541–550 of 658 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are multiple "photoshop killers" already available, even for free like photopea. I would bet that you can ask AI to make a clone of it. People just haven't done it because there's no need to waste tokens on that.
Then why isn't Photoshop killed?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>doctors make mistakes that kill people all the time Yes, but they make a lot FEWER such mistakes than would people who could not pass the exams and maintain a license. The standard is not perfection; the standard is as good as practical and better than if nothing were done. Medical licensing definitely meets both of those criteria. Unless you are arguing that anyone who takes a ten-week "Medical Bootcamp" is ready…
> they make a lot FEWER such mistakes than would people who could not pass the exams and maintain a license. I don’t know if that’s true. More schooling does not mean more trustworthy or careful doctors. And I suspect some negative trait selection. Milton Friedman wrote a PhD dissertation on the topic of medicine that I invite you to take a look at. > than if nothing were done. The alternative is not to invite people…
You state this so confidently, like every person who walks through the door to interview will be 100% honest about their level of experience.
Have you ever interviewed? Nobody _wants_ a software engineer on their team who is awful.
Sometimes they slip through the cracks for a variety of reasons.
> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…
I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-code…
My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv. Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself. Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift. We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.
100% agree. People are looking at the future through the lenses of the current paradigm just like when people from the past imagined the future (our present) in a way which we now find hilarious. Most of the time, the future doesn't bring developments which improve an action in a scalar way (faster, shorter, stronger, etc) but instead fundamentally change the nature of that action (handwritten letter communication vs video calls) or completely override the need for it (telephone boxes vs mobile phones).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff. A bad engineer with a good model and harness will produce something faster, but it will be worse. A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff.
Yes, but much more slowly. And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We never had any real body that could certify proficiency Good! > having to resort to leetcode and other such styles of interviewing Such test filter out the obvious frauds.
> Such test filter out the obvious frauds. if you need garbage like leetcode to filter out "obvious frauds" you got a whole lot of problems in your company/team/...
After they rejected me I had to point out that their test is selecting for the cheaters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but much more slowly. And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever
Speed doesn’t matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they make a lot FEWER such mistakes than would people who could not pass the exams and maintain a license. I don’t know if that’s true. More schooling does not mean more trustworthy or careful doctors. And I suspect some negative trait selection. Milton Friedman wrote a PhD dissertation on the topic of medicine that I invite you to take a look at. > than if nothing were done. The alternative is not to invite people…
> The alternative is not to invite people who have no experience to build bridges or perform surgeries. You state this so confidently, like every person who walks through the door to interview will be 100% honest about their level of experience. Have you ever interviewed? Nobody _wants_ a software engineer on their team who is awful. Sometimes they slip through the cracks for a variety of reasons.
How do you think companies hire for key roles like CEOs?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They aren't accustomed to working with constraint thinking That's one way to frame it I guess I would frame it as "they have been abused by AGILE and impatient PMs into never actually taking time to do constraint based thinking or design" It is impossible to think about constraints, or really do any proper engineering, if you are constantly "sprinting" Edit: I also don't personally like engineering based on constra…
> "they have been abused by AGILE [...]" That's ironic given that some of the Agile Manifesto signatories are some of the biggest proponents of constraint-based development. While the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto is not prescriptive, I am not certain you could, in practice, even satisfy many of the principles without constraint-based development. > I also don't personally like engineering based on constraint…
Yes absolutely. I don't call myself an engineer, I'm a developer. Software Engineer is a title that my jobs give me, but I'm rarely given the time or resources to do any engineering.
It has become very clear to me over the years that I would much rather be an artisan than an engineer though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…
The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship p…
There is very little innovation going on. And most companies do everything they can to stick to standard patterns, technologies etc where all the risk is removed and known in advance.
Often "good" programmers are worse - they over complicate the architecture, go off on tangents, try to solve problems the business didn't ask for either etc.
So bootcamps filled a need.