have already been scraped . All OSS has been ingested, and all the discussion in forum like this about it, and the personal blog posts and newsletters about it; and the bug tracking; and theh pull requests, and... and training etc. is only going to get better and filtering out what is "best."

A vast majority of the problems I’m asked to solve at work do not have open-source code I can simply copy or discussion forums that already decided the best answer. Enterprise customers rarely put that stuff out there. Even if they did, it doesn’t account for the environment the solution sit in, possible future integrations, off-the-wall requests from the boss, or knowing that internal customer X is going to want som…

Obviously novel problems require novel solutions, but the vast majority of software solutions are remixes of existing methods. I don’t know your work so I may be wrong in this specific case, but there are a vanishingly small number of people pushing forward the envelope of human knowledge on a day-to-day basis.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#58

Post by JoshTriplett »

ctoth wrote: post #52
jgeada wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you did was changing the programming language from (say) Python to English. One is designed to be a programming language, with few ambiguities etc. The other is, well, English. Speed of typing code is not all that different than the speed of typing English, even accounting for the volume expansion of English -> . And then, of course, there is the new extra cost of then reading and understanding whatever code the…

The thing about this metaphor that people don't seem to ever complete is. Okay, you've switched to English. The speed of typing the actual tokens is just about the same but... The standard library is FUCKING HUGE! Every concept that you have ever read about? Every professional term, every weird thing that gestures at a whole chunk of complexity/functionality ... Now, if I say something to my LLM like: > Consider the…

> The standard library is FUCKING HUGE!

And extremely buggy, and impossible to debug, and does not accept or fix bug reports.

AI is like an extremely enthusiastic junior engineer that never learns or improves in any way based on your feedback.

I love working with junior engineers. One of the best parts about working with junior engineers is that they learn and become progressively more experienced as time goes on. AI doesn't.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#59

Post by ewoodrich »

jmtulloss wrote: post #57
al_borland wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A vast majority of the problems I’m asked to solve at work do not have open-source code I can simply copy or discussion forums that already decided the best answer. Enterprise customers rarely put that stuff out there. Even if they did, it doesn’t account for the environment the solution sit in, possible future integrations, off-the-wall requests from the boss, or knowing that internal customer X is going to want som…

Obviously novel problems require novel solutions, but the vast majority of software solutions are remixes of existing methods. I don’t know your work so I may be wrong in this specific case, but there are a vanishingly small number of people pushing forward the envelope of human knowledge on a day-to-day basis.

My company (and others in the same sector) depends on certain proprietary enterprise software that has literally no publicly available API documentation online, anywhere.

There is barely anything that qualifies as documentation that they are willing to provide under NDA for lock-in reasons/laziness (ERPish sort of thing narrowly designed for the specific sector, and more or less in a duopoly).

The difficulty in developing solutions is 95% understanding business processes/requirements. I suspect this kind of thing becomes more common the further you get from a "software company” into specific industry niches.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#60

Post by trollbridge »

linhns wrote: post #20
RandallBrown wrote: post #7

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

Well you should be surprised by the number of people who do not know this. Klarna is probably the most popular example where the CEO was all about creating more code, then fired everyone before regretting

Klarna, now there's a company that seems to have no idea what direction it's going in. In the past month, they've announced they're going to be at the forefront of Agentic AI for merchants so... agents can figure out what merchants are selling? They're somehow offering stablecoins to institutional investors to use USDC to extend loans to Klarna? And then they're starting some kind of credit-card rewards program with access to airline lounges?
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