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Re: You Are Here

#51

Post by autoexec »

chasd00 wrote: post #33
autoexec wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost for producing code is zero Zero as long as your time is worth nothing, and bad code and security issues cost you nothing maybe. "Getting code" has always been dead simple and cheap. Getting actually good code that works and doesn't turn into a problem for you down the road is the expensive part

> Zero as long as your time is worth nothing i can't remember who said it but a long time ago i remember reading "Linux is free if your time is worthless". Now we all use Linux one way or the other.

That's still very much true, but at least in the case of Linux the cost is getting lower and lower all the time. The time investment for many has reached about the same as the cost needed for Windows and as a result we see more and more people using linux. At this point it's a perfectly viable gaming platform!

Maybe one day LLMs will eventually make good code at a low cost, and that will allow non-programmers to write programs with few problems but the cost will never be zero, and I think we're a long long way from making human programers obsolete.

All of the intelligence that LLMs mimic came directly from the work of human minds which got fed into them, but what LLMs output is a lossy conversion filled with error and hallucination.

My guess is that the LLMs producing code will improve for a short time, but as they start to slurp up more and more of their own slop they'll start performing worse.

Re: You Are Here

#52

Post by pvtmert »

> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero

It hasn't. Large enterprises currently footing the bill, essentially subsidizing AI for now.

I constantly see comparisons between the 200$ Claude-Code Max subscription vs 6-figure (100k$) salary of an engineer.

The comparison here is, first of all, not apples-to-apples. Let's correct CC subscription to the yearly amount first; 12x200=2400$. Still more than 10x difference compared to the human engineer.

Although when you have the human engineer, you also pay for the experience, responsibility, and you somewhat transfer liability (especially when regulations come into play)

Moreover, creation by a human engineer, unless stolen IP or was plagiarized, owned by you as the employer/company. Meanwhile, whatever AI generated is guaranteed to be somewhat plagiarized in the first place. The ownership of the IP is questionable.

This is like when a layman complains when the electrician comes to their house, identifies the breaker problem, replaces the breaker which costs 5$ and charges 100$ for 10-minute job. Which is complete underestimation of skill, experience, and safety. A wrong one may cause constant circuit-breaks, causing malfunction in multitude of electronic devices in the household. Or worse, may cause a fire. When you think you paid 100$ for 10-minutes, in fact it was years of education, exams, certification, and experience you had paid for your future safety.

The same principle applies to the AI. It seems like it had accumulated more and more experience, but failing at the first prompt-injection. It seems like getting better at benchmarks because they are now part of their dataset. All these are hidden-costs 99% does not talk about. All these hidden costs are liabilities.

You may save an engineer's yearly salary today, at the cost of losing ten times more to the civil-lawsuits tomorrow. (Of course, depending on a field/business)

If your business was not that critical to get a civil-lawsuit in the first place, then you probably didn't needed to hire an engineer yourself. You could hire an agency/contractor to do that in much cheaper way, while still sharing liability...

Re: You Are Here

#53

Post by ausbah »

blogs like this seem like they’re in the right direction with LLMs being “here to stay” and a near indispensable part of people’s daily toolkit, but the near certainty that programming as a job or skillset is dead in the water seems just wrong?

like ok the cost for anyone to generate almost always working code has dropped to zero but how does a lay person verify the code satisfies business logic? asking the same set to generate tests to that just seems to move the goalposts

or like what happens when the next few years of junior engineers (or whatever replaces programming as a field)who’ve been spoon fed coding through LLMs need to actually decipher LLM output and pinpoint something the machine can’t get right after hours of prompting? a whole generation blindly following a tool they cant reliably control?

but maybe I am just coping because it feels like the ladder on the rest of my already short career , but some humility m

Re: You Are Here

#54

Post by pvtmert »

kgraves wrote: post #25

When these vibe coded projects realise that maintenance, security updates, API changes are still needed. Get ready for a massive swing back to senior software developers being in demand. Playing software maintainer while many vibe coded web apps aren't built with proper software architecture or practices only makes the swing back to senior engineers being in demand a possibility. Good luck to those who are building 6…

Honestly, "vibe-code-cleaners" are already out there and in demand!

I even expect "vibe-code-scalers" will come soon, to be able to fix and scale up the spaghetti AI agents plopped in the first place.

The author seems to be an Amazonian, it also seems that they are good at "Invent", but not at "Simplify" bit.

Big-Tech has invented LLMs, that is great. Big-Tech hasn't been great when it comes to "Simplify"-ing things. Actually, notoriously bad at it.

That is the opportunity here; "Simplifying" these workflows, making AaaS (Agent as a Service or AI as a Service)

Re: You Are Here

#55

Post by rc-1140 »

Saying it again, I think we're in need of a moratorium on "AI Has Changed The World Forever" posts. All of them read the same and offer nothing past "I asked a LLM to make a midsize feature, I haven't looked at the code but it compiles on my machine and that should terrify you" - buddy, we've had people pushing code that compiles on their machine and occasionally goes quickly read or unread in PRs, that terrifies me now.

Re: You Are Here

#56

Post by bopbopbop7 »

stephenlf wrote: post #3

> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero Didn’t realize this was science fiction.

I think the author forgot that code has to compile and be useful.

And how much is technical debt worth?

Re: You Are Here

#58

Post by zb3 »

> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero

Then go and throw your $0 to fix some real bugs on GitHub.. really, if AI works so well, why are all those issues still open?

Look, almost 2K issues open here: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues

If AI really works like non-technical people think it does, why doesn't Google just throw their AI tool to fix them all?

Re: You Are Here

#59

Post by canadiantim »

bopbopbop7 wrote: post #56
stephenlf wrote: post #3

> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero Didn’t realize this was science fiction.

I think the author forgot that code has to compile and be useful. And how much is technical debt worth?

Depends if I can bundle the technical debt, get a triple AAA rating on it and then sell it

Re: You Are Here

#60

Post by hunterpayne »

pousada wrote: post #9
IhateAI_2 wrote: post #5

[flagged]

What went viral? To me it just seems like people are pretty divided on the topic which makes sense as it’s an emerging technology. I feel I see as many posts against AI as glazing it.

Which side of that argument has lots of marketing dollars behind it. I suspect what we are all seeing is marketing plus a few useful idiots against everyone else. I will change my mind when I start seeing actual apps created by LLMs which people actually use. What I do see is LLMs replacing search engines and lots of failed software projects. The basic problem here is that the powers that be think the economics of software are like manufacturing. They aren't; they are closer to music publishing, just a lot bigger. And AI isn't having any real impact there.
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