581–590 of 592 posts
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Writing scalable and efficient programs are extremely hard. This matters for serious projects but for small projects, honestly who cares.
The almost all problems are "small", by your standards. Giant market.
“The hard part of writing software has never been the writing.” I’m tired of these endless articles on HN about software engineers trying to reinvent their identity while trying not to lose touch with reality. One way of dealing with LLMs is to deny the skill level of LLMs. Claim they can’t code as well as you. This excuse works to a certain extent but it also fails because not only are their multitudes of cases wher…
It is premature to conclude that someone is wrong and will ultimately be replaced, as the final verdict on LLMs is not yet in. In fact, recent trends show rather negative outcomes. Multiple analyses continuously indicate that recent layoffs are driven by the normalization of the post-pandemic bubble and economic recession due to wars, not LLMs. Companies are merely using LLMs as a convenient excuse to frame hiring fr…
This is what I wrote. ^ Please respond to that, rather then not addressing the nuance in my argument.
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Lol truly. A short list of just a few things that haunt my dreams: Distributions, American/European waterfalls, Carried interest, Management fees, and basically every single detail about Master feeder fund economics
Funny. Sure. Kernel development and truly scalable architectures must come easy for you. Management fees must be so hard. :)
Like anything in life, "it depends" -- but I do have the opinion that the vast majority of software engineering jobs are orders of magnitudes simpler in requirements than the two examples you've given. On the grand scheme, many engineers need to be experts in their domain to succeed; it doesn't matter if you can support 1k RPS if you only have a few hundred clients and don't understand their needs well enough.
Most startups don't fail because they don't have the right tech, but because they don't capture the right market or understand their customers well enough. There have been many startups with absolutely brilliant tech, but if your company (and your engineers) aren't experts in your product the tech won't matter _until_ you hit a scale in which you require that sort of expertise.
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Im not understanding why the discounting of your prior knowledge somehow slides over to a benefit for the non-technical vibe coder? wouldnt you still be in a better position when prompting “site slow, make fast”?
For now. But in a future where the non-technical vibecoder + AI can fix the slow site without the benefit of my expertise to thoroughly prompt it properly, why hire me? The business goal is that the site is slow. That gets fixed by the non-technical vibecoder for the cost of however many tokens. Why look for outside help (aka me) if there's no need to and the AI can do it all?
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> The tools could improve to the point they deskill the work but today one must learn about enough concepts that, in practice, they're still "learning to program,"... Then we'll have to agree to disagree. There are people building, deploying and selling applications using AI who aren't doing anything close to what I would consider "programming". This is so far beyond the comparison to an IDE or WYSIWYG editor. > Ther…
> Why does your employer need to be willing to pay thousands per month for AI tools if you don't need AI to do your job? Can't you just tell your employer you don't need AI? If you use 0 tokens, don't they pay for 0 tokens? Or do you have an employer who is forcing you to use AI? How are you using it if you don't need it? An accountant could do his job without Excel, a developer when AI didn't exist could do his job…
Why would an employer hire a non-programmer for a programming job? Do you think that the only people who can use AI to build software are software developers?
Once again, the "democratization" comes from the fact that a growing number of smart people who aren't programmers and who by any reasonable definition haven't taught themselves how to program are now able to use AI to build and ship software products. They aren't recreating Salesforce in a weekend, and they're not coming to take your job, but the latest models are sufficiently good at creating polished (if still uniform looking) web applications with features including access controls, billing, etc. through prompting alone. So non-developers have a new path for creating software themselves without learning to program or hiring a programmer.
As for AI's impact on the labor market for developers, you either believe that a) the need for software will outpace the productivity gains you acknowledge at a significant enough pace so that the number of developers needed and the wages they can command will stay the same or increase or b) AI will reduce the number of developers needed and the wages they can command.
So which one is it? Well, when new grads that would have had multiple 6-figure offers a few years ago are struggling to get hired and you have big tech companies laying off hundreds of thousands of people with CEOs like Zuckerberg making statements like "we're starting to see projects that used to require big teams being accomplished by a single talented person", it sure doesn't look like the former.
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It is premature to conclude that someone is wrong and will ultimately be replaced, as the final verdict on LLMs is not yet in. In fact, recent trends show rather negative outcomes. Multiple analyses continuously indicate that recent layoffs are driven by the normalization of the post-pandemic bubble and economic recession due to wars, not LLMs. Companies are merely using LLMs as a convenient excuse to frame hiring fr…
"Just face the goddamn truth. AI is on a trajectory to dominate. That’s what all the trendlines say. It’s not currently dominating, but it’s close, and the trajectory points to an endgame where it is fundamentally better. The trendline could be wrong but the trendline is the best quantitative predictor we have and it’s been trumping all the half baked theories on HN where people were claiming self driving cars would…
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> Why does your employer need to be willing to pay thousands per month for AI tools if you don't need AI to do your job? Can't you just tell your employer you don't need AI? If you use 0 tokens, don't they pay for 0 tokens? Or do you have an employer who is forcing you to use AI? How are you using it if you don't need it? An accountant could do his job without Excel, a developer when AI didn't exist could do his job…
> If we're making appeals to rational behavior on employers' part, they did hire me, and at prevailing SWE wages, to do it, rather than getting someone who doesn't know how to program in any traditional sense, and then immediately encourage my use of the tools. Why would an employer hire a non-programmer for a programming job? Do you think that the only people who can use AI to build software are software developers?…
Well, that's your belief; I don't share your confidence (there were and are a lot of headwinds to hiring besides AI but AI is the most investor-friendly face to put on them). But it seems like a completely different discussion.
To the main point, I really don't think the fact that non-professionals can make software with AI is fundamentally different than the way, say, Access could slowly move you along the continuum from a user to a full-fledged developer. Yes, someone can do more things, faster, but in essence, it's the same thing. But this conversation is frankly really circular and unsatisfying. You have your thing you want to believe, and you have the spiteful edge you want to put on it. That's fine.
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> (...) rules, and best practices that developers have built up over the decades. It seems you are not understanding that the reason all these "rules, best practices" had to be created in the first place was the fact that your average old times developer was churning out shit code and weaving spaghetti just as hard as today's vibecoders. Those "rules, best practices" spawned from the same evolutionary pressure as tod…
All that stuff you mentioned is derived from a core set of principles established by decades of software best practices applied to a new means of generating code. Like quite literally those instruction files/skills essentially just reiterate the practices themselves. To your last paragraph, I never say that nor do I imply it. I find that as a pretty disingenuous interpretation of what I said actually. The practices I…
The whole point is that the problem was already here, and the solutions were developed over a decade ago because the old time way of developing software was exemplary in the volume of shit it generated and had to be reigned in.
It's disingenuous to blame AI for yesterday's problems.
> The practices I mentioned were derived from hard learned lessons and designed as a means of mitigating the human tendency to write bad code.
That's the whole point. It's silly to pretend that AI invented bad code. It was already here, and in high volume. Ironically, AI is contributing to greatly improve the quality of existing code, but as the same shit coders are at the helm of course you still get the result of the same level of oversight.
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And there's nothing "wrong" with the GoF Patterns per-se. The issue was always people applying them blindly without understanding why (or more to the point, "if") they were needed. Once writing code filled with patterns became "the thing you do"... all bets were off. :-(
I remember putting stuff like this on my resume "developed X using visitor pattern" . ppl would ask "what is your favourite design pattern" in interviews. lmao.
SOLID
and
Hexagonal Programming
But these are not GoF patterns (although Singleton's are, and I do recall how it was incredibly difficult to produce a singleton in some languages - eg. Python)