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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

#561

Post by leptons »

laserlight wrote: post #335
JohnFen wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no learning curve*, that's the nature of AI. There isn't? Then why is it that whenever devs have tried it and not achieved useful results, they're told that they just haven't learned how to use it right?

“You're holding it wrong.” is the most common response I get, when I talk about problems I had with LLM-assisted coding.

You aren't holding it wrong, the truth is AI is a mixed bag, leaning towards a liability.

If people really counted all the time they spend coddling the AI, trying again, then trying again and again and again to get a useful output, then having to clean up that output, they would see that the supposed efficiency gains are near zero if not negative. The only people it really helps are people who were not good at coding to begin with, and they will be the ones producing the absolute worst slop because they don't know the difference between good and bad code. AI is constantly trying to introduce bugs into my codebase, and I see it happening in real-time with AI code completion. So, no you aren't "holding it wrong", the other people are no different than the crypto-bro's who were pushing blockchain into everything and hoping it would stick.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#562

Post by 0x3f »

komali2 wrote: post #377
0x3f wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. In the vast majority of cases, financial returns help maximize your impact on the things you care about. Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. The only real exceptions are things that spec…

> Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. The EA guys aren't the final word on ethics or a fulfilling life. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that one might, rather than seeking to always better one's life, instead seek to share the burden others are holding. Making a bunch of money to turn around and spe…

Nobody is asking about ethics or a fulfilling life. We are talking about maximum _impact_.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#563

Post by xigoi »

linsomniac wrote: post #69

>I didn't use Git when it first came out. This really hinges on what you mean by "didn't use git". If you were using bzr or svn, that's one thing. If you were saving multiple copies of files ("foo.old.didntwork" and the like), then I'd submit that you're making the point for the AI supporters. I consulted with a couple developers at the local university as recently as a couple years ago who were still doing the copy…

Git may have an arcane interface, but if you learn it, you can be sure what exactly will happen when you run a Git command. Unlike with LLMs.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#564

Post by mekoka »

apsurd wrote: post #528
mekoka wrote: post #426

Earlier 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…

No, this thread and sub-discussion is about specifically early web fundamentals. The web is special in this sense, it's intentionally long-lived warts and all. So the fundamentals pay outsized dividends. The rube goldberg machine that is modern JS dev still spits out an index.html result. Being a good professional developer means getting the primitives and the data model not horribly pointed in the wrong direction. S…

The discussion is centered around the idea that "adopting early" provides some future proofing in a rapidly evolving (and largely non-standard) terrain. I share the FA's position that it does not.

> The web is special in this sense, it's intentionally long-lived warts and all. So the fundamentals pay outsized dividends.

Fundamentals pay dividends, but what makes you think that what you learn as an early adopter are fundamentals? Fundamentals are knowledge that is deemed intemporal, not "just discovered".

The historical web and its simplicity are as available to anyone today as it was back then. People can still learn HTML today and make table-based layouts. HTML is still HTML, whether you learned it then or today. But if back then you intended to become a professional front-end developer, you would still have to contend with the tremendous difficulties that some seem to have forgotten out of nostalgia. You'd soon have to also learn CSS in its early and buggy drafts, then (mostly non-standard) JavaScript (Netscape and IE6) and the multiple browser bugs that required all kinds of hacks and shims. Then you'd have to keep up with the cycles of changing front-end tools and practices, as efforts to put some sense into the madness were moved there. Much in all that knowledge went nowhere since it was not always part of a progression, but rather a set of competing cycles.

Fundamentals are indisputably relevant, but they're knowledge that emerges as victorious after all the fluff of uncertainty has been left behind. Front-end development is only now settling into that phase. With LLMs we're still figuring out where we're going.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#565

Post by mekael »

stavros wrote: post #553
mekael wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still confused about the things I'll be slower in though, and I'm being sincere with that confusion. If it's "boilerplate", then I haven't done enough research or pick a library which has little to none of that, or I'm not using the template(s) built into whatever framework I am using. For example, in one of the projects I'm working on, I'm using the VSA pattern. I have the list of 50 to 75 features I need to imp…

I find that can write features 5-10x faster with these tools than by hand, at a comparable level of quality (though it hasn't been long enough for me to judge what'll happen in a year).

Would you be able to give an example of a feature? For my example, I need to query an ancient undocumented database , pull back a pile of data, do some validations on it, and then show it to the user or pass it along with another processing step. The human part is researching the database and the data living in it, and implementing the validation(s) while talking to a business user, everything else can be templated.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#566

Post by mekael »

logicchains wrote: post #559
mekael wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can ask the agent to check that it doesn't leave a database instance exposed to the public, and present you with proof for you to check (references to the code and the relevant Cloudformation documentation). Then repeat this for all the things you'd normally want to check for in a code review.

In that case I'm just moving the reading of the documentation from reading it as I'm writing the yaml to when I'm doing a code review. Not saying it isn't helpful to have a pair researcher, just seems like I'm moving things around .

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#567

Post by sarchertech »

nightski wrote: post #422
toomuchtodo wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How you objectively measuring success? 93% of Developers Use AI Coding Tools. Productivity Hasn't Moved. - https://philippdubach.com/posts/93-of-developers-use-ai-codi... - March 4th, 2026

They measured 16 developers and called it a "study"? That is amusing. Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago, the tools have already changed dramatically.

Depending on the effect size a sample size of 16 can be plenty.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#568

Post by JumpCrisscross »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #420
mahemm wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be comfortable using this same logic to invest most of your net worth in lottery tickets/betting on black in a casino? If not, I'd be curious to hear what is different in that for you.

> Would you be comfortable using this same logic to invest most of your net worth in lottery tickets/betting on black in a casino? I wouldn't "invest" in lottery tickets because for these p is far too small (exception: if I found a loophole in the system of the lottery, which has been found for some lotteries). For casinos, there is additionally the very important aspect that the casino will scam you (if you start wi…

> this is a strategy for risk-affine people

If you’re paying a fair price for the risk, sure. Most of the examples you gave seemed to be in deep speculative territory to the point that they don’t very much resemble anything economic.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#569

Post by khriss »

augusto-moura wrote: post #164
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…

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…

This is largely due to the age old fact that corporations rarely make decisions based on actual data, introspection, and good judgment. Usually the decision is made first and then the justifications are invented afterwards.

In this case, every executive is terrified of being "left out" in the AI race. As we saw with the mass layoffs across companies, most of CEO decision making is just adhering to herd behavior. So it is literally better for execs to have shoveled a shit ton of money into 'strategic' AI initiatives and have them fail than potentially deal with the potentially remote chance of some other exec or company succeeding with 'AI enabled transformation'.

What makes it even more fun is that nobody really has a good understanding of how to measure the ROI of AI. Hence we have people burning a lot of money due to FOMO and no easy way of measuring the outcome, which is usually how the foundations for good Ponzi schemes are laid.

This is unlikely to end well. However, as usual, it's us, the common plebs, who will suffer regardless of outcome.

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