531–540 of 870 posts
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Have you an example of getting a coding chatbot to do exactly what you want?
Is this a joke? Are you genuinely implying that no one has ever got an LLM to write code that does exactly what they want?
the xcancel link is amusing. 9/10 of the most important social media users use X, like or loath it
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Businesses too. For two years it's been "throw everything into AI." But now that shit is getting real, are they really feeling so coy about letting AI run ahead of their engineering team's ability to manage it? How long will it be until we start seeing outages that just don't get resolved because the engineers have lost the plot?
How long until “the LLM did it it” is just as effective as “AWS is down, not my fault”?
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I don’t get this at all. I’m using LLM’s all day and I’m constantly having to make smart architectural choices that other less experienced devs won’t be making. Are you just prompting and going with whatever the initial output is, letting the LLM make decisions? Every moderately sized task should start with a plan, I can spend hours planning, going off and thinking, coming back to the plan and adding/changing things,…
One challenge is, are those decisions making tangible differences? We won't know until the code being produced especially greenfields hits any kind of maturity 5 years+ atleast?
It's like a junior dev writing features for a product everyday vs a principle engineer. The junior might be adding a feature with O(n^2) performance while principle has seen this before and writes it O(log n).
If the feature never reaches significance, the "better" solution doesn't matter, but it might!
The principle may write once and it is solid and never touched, but the junior might be good enough to never need coming back to, same with a llm and the right operator.
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> I trigger Claude to examine the code and figure out how the feature works, then tell it to update the documentation accordingly. And how do you verify its output isn't total fabrication?
Your docs are a contact. You can verify that contract using integration tests
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Previous tools have been deterministic and understandable. I write code with emacs and can at any point look at the source and tell you why it did what it did. But I could produce the same program with vi or vscode or whatever, at the cost of some frustration. But they all ultimately transform keystrokes to a text file in largely the same way, and the compiler I'm targeting changes that to asm and thence to binary in…
> and can at any point look at the source and tell you why it did what it did Even years later? Most people can’t unless there’s good comments and design. Which AI can replicate, so if we need to do that anyway, how is AI specially worse than a human looking back at code written poorly years ago?
I retired from paid sw dev work in 2020 when COVID arrived. I’ve worked on my small projects since with all development by hand. I’d followed the rise of AI, but not used it. Late last year I started a project that included reverse engineering some firmware that runs on an Intel 8096 based embedded processor. I’d never worked on that processor before. There are tools available, but they cost many $. So, I started to…
> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble. For example I needed to cut out some pages from a pdf. I could have found a tool online(I’m sure there are several), write one myself. However, Claude quickly performed the task. Definitely. Making small, single-purpose utilities with LLMs is almost as easy these days as googling for them on-line - much easier, in fact, if you account for time spent filtering out all…
I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…
I’ve actually found the tool that inspires the most worry about brain atrophy to be Copilot. Vscode is full of flashing suggestions all over. A couple days ago, I wanted to write a very quick program, and it was basically impossible to write any of it without Copilot suggesting a whole series of ways to do what it thought I was doing. And it seems that MS wants this: the obvious control to turn it off is actually jus…
I use claude daily, no problems with it. But vscode + copilot suggestions was garbage!
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Honestly, this seems very much like the jump from being an individual contributor to being an engineering manager. The time it happened for me was rather abrupt, with no training in between, and the feeling was eerily similar. You know _exactly_ why the best solution is, you talk to your reports, but they have minds of their own, as well as egos, and they do things … their own way. At some point I stopped obsessing w…
The only issue is that as an engineering manager you reasonably expect that the team learns new things, improve their skills, in general grow as engineers. With AI and its context handling you're working with a team where each member has severe brain damage that affects their ability to form long term memories. You can rewire their brain to a degree teaching them new "skills" or giving them new tools, but they still…
It's also peeking at the big/impactful changes and ignoring the small ones.
Your job isn't to make sure they don't have "brain damage" its to keep them productive and not shipping mistakes.
I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…
My experience is the opposite - I haven't used my brain more in a while.. Typing characters was never what developers were valued for anyway. The joy of building is back too.
Now back to IC with 25+ years of experience + LLM = god mode, and its fun again.