It is a far better investment to attend to the eternities rather than the times.
I'm OK being left behind, thanks
531–540 of 800 posts
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It will grow more complex" is never a good reason to get into things early. It's just your mind playing FOMO tricks on you. Many developers who picked up the web in the early years struggle with (front-end) web development today. It doesn't matter if they fetched jQuery or MooTools from some CDN as it was done in the mid 00s. Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-en…
> Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals. The best professionals did not fall for insanity of the modern front-end dilettante and continued hacking shit without that insanitity. > You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today. which will be outdat…
> The best professionals did not fall for insanity of the modern front-end dilettante and continued hacking shit without that insanitity.
"Front-end professional" and "no tooling" have been exclusive propositions since the early 2010s. You either learned to use tools or you were out of the loop.
> which will be outdated "tomorrow" just like grunt/bower... are looked at today
Not really. Historically, the main problem with front-end development has not been change, but the pace of it. That's how it ties in with the current discussion regarding the (now) ever-changing terrain of LLM-assisted coding. Front-end development is still changing today, but it's coalescing and congealing more than it's revolving. The chasms between transitions are narrowing. If you observe how long Webpack lasted and familiarity with it carried over to using Vite, it's somewhat safe to expect that the latter will last even longer and that its replacement will be a near copy. Someone putting time to learn front-end skills today might reap the benefits of that investment longer.
> if you learned Javascript early, like really learned it, that mastery gets you far today.
I did. I got a copy of the Rhino book 4th ed. and read it cover to cover. I would not advise to learn JS today with historical references. JS was not designed like most other languages. It was hastily put together to get things done and it had a lot of "interesting", but ultimately undesirable, artifacts. It only slowly turned into a more sensible standard after-the-fact. Yes, there are some parts that are still in its core identity, but a lot in the implementation has changed. Efforts like "Javascript: The Good Parts", further standardization, and TS helped to slowly turn it into what we know today. You don't need to travel back in time for that mastery. Get a modern copy of the Rhino book and you'll be as good as the best of them.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the error rate of the pen guy? Also, if your AI has a 20% error rate, you're not holding it right. You need to spend more time keeping it on rails - unit tests, integration tests, e2e tests, local dev + browser use, preview deployments, staging environments, phased rollouts, AI PR reviews, rolling releases. The error rate will be much closer to 0%.
How does a phased rollout improve LLM error rates exactly?
Error rate here is the rate of shipping bugs to customers.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had an heavy ai user on my team say that “those who learn how ti use the tools wont get fired, those who dont are gone”. I used it to generate a bunch of cfn and it worked fine from an example and a couple line prompt, doesnt seem that hard to learn to me. Now reviewing the 1k lines it generated and making sure its secure, thats going to take me longer than writing it by hand.
>Now reviewing the 1k lines it generated and making sure its secure, thats going to take me longer than writing it by hand. Then you still need to learn how to use the tools to speed up reviewing the code.
If I don't have experience with the underlying framework/language/thing being modified, it makes it quite difficult to trust the actual review. In this example, I haven't worked heavily with Cloudformation, so I can't call b.s if it leaves a database instance exposed to the wider public internet rather than in my company's private VPC.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#535> 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…
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…
Tech directors, CEOs, managers, etc tend to be people with a certain personality and ( learned behaviors/thinking ) just like "technical people".
Yes, they tend to be incredible gullible to certain things, over-simplistic and over-confident but also very "agile" when it comes to sweep their failures under the rug and move on to keep their own neck in one piece. At this point in time even the median CEO knows AI has been way overhyped and they over invested to a point of absolute financial insanity.
The first line of defense about the pressure to deliver is to mandate their minions to use it as much as possible.
We spent a fortune on this over-rated Michelin star reservation, and now you kids are going to absolutely enjoy it, like it or not goddammit!
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also seems like skills with particular tech (prompt engineering, harnesses, mixture of experts set ups) doesn't always necessarily pay off when there's a sea change. Hard to predict what you'll want in a few years anyway, right?
All of these occulted skills, that we literally can't explain why they work are akin to gamblers superstitions. If I write something this way, it works. Its like a gambler who think they order in which the push the buttons on the slot machine makes a difference. Kind of weird tools also incorporate addictive gambling game's UX design. They're literally allowing you to multiply your output: 3x, 4x, 5x (run it 5 times…
> All of these occulted skills, that we literally can't explain why they work are akin to gamblers superstitions.
Yes, it's hard to see how, at this moment in time, "Anybody can write code with an LLM" is so different from "Anybody can make money in the stock market."
The underlying mechanisms are completely different, of course, and the putative goal of the LLM purveyors is to make it where anybody really can write code with an LLM.
I'm typically a nay-sayer and a perfectionist, but many not-so-great things become and stay popular, and this may fall into that category.
> Kind of weird tools also incorporate addictive gambling game's UX design.
It's unclear it started out this way, but since it's obviously going this way, it is certainly prudent to ask if some of this is by design. It would presumably be more worrisome if there were only a single vendor, but even with multiple vendors, it might be lucrative for them to design things so that "true insider knowledge" of how to make good prompts is a sought-after skill.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
Oh I cannot agree with this at all.
If you think any programming task at hand one must have at least some reasonable grasp of formalism, boolean logic, predicate logic, then understanding the software developing concepts, your APIs frameworks, language constructs etc and finally the domain knowledge.Most of this goes away when changing from coding to prompting.
I was just doing some computer graphics work myself doing Signed Distance Fields and Claude just literally regurgitated code that I could just adopt (since it works) without understanding any of the math involved.
I'd say that prompting is at least two orders of magnitude easier than coding.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Feels like a false dichotomy. Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe. Is it 10x or 1000x or 10,000x? Definitely not. I think actually in the past I would have leaned more on senior developers, books, stack overf…
>Feel like we’re back at Adobe Dreameaver release and everyone is claiming that web development jobs are dead I truly believe so much of the anti-AI sentiment is the same as the Luddites. They're often used as a meme now, but they were very real people, faced with a real and present risk to their livelihoods. They acted out of fear, but not just irrational fear. AI is the same: it's unquestionably (to anyone evaluati…
The burden of proof lies with he who makes grand claims. My counterargument in the face of your lack of evidence is: “Where are all the improvements to my daily life? Where are the disrupting geniuses who go-to market 100x faster than their Luddite counterparts?”
To paraphrase another analogy that I enjoyed, it’s a bit like when 3d printing became a thing and hype con artists claimed that no one would buy anything anymore, you could just 3d print it.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#539Earlier 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.
> Building a simple marketing website? Probably don’t waste your time - an LLM will probably be faster.
This is actually where I would be most reluctant to use an LLM. Your website represents your product, and you probably don’t want to give it the scent of homogenized AI slop. People can tell.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#540> 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.
I saw meme in X the other day, which roughly says that one does not have to learn if she learns slow enough in the age AI. I guess the undertone is that AI evolves faster than one can learn about the tricks of using it.