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The Bitter Prediction

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61–70 of 189 posts

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#61

Post by creata »

exfalso wrote: post #21

I'm more and more confident I must be doing something wrong. I (re)tried using Claude about a month ago and I simply stopped using it after about two weeks because on one hand productivity did not increase(perhaps even decreased), but on the other hand it made me angry because of the time wasted on its mistakes. I was also mostly using it on Rust code, so I'm even more surprised about the article. What am I doing wro…

I'd love to watch a video of someone using these tools well, because I am not getting much out of it. They save some time, sometimes, but they're nowhere near the 5x boost that some people claim.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#62

Post by zkmon »

It's not true that coding would no longer be fun because of AI. Arithmetic did not stop being fun because of calculators. Travel did not stop being fun because of cars and planes. Life did not stop being fun because of lack of old challenges.

New challenges would come up. If calculators made the arithmetic easy, math challenges move to next higher level. If AI does all the thinking and creativity, human would move to next level. That level could be some menial work which AI can't touch. For example, navigating the complexities of legacy systems and workflows and human interactions needed to keep things working.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#63

Post by BrenBarn »

The idea of "breaking the game" here is similar to that expressed in this other recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43650656 . The focus here is a bit different though.

> It makes economic sense, and capitalism is not sentimental.

I find this kind of fatalism irritating. If capitalism isn't doing what we as humans want it to do, we can change it.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#64

Post by jamil7 »

cardanome wrote: post #56
pornel wrote: post #28

AI will be cheap to run. The hardware for AI is getting cheaper and more efficient, and the models are getting less wasteful too. Just a few years ago GPT-3.5 used to be a secret sauce running on the most expensive GPU racks, and now models beating it are available with open weights and run on high end consumer hardware. Few iterations down the line good-enough models will run on average hardware. When that Xcom game…

I wouldn't be so optimistic. Moore's law is withering away due to physical limitations. Energy prices go up because of the end of fossil fuels and rising climate change costs. Furthermore the global supply chain is under attack by rising geopolitical tension. Depending on US tariffs and how the Taiwan situation plays out and many other risks, it might be that compute will get MORE expensive in the future. While there…

I think there’s a huge amount of inefficiency all the way through the software stack due to decades of cheap energy and rapidly improving hardware. I would expect with hardware and energy constraints that we will need to look for deeper optimisations in software.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#65

Post by qingcharles »

creata wrote: post #61
exfalso wrote: post #21

I'm more and more confident I must be doing something wrong. I (re)tried using Claude about a month ago and I simply stopped using it after about two weeks because on one hand productivity did not increase(perhaps even decreased), but on the other hand it made me angry because of the time wasted on its mistakes. I was also mostly using it on Rust code, so I'm even more surprised about the article. What am I doing wro…

I'd love to watch a video of someone using these tools well, because I am not getting much out of it. They save some time, sometimes, but they're nowhere near the 5x boost that some people claim.

I don't know what everyone is doing. Mine is like a 10X-100X force multiplier. I enjoy coding enormously more now that all the drudgery is removed.

And I might not be the best coder, by far, but I've got over 40 years experience at this crap in practically every language going.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#66

Post by qingcharles »

skerit wrote: post #43
hsuduebc2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I do not usually enjoy programming as an craft but the act of building something is what is loveable experience.

The challenge I often face is having an entire _mental model_ of what I want to build already crystallized in my head, but then the realization that it will take hours of coding to actually convert that to code... That can be incredibly demotivating.

Exactly. It's even hard to get started sometimes.

AI coding has removed the drudgery for me. It made coding 10X more enjoyable.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#67

Post by whiplash451 »

The thing is: the industry does not need people who are good at (or enjoy) programming, it needs people who are good at (and enjoy) generating value for customers through code.

So the OP was in a bad place without Claude anyways (in industry at least).

This realization is the true bitter one for many engineers.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#68

Post by joshjob42 »

cardanome wrote: post #56
pornel wrote: post #28

AI will be cheap to run. The hardware for AI is getting cheaper and more efficient, and the models are getting less wasteful too. Just a few years ago GPT-3.5 used to be a secret sauce running on the most expensive GPU racks, and now models beating it are available with open weights and run on high end consumer hardware. Few iterations down the line good-enough models will run on average hardware. When that Xcom game…

I wouldn't be so optimistic. Moore's law is withering away due to physical limitations. Energy prices go up because of the end of fossil fuels and rising climate change costs. Furthermore the global supply chain is under attack by rising geopolitical tension. Depending on US tariffs and how the Taiwan situation plays out and many other risks, it might be that compute will get MORE expensive in the future. While there…

Costs for a given amount of intelligence as measured by various benchmarks etc has been falling by 4-8x per year for a couple years, largely from smarter models from better training at a given size. I think there's still a decent amount of headroom there, and as others have mentioned dedicated inference chips are likely to be significantly cheaper than running inference on GPUs. I would expect to see Gemini Pro 2.5 levels of capability in models that cost <$1/Mtok by late next year or plausibly sooner.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#69

Post by qingcharles »

IshKebab wrote: post #48
joelthelion wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which model and tool are you using? There's a whole spectrum of AI-assisted coding.

ChatGPT, Claude (both through the website), and Github Copilot (paid if it makes any difference).

I use the same with a sprinkling of Gemini 2.5 and Grok3.

I find it they all make errors, but 95% of them I spot immediately by eye and either correct manually or reroll through prompting.

The error rate has gone down in the last 6 months, though, and the efficiency of the C# code I mostly generate has gone up by an order of magnitude. I would rarely produce code that is more efficient than what AI produces now. (I have a prompt though that tells it to use all the latest platform advances and to search the web first for the latest updates that will increase the efficiency and size of the code)

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#70

Post by qingcharles »

freb3n wrote: post #7

The financial barrier point is really great. I feel the same with a lot of points made here, but hadn't yet thought about the financial one. When I started out with web development that was one of the things I really loved. Anyone can just read about html, css and Javascript and get started with any kind of free to use code editor. Though you can still do just that, it seems like you would always drag behind the 'coo…

These platforms all feel like they are being massively subsidized right now. I'm hoping that continues and they just burn investor cash in a race to the bottom.
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