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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

#621

Post by tastyface »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #557
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The burden of proof lies with he who makes grand claims. My counterargument in the face of your lack of evidence is: “Where are all the improvements to my daily life? Where are the disrupting geniuses who go-to market 100x faster than their Luddite counterparts?” To paraphrase another analogy that I enjoyed, it’s a bit like when 3d printing became a thing and hype con artists claimed that no one would buy anything an…

You don’t need 100x productivity to be disruptive. In business 10% gain can be quite enormous. My senior engineers are estimating 25-50% gains. That is a far cry from your 100,000% gain, but very real and meaningful.

The last study that came out on this showed that engineers were significantly overestimating their own productivity gains.

If a stat like that is not accurately measured, it's useless.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#622

Post by whazor »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #402
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Feels like a false dichotomy. Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe. Is it 10x or 1000x or 10,000x? Definitely not. I think actually in the past I would have leaned more on senior developers, books, stack overf…

>Feel like we’re back at Adobe Dreameaver release and everyone is claiming that web development jobs are dead I truly believe so much of the anti-AI sentiment is the same as the Luddites. They're often used as a meme now, but they were very real people, faced with a real and present risk to their livelihoods. They acted out of fear, but not just irrational fear. AI is the same: it's unquestionably (to anyone evaluati…

I have found that maximising AI coding is a skill on its own. There is a lot of context switching. There is making sure agents are running in loops. Keeping the quality high is also important, as they often take shortcuts. And finally you need an somewhat of an architectural vision to ensure agents don’t just work in a single file.

This is all very tiring and difficult. You can be significantly better than other people at this skill.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#623

Post by mh- »

xantronix wrote: post #519
mh- wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, though I believe savvy employees have leverage to ensure they participate in a larger share of that upside. As you can see from other comments, lots of people will just drag their heels and not give it a good-faith attempt, so it'll often average out in the way you predict.

Are you budgeting time to allow people to properly evaluate LLMs and possibly struggle with them? This is not the sort of new tool whose utility is universally immediately obvious to all builders and craftsmen out there. Are you willing to pay down the likely debt of some individual contributors never clicking with this, or being outright resentful to towards the technology or the mandates? There is a LOT of self-sel…

> Are you budgeting time to allow people to properly evaluate LLMs and possibly struggle with them?

Great question. That is absolutely the goal. My take is that building with LLMs - at least with the current popular harnesses like Claude Code - is a skill on its own, and people need time to develop that skill and also to figure out where these tools might fit into their workflows.

> Are you willing to pay down the likely debt of some individual contributors never clicking with this or being outright resentful to towards the technology or the mandates?

I'll be honest as I have been elsewhere in the thread: A few years from now, I don't know what the state of the technology or its adoption will be, or what expectations of software engineers at large will be.

But for the foreseeable future, yes, absolutely, I'm willing to give engineers the time and space to develop familiarity and comfort with the tools, as long as they're engaging in good faith.

edit: oops, didn't mean to dodge the last part of your question (re: resentment): I genuinely don't know the answer to how I'll handle that, but I'm also sure it'll happen. Hopefully I'll still be in a position to speak publicly about how one can deal with those challenges.

edit 2: also, thank you for the thoughtful questions and dialogue.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#624

Post by layer8 »

sarchertech wrote: post #571
layer8 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technologies were imposed by management whether it made sense or not. Like, “all data exchange formats now have to use XML”, or “all applications must be J2EE now”, because it was the new hot thing. “You” weren’t making that choice, management imposed it. That’s the parallel I’m drawing.

That was usually only the case where everyone had to be using it or it didn’t work. One person hand coding and one person having Claude still results in the same output that is compatible with each other. This is more like mandating that you use vim. I’ve never some something like that before in 20+ years.

> That was usually only the case where everyone had to be using it or it didn’t work.

Absolutely not, a lot was done just because it was pushed as the current fashion and advertised to be solving problems that either weren’t applicable to the concrete use case or that it didn’t actually solve.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#625

Post by _doctor_love »

HolyLampshade wrote: post #268
augusto-moura wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool Cloud had a very similar vibe when it was really running advertising to CIO/CTOs hard. Everything had to be jammed into the cloud, even if it made absolutely no sense for it to be run there. This seems to come pretty frequently from visionless tech execs. They need to justify their existence to their boss, and thus try to show how innovative and/or co…

> Cloud had a very similar vibe when it was really running advertising to CIO/CTOs hard. Everything had to be jammed into the cloud, even if it made absolutely no sense for it to be run there.

