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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

#501

Post by someguynamedq »

pennomi wrote: post #155
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.

For sure. The more specialized or obscure of things you have to do, the less LLMs help you. Building a simple marketing website? Probably don’t waste your time - an LLM will probably be faster. Designing a new SLAM algorithm? Probably LLMs will spin around in circles helplessly. That being said, that was my experience several years ago… maybe state of the art has changed in the computer vision space.

Several years ago is ancient with the rate of advancement that LLMs have had recently

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#502

Post by lapcat »

adampunk wrote: post #489
lapcat wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost is SPECIFICALLY that it is harder to jump in to a mature field with its own jargon and concerns. Hasn't that been the case for decades? What specifically is different now, such that for some reason it's harder to jump in now than it was before? If anything, LLMs are supposed to make things easier, aren't they? > it's the implied "imma wait until everything falls apart, then we'll go back to what I know how…

>What specifically is different now, such that for some reason it's harder to jump in now than it was before? Well, the obvious evidence that something is different now is all around us. It's been made with painful seriousness by people who thought they were making a different point, namely that LLMs represent an unreliable, poorly understood, and hazardous abstraction layer between coders and the machine. Specifical…

> I don't want to dunk on a strawman.

You said "it is harder to jump in to a mature field with its own jargon and concerns." I asked how it's harder than in the past. Your long reply did not appear to explain this at all. Rather, it seemed to be a series of red herrings and dunks, not directly addressing my question.

> I'd much rather not see a whole community of engineers loudly pat each other on the back for not learning about something.

The submitted article said, "I've tried a bunch of them. Some are good. Most are a bit shit. Few are useful to me as they are now."

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#503

Post by swagmaster8008 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #469
another-dave wrote: post #110

On the otherhand, when Cloud Computing started to come in, I knew a bunch of sysadmins. Some were in the "it'll never take off" camp and no doubt they know it now, kicking and screaming. But the curious early adopters were the ones best positioned to be leading the charge on "cloud migration" when the business finally pulled the trigger. Similarly with mobile dev. As a Java dev at the time that Android came along, I…

> But the curious early adopters were the ones best positioned to be leading the charge on "cloud migration" when the business finally pulled the trigger. lol no. There's nothing actually different about managing VMs in EC2 versus managing physical servers in a datacenter. It's all the same skills, and anyone who is competent in one can pick up the other with zero adjustment.

Maybe in a greenfield environment, but this I disagree with your assessment in an enterprise setting. Have you worked with orgs that have on-prem + cloud and are migrating? It is a massive pain and regardless of whether it's easy, people and orgs don't want to do it.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#504

Post by GeoAtreides »

jghn wrote: post #496
GeoAtreides wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> One thing they all had in common was taking a very targeted approach with their search and leveraging their networks

Right, so they applied to a couple of jobs and it worked for them?

I'm sorry, do you understand how uncommon and rare that is? sure, if their domain was REALLY niche and the jobs weren't publicly advertised, then i could see how that would work. but the experience is VASTLY different outside such niche cases

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#505

Post by tartoran »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #354
benhurmarcel wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would probably have sold early for a relatively small amount too. I bought 10ish BTC at some point for almost nothing, sold them for a low 4-digit amount thinking they were stupid anyway. I still think they were stupid but it turns out they could have paid off my house easily. Oh well.

Question is whether you sold all or just a segment. If you bought 100 btc early on, sold 99 of them, you'd still have something worth a deposit for a house or a car now, which is still life-changing.

Or bought btc early on and forgot about it. Then haphazardly attenpting to find it on some old HD when the price skyrocketed.. There was a guy who combed through a trash landfill to recover a HD that presumably had dozens of millions in BTC

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#506

Post by themacguffinman »

samiv wrote: post #62
bogzz wrote: post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

I cannot but agree. It's a massive skill leveling where software development is transforming from high skilled coding to low skilled prompting. For an old dog like myself it feels an unjust rug pull.

