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Believe the Checkbook

robertgreiner.com

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Re: Believe the Checkbook

#61

Post by conductr »

marcosdumay wrote: post #12
conductr wrote: post #3

People speak in relative terms and hear in absolutes. Engineers will never completely vanish, but it will certainly feel like it if labor demand is reduced enough. Technically, there’s still a horse buggy whip market, an abacus market, and probably anything else you think technology consumed. It’s just a minuscule fraction of what it once was.

> but it will certainly feel like it if labor demand is reduced enough All the last productivity multipliers in programming led to increased demand. Do you really think the market is saturated now? And what saturated it is one of the least impactful "revolutionary" tools we got in our profession? Keep in mind that looking at statistics won't lead to any real answer, everything is manipulated beyond recognition right…

Demand for software has been tied to demand for software engineering labor. That is no longer true. So demand for software may still go up while demand for labor goes another direction.

Also I do hold a belief that most tech companies are taking a cost/labor reduction strategy for a reason, and I think that’s because we’re closing a period of innovation. Keeping the lights on, or protecting their moats, requires less labor.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#62

Post by mk12 »

zmj wrote: post #55

Do people reading this post not understand that this is the output of a prompt like 'analyze with arriving at '? Tighten up your epistemology if you're arguing with an author who isn't there.

This has been happening a lot recently, where an article immediately sets off all my AI alarm bells but most people seem to be happily engaging with it. I’m worried we’re headed for a dystopian future where all communication is outsourced to the slop machine. I hope instead there is a societal shift to better recognize it and stigmatize it.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#63

Post by integralid »

fragmede wrote: post #44
RandallBrown wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience (and especially at my current job) bottlenecks are more often organizational than technical. I spend a lot of time waiting for others to make decisions before I can actually proceed with any work. My judgement is built in to the time it takes me to code. I think I would be spending the same amount of time doing that while reviewing the AI code to make sure it isn't doing something silly (even if it d…

Does voice transcription count as AI? I'm an okay typer, but being able to talk to my computer, in English, is definitely part of the productivity speed up for me. Even though it struggles to do css because css is the devil, being able to yell at my computer and have it actually do things is cathartic in ways I never thought possible.

Depends. What year is it? Voice recognition definitely uses to be considered AI, but today it's well researched and non-exciting.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#64

Post by geitir »

maccard wrote: post #42
faxmeyourcode wrote: post #28

While I agree with the premise of the article, even if it was a bit shallow, this claim made at the beginning is also still true: > Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished.” Software engineering pre-LLMs will never, ever come back. Lots of folks are not understanding that. What we're doing at the end of 2025 looks so much different than what we were doing at the…

Does it? I use AI as a smart auto complete - I’ve tried multiple tools on multiple models and I still _regularlt_ have it dump absolute nonsense into my editor - in thr best case it’s gone on a tangent, but in the most common case it’s assumed something (often times directly contradicting what I’ve asked it to do), gone with it, and lost the plot along the way. Of course when I correct it it says “you’re right, X doe…

When you have that hair raising “am I crazy why are people touting ai” feeling, it’s good to look at their profile. Oftentimes they’re caught up in some ai play. Also it’s good to remember yc has heavy investment in gen ai so this site is heavily biased

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#65

Post by integralid »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #58
ctoth wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about this metaphor that people don't seem to ever complete is. Okay, you've switched to English. The speed of typing the actual tokens is just about the same but... The standard library is FUCKING HUGE! Every concept that you have ever read about? Every professional term, every weird thing that gestures at a whole chunk of complexity/functionality ... Now, if I say something to my LLM like: > Consider the…

> The standard library is FUCKING HUGE! And extremely buggy, and impossible to debug, and does not accept or fix bug reports. AI is like an extremely enthusiastic junior engineer that never learns or improves in any way based on your feedback. I love working with junior engineers. One of the best parts about working with junior engineers is that they learn and become progressively more experienced as time goes on. AI…

People need to decide if their counter to AI making programmers obsolete is "current generation AI is buggy, and this will not improve until I retire" or "I only spend coding 5% of my time so it doesn't matter if AI can instantly replace my coding".

And come on: AI definitely will become better as time goes on.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#66

Post by integralid »

mk12 wrote: post #62
zmj wrote: post #55

Do people reading this post not understand that this is the output of a prompt like 'analyze with arriving at '? Tighten up your epistemology if you're arguing with an author who isn't there.

This has been happening a lot recently, where an article immediately sets off all my AI alarm bells but most people seem to be happily engaging with it. I’m worried we’re headed for a dystopian future where all communication is outsourced to the slop machine. I hope instead there is a societal shift to better recognize it and stigmatize it.

>instead there is a societal shift to better recognize it

Unlikely. AI keeps improving, and we are already at the point where real people are accused of being AI.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#67

Post by JoshTriplett »

integralid wrote: post #65
JoshTriplett wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The standard library is FUCKING HUGE! And extremely buggy, and impossible to debug, and does not accept or fix bug reports. AI is like an extremely enthusiastic junior engineer that never learns or improves in any way based on your feedback. I love working with junior engineers. One of the best parts about working with junior engineers is that they learn and become progressively more experienced as time goes on. AI…

People need to decide if their counter to AI making programmers obsolete is "current generation AI is buggy, and this will not improve until I retire" or "I only spend coding 5% of my time so it doesn't matter if AI can instantly replace my coding". And come on: AI definitely will become better as time goes on.

It gets better when the AI provider trains a new model. It doesn't learn from the feedback of the person interacting with it, unlike a human.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#68

Post by placebo »

zmj wrote: post #55

Do people reading this post not understand that this is the output of a prompt like 'analyze with arriving at '? Tighten up your epistemology if you're arguing with an author who isn't there.

The very fact that people are arguing with a non-existent author signals that whatever generated the content did a good enough job to fool them today. Tomorrow it will do a good enough job to fool you. I think the more important question is what this means in terms of what is really important and what we should invest in to remain anchored in what matters.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#69

Post by verbify »

zmj wrote: post #55

Do people reading this post not understand that this is the output of a prompt like 'analyze with arriving at '? Tighten up your epistemology if you're arguing with an author who isn't there.

The article is full of snow clones that I see in AI writing. Or as the AI would put it "that's style *without* authorship".

The point is still valid, although I've seen it made many times over.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#70

Post by bonesss »

geitir wrote: post #64
maccard wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? I use AI as a smart auto complete - I’ve tried multiple tools on multiple models and I still _regularlt_ have it dump absolute nonsense into my editor - in thr best case it’s gone on a tangent, but in the most common case it’s assumed something (often times directly contradicting what I’ve asked it to do), gone with it, and lost the plot along the way. Of course when I correct it it says “you’re right, X doe…

When you have that hair raising “am I crazy why are people touting ai” feeling, it’s good to look at their profile. Oftentimes they’re caught up in some ai play. Also it’s good to remember yc has heavy investment in gen ai so this site is heavily biased

Context is king, too: in greenfield startups where you care little about maintenance and can accept redundant front end frameworks and backend languages? I believe agent swarms can poop out a lot lot lot of code relatively quick… Copy and paste is faster though. Downloading a repo is very quick.

In startups I’ve competed against companies with 10x and 100x the resources and manpower on the same systems we were building. The amount of code they theoretically could push wasn’t helping them, they were locked to the code they actually had shipped and were in a downwards hiring spiral because of it.

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