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I don't care how well your "AI" works

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Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#621

Post by atleastoptimal »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #387
atleastoptimal wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people actually are becoming more productive. I know you're using quotes around productive to insulate yourself from the indignity of admitting that AI actually is useful in specific domains.

If AI is making you more productive, then I doubt you were very productive pre-AI

I had a software engineering job before AI. I still do, but I can write much more code. I avoid AI in more mission-critical domains and areas where it is more important that I understand the details intimately, but a lot of coding is repetitive busywork, looking for "needles in haystacks", porting libraries, etc. which AI makes 10x easier.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#622

Post by jimbokun »

embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

Because there are now massive layoffs and graduating CS majors have a higher unemployment rate than the average new college graduate.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#623

Post by embedding-shape »

queenkjuul wrote: post #141
embedding-shape wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now I'm doing consulting for two companies, maybe a couple of hours per week, mostly having downtime and trying to expand on my machine learning knowledge. But in general, every job I've had has been "high pay and high enjoyment" even when I initially had "shit pay" compared to other programmers, and the product wasn't really fun, I was still programming, an activity I still love. Compare this to the jobs I did…

I work remote and i hate it, sitting all day is killing me, my 5 minute daily stand-up is nowhere near enough social interaction for a whole day's work. I've been looking for a role better suited to me for over a year, but the market is miserable. I miss having jobs where at least a lot of the time i was moving around or working directly with other people. More than anything else i miss casual conversation with cowor…

No, definitely some environments are less ideal, I agree. Personally, I also cannot stand working remote, if I'm working in a high-intensity project I have to work with the team in person, otherwise things just fall apart.

I understand exactly what you mean and agree, seems our ideals agree after all :)

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#624

Post by fancyfredbot »

IshKebab wrote: post #399
fancyfredbot wrote: post #393

I feel like in a sci-fi world with robots, teleportation and holodecks these people would decide to stay at home and hand wash the dishes. If an amazing world changing technology like LLMs shows up on your doorstep and your response is to ignore it and write blog posts about how you don't care about it then you aren't curious and you aren't really a hacker.

I don't touch dishwashers with a stick. No matter how well they work. I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the dishwasher brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive cleaning circles. Edit: Ha I see you edited "empty the dishwasher" to "hand wash the dishes". My thoughts exactly. There's no hope for these people.

lol, sorry for the edit. I realised such people would surely be disgusted with a dishwasher and had to change it.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#625

Post by underlipton »

dugidugout wrote: post #425
underlipton wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Odd line to be dancing upon.

Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message.

Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. (The post you replied to got flagged to death. That's gotta count for some Punk Points.)

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#626

Post by ctoth »

jpadkins wrote: post #568
Glemkloksdjf wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to change the underlying system. We do not need to do things no one needs. We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application. We need a system which allows the earth resources being used as efficient and fair as possible. Then we can again start apprechiating real craftmanship but not for critical things and not because we need to feed ourselves but because we want to do it.

> We need a system which allows the earth resources being used as efficient and fair as possible. To what goals? Who gets to decide what is fair?

The number of not-so-secretly centralized-economy types on HN has actively surprised me whenever I see this.

Who is we? and how do we decide?

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#627

Post by alcasa »

I think there might be a culture divide here. That person is very likely from Germany/Berlin based on their attitudes and descriptions and I feel like the hacker/tech scene is very different from bay area vibes.

FAANG is not really a thing here and people are much more tech-luddite, privacy paranoid.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#628

Post by atleastoptimal »

AlexandrB wrote: post #398
atleastoptimal wrote: post #292

HN loves this "le old school" coder "fighting the good fight" speak but it seems sillier and sillier the better and better LLM's get. Maybe in the GPT 4 era this made sense but Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 are substantively different, and anyone who can extrapolate a few years out sees the writing on the wall. A year ago, no reasonable person would use AI for anything but small-scoped autocomplete. Now it can author entire…

Where are these LLM-authored projects though? I was expecting to see a fresh flood of cheap shovelware in the App Store after LLMs appeared.

Most "low hanging fruits" have been taken. The thing with AI is that it gets worse in proportion to how new of a domain it is working in (not that this is any different than humans). However the scale of apps made that utilize AI have exploded in usefulness. What is funny is that some of the ones making a big dent are horrible uses of AI and overpromise its utility (like cal.ai)

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#629

Post by wry_discontent »

Mashimo wrote: post #44
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing A lot of newly skilled job applicants can't find anything in the job market right now.

I've always heard this sentiment, but I've also never met one of these newly skilled job applicants who could do anything resembling the job.

I've done a lot of interviews, and inevitably, most of the devs I interview can't pass a trivial interview (like implement fizzbuzz). The ones who can do a decent job are usually folks we have to compete for.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#630

Post by atleastoptimal »

cyral wrote: post #436
atleastoptimal wrote: post #292

HN loves this "le old school" coder "fighting the good fight" speak but it seems sillier and sillier the better and better LLM's get. Maybe in the GPT 4 era this made sense but Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 are substantively different, and anyone who can extrapolate a few years out sees the writing on the wall. A year ago, no reasonable person would use AI for anything but small-scoped autocomplete. Now it can author entire…

Great comment. I'll add that despite being a bit less powerful, the Composer 1 model in Cursor is also extremely fast - to the point where things that Claude would take 10+ minutes of tool calls now takes 30 seconds. That's the difference between deciding to write it yourself, or throwing a few sentences in Cursor and having it done right away. A year ago I'd never ask AI to do tasks without being very specific about…

Yeah the thing about having principles is that if the principle depends on a qualitative assessment, then the principle has to be flexible as the quality that you are assessing changes. If AI was still at 2023 levels and was improving very gradually every few years like versions of Windows then I'd understand the general sentiment on here, but the rate of improvement in AI models is alarmingly fast, and assumptions about what AI "is good for" have 6-month max expiration dates.
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