I doubt software development will stay as "low skilled prompting", or that it is even low skilled prompting right now. Productive LLM usage goes beyond typing in better prompts and involves things like improving guardrails (eg type definitions and tests), context (docs and "skills" and MCP servers), and management strategy (instructing specialized agents together). It seems natural that there will be high skill AI coding to differentiate engineers, at least until superintelligent AGI emerges and kills us all.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#507

Post by toraway »

sarchertech wrote: post #347
hibikir wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's using a bad tool to try to aim at something reasonable-ish: Developers not taking advantage of the tools in places where it's very easy to get use out of them. I have coworkers like that: One spent 3 days researching a bug that Claude found in 10 minutes by pointing it at the logs in the time window and the codebase. And he didn't even find the bug, when Claude nailed it in one. But is this something that is bes…

The thing is we’ve always had people who spend more time on their tooling or learn different tools and perform better. I’ve seen people use notepad and I’ve seen people who are so good at vim that they look like they’re on editing code directly with their mind. Your particular example is extreme and my guess is the coworker is just not great at debugging. I use Claude all the time for finding bugs, but it fails fairl…

That, and an objective comparison measuring time saving should include all time that went into learning, configuring, maintaining the tool.

And ideally a sample large enough to capture any wasted time from dead ends in other tasks where the tool may actually fail to solve the problem.

I’ve definitely lost a couple hours here and there from when it felt like I was right on the verge of CC fixing something but never actually got there and finally had to just do it myself anyway.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#508

Post by ctoth »

The Programmer's Prayer

Nothing is happening. And if it is, it's just hype.

And if it isn't, it only works on toy problems. And if it doesn't, I'll learn it when it stabilizes.

And if I can't, the gains all go to owners anyway. And if they don't, it's just managers chasing metrics.

And if it isn't, well I'm a real programmer. And if I'm not, then neither are you.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#509

Post by subarctic »

keiferski wrote: post #132
bastawhiz wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know what not to invest in then? Bitcoin wasn't the only cryptocurrency fifteen years ago. It wasn't even the first digital currency. If you hop on every bandwagon, you'll go broke far more then you become wealthy. Just look at all the people who poured money into NFTs or digital real estate in the metaverse or Dogecoin or whatever. It's easy to say "well of course I would have invested in Google in 1999"…

I don't think you're understanding my point. Hopping on the bandwagon is explicitly not "maximizing your foothold while minimizing your downside," nor is it early-stage almost by definition. An early stage technology with an uncertain future cannot have a bandwagon. I think the logical thing to do is to invest a minor amount of time/money across a broad spectrum of new promising tech. If you had been aware of and bou…

What is the broad spectrum of new promising tech today? How much time and money should you invest in each one?

This question is easy to answer in hindsight but it's not trivial to answer in the moment. I like your mindset though

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#510

Post by abustamam »

skydhash wrote: post #409
bonesss wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Past the sea change: half the reason those prompt and harness solutions seem to work are LLM-lies, the testing is gassing you about how it works and the efficacy, defaulting to ‘yes’. If you test specific features of those solutions over time you see very inconsistent results, lots of lies, and seemingly stable solutions that one-shot well but suddenly experience behaviour changes due to tweaks on the backend. Tuesda…

People are doing toy projects and praising them, while some are testing them in real world situations and not findings them that useful. But the former is labelling the latter as luddites and telling them they will be left behind.

As someone on the intersection of both (I've built a lot of vibe coded toy projects and lead a vibe coding initiative at work), they're both right and both wrong.

For a single dev team, vibe coding is great. Write specs, write plans, write code. I know what the project wants and needs because I'm the target market.

At work, I haven't written more than a few lines of code since December. But I work with other people vibe coding this same project. Lots of changing requirements and rapid iteration. Lots of mistakes were made by everyone involved. Lots of tech debt. Sure, we built something in 2 mos that would have otherwise taken us 6 mos, but now I'm fixing the mess that we caused.

I think the critical difference is the attitude towards our situation. My boss said to fix the AI harness so we can vibe code more confidently and freely. But other bosses might cut their losses and ban vibe coding. Who's right? I dunno. In both cases I'd just do what my boss wants me to do. But it's not that I don't want to be left behind. I don't want to lose my job. There's a difference.

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