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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

#511

Post by aquariusDue »

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…

The first time I saw something like this in action was in a video about agentic blabla features in VS Code on the official VS Code YouTube channel. Pretty much write a complete and detailed specification, fire away and hope for the best. The workflow kinda clicked for me then but I still find a hard time adjusting to this potential new reality where slowly it won't make sense to generally write code "by hand" and only intervene to make pinpoint changes after reviewing a lot of code.

I've been reading a book about the history of math and at some points in the beginning the author pointed out how some fields undergo a radical change within due to some discovery (e.g. quantum theory in physics) and the practitioners in that field inevitably go through this transformation where the generations before and after can't really relate to each other anymore. I'm paraphrasing quite a bit though so I'll just recommend people check out the book if they're interested: The History of Mathematics by Jacqueline Stedall

And the aforementioned VS Code video, if I remember correctly: https://youtu.be/dutyOc_cAEU?si=ulK3MaYN7_CPO76k

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#512

Post by jghn »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #504
jghn wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nic…

They applied to a couple of jobs where they were certain the fit would be good, and didn't mindlessly spam their resume to some bot. They got in touch with the right people, and worked it out from there. Because they had done their homework, the path was easier for them.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#513

Post by subarctic »

remus wrote: post #237
lopis wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're only missing out if that's what you want to do. Not every software developer is interested in creating new software projects from scratch in an hour, or at all. It's totally find to do software development as a job, and then close your laptop and not see it until Monday. Learn the tools that suit when when you need them.

> You're only missing out if that's what you want to do. Who writes software and doesn't have a list of "I'll fix this one day" issues as long as their arm? This is honestly one of the things I enjoy most at the moment. There's whole classes of issues where I know the fix is probably pretty simple but I wouldn't have had time to sort it previously. Now I can just point claude at it and have a PR 5mins later. It's rea…

Claude code makes it so easy to do things the "right way" that it also makes it really easy for you to let scope creep get out of hand. I have a personal project that I haven't deployed yet that in some ways is way overengineered for its purpose. It's hard to blame the tool though, it's always telling me I'm making it more complicated than it needs to be but I don't listen

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#514

Post by ozim »

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…

I think it was challenging 2 or 3 years ago. I plunged a year ago and it already was quite easy to use mainstream tools. I could run some local models with Ollama by just installing it. I could use coding assistance in VSCode. Connecting with http API to use AI within applications you build was also easy for local models or cloud.

There are loads of BS tools out there of course but I don’t use that many tools.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#515

Post by linhns »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #497
kaffekaka wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, if you ask it to write a library at the start, it's likely it will not do that well. Start small, spoon feed some examples.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#516

Post by somenameforme »

bondarchuk wrote: post #445
augusto-moura wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…

> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool If you broaden the comparison (only a little bit) it looks suspiciously like employees being forced to train their own replacement (be that other employees, or factory automation), a regular occurrence.

Yeah this is the thing I think many don't want to see. Imagine a bunch of farm laborers being trained to use a tractor/reaper early on its development. Certainly they'd think it's cool and convenient, because it is. But if it works out, then most of those farm laborers are now obsolete, and a handful of them can now replace the rest. And indeed this is why agricultural employment went from the majority of jobs to a footnote.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#517

Post by gamerdonkey »

abustamam wrote: post #500
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

> It's use AI or be replaced by AI

I think they want to sell that perception, but the biggest thing the tech execs want in their SWEs is fear.

Fear that makes us stay in our jobs, even when raises and bonuses stagnate, because the market is scary with all the "AI layoffs" (which have largely been regular downsizing with the AI label slapped on).

Fear that makes us use the LLMs and then put in extra hours when we don't see the 10x productivity gains that they expect.

Fear that makes us erode our own skills and become dependent on these gatekeepers to maintain even a base level of productivity.

So much of the advertising and discussion around AI is based around fear. It's inevitable. It will take your job. Render you useless. It will render humanity useless. You better get in now, or you'll both lose your job and could end up in a virtual hell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk).

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#518

Post by Tade0 »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #253
Tade0 wrote: post #186

To me the main question is the long term pricing. It is said that major providers more than break even on what they're charging. But at the same time that's not the point of capitalism, is it? The point is to charge close to the value you're providing. My lunch money is approximately $10 and I often blow through as much in Claude tokens generously provided by the company which hired me. But I'm not getting $10 value…

I don't think there's a universe where Google stops competing here, though. The second Anthropic gets greedy, there will be alternatives.

My worry is are two or even three companies at the top enough for healthy competition? You're not limited to one product - arguably it's better to have multiple subscriptions.

If they decide to increase pricing in lockstep just like FAANG applied RTO policies, we as consumers are going to get the short end of the stick.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#519

Post by xantronix »

mh- wrote: post #281
ianm218 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you care so much? If these are really revolutionary tools that vastly optimize work, why bother forcing people to "try new models and best practices"? If AI makes an employee 10X more productive they get a slight pay raise maybe, but the company makes substantially more money or gets substantially more output. So there is a large difference in incentives.

This is true, though I believe savvy employees have leverage to ensure they participate in a larger share of that upside. As you can see from other comments, lots of people will just drag their heels and not give it a good-faith attempt, so it'll often average out in the way you predict.

Are you budgeting time to allow people to properly evaluate LLMs and possibly struggle with them? This is not the sort of new tool whose utility is universally immediately obvious to all builders and craftsmen out there. Are you willing to pay down the likely debt of some individual contributors never clicking with this, or being outright resentful to towards the technology or the mandates? There is a LOT of self-selecting bias from LLM proponents assuming everybody else is willing or able to travel the same path as them.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#520

Post by i_cannot_hack »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #185
pennomi wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Specialized is probably not the word I'd use, because llms are generally useful to understand more specialized / obscure topics. For example I've never randomly heard people talking about the dicom standard, llms have no trouble with it.

The standard for obscurity is different for LLMs, something can be very widespread and public without the average person knowing about it. DICOM is used at practically every hospital in the world, there's whole websites dedicated to browsing the documentation, companies employ people solely for DICOM work, there's popular maintained libraries for several different languages, etc, so the LLM has an enormous amount of it in its training data.

The question relevant for LLMs would be "how many high quality results would I get if I googled something related to this", and for DICOM the answer is "many". As long the that is the case LLMs will not have trouble answering questions about it either.

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