100% accurate - some of us are old enough to have lived through a few of the mini-revolutions in between the mega-revolutions of Internet/Web in the 1990s and now AI/LLM in the 2020s.

We are in the "stupid phase" of adoption still. C-level people have to follow the herd and they are being evaluated on keeping up with everyone else. Idiotic mandates are a way to cause things to happen short-term even though everyone knows long-term it will have to be re-done.

Consultants gonna make a looooooooot of money this coming decade.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#626

Post by dakolli »

Hasslequest wrote: post #417
dakolli wrote: post #92

I love the Cryptocurrency analogy. The LLM hype monkeys are the same people that were screaming that NFTs/Digital Art was going to replace all the traditional art in gallaries in 10 years. They are literally the same people, and they are all addicted to money and hype. Ignore them.. Did handmade Swiss watch movements lose all demand when Asia started mass manufacturing watches? No. There is always going to be more de…

You can run the LLMs on your own machine

It costs about 60-80k to run a 1T param model at your house.. which is the only size model that's going to get anywhere close to a foundation model's capability.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#627

Post by dakolli »

Hasslequest wrote: post #432
dakolli wrote: post #32

The kid who showed his work in detail in math class is doing better in life 9/10 times than the kids that only knew how to use a calculator. Now consider how well the people who think you just need to know how to yell at the calculator are going to do? When Maps apps came around, people totally lost the brain muscle for being able to navigate. Using LLMs is no different, people over reliant on these tools are simply…

Firstly, you can run the LLMs on your own machine. So I find the proprietary/moat narrative weak. Secondly, I find that correct usage of LLMs can accelerate learning. My brother used an LLM to generate flash cards for a driver's license test. I use LLMs to digest a ton of text and debug issues that would have been impossible to find (I would have given up) Have it generate, explain, review, compare code or general wr…

> Firstly, you can run the LLMs on your own machine. So I find the proprietary/moat narrative weak.

You cannot run useful models on consumer hardware, sorry this is wrong and will always be the case. Atleast for 10 years until GPUs with 48GB vRAM depreciate. This is a limitation of llm architecture. You cannot post train a It costs about $60-80k to run a 1T param model at your house like Kimi 2.5 .. which is the only size model that's going to get anywhere close to a foundation model's capability. Nobody is going to spend close to 100k to run a mediocre open source model as opposed to spending $200.00 a month. Its a ridiculous notion.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#628

Post by danny_codes »

0x3f wrote: post #560
danny_codes wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only real exceptions are things that specifically require you personally, like investing time with your family, or developing yourself in some way. So, the things that matter the most for most people? Studies pretty consistently show that happiness caps off at relatively modest wealth.

That's not their stated goal. Their stated goal is to maximize impact, not their own happiness.

Impact is nebulous. For example, Zuckerberg has had impact but it’s been almost entirely negative. The world is a worse place for him having existed.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#629

Post by mekoka »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #402
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Feels like a false dichotomy. Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe. Is it 10x or 1000x or 10,000x? Definitely not. I think actually in the past I would have leaned more on senior developers, books, stack overf…

>Feel like we’re back at Adobe Dreameaver release and everyone is claiming that web development jobs are dead I truly believe so much of the anti-AI sentiment is the same as the Luddites. They're often used as a meme now, but they were very real people, faced with a real and present risk to their livelihoods. They acted out of fear, but not just irrational fear. AI is the same: it's unquestionably (to anyone evaluati…

> it's failing to keep up on the skills that keep you employed.

I judge "failing to keep up" by my ability to "catch up". Right now if I search for paying courses on AI-assisted coding, I get a royal bunch for anything between 3$ to about 25$. These are distilled and converging observations by people who have had more time playing around with these toys than me. Most are less than 10 hours (usually 3 to 5). I also find countless free ones on YouTube popping up every week that can catch me up to a decent bouquet of current practices in an hour or two. They all also more or less need to be updated to relevancy after a few months (e.g. I've recently deleted my numerous bookmarks on MCP).

Don't get me wrong, LLM-assisted coding is disruptive, but when practice becomes obsolete after a few months it's not really what's keeping you employed. If after you've spent much time and effort to live near that edge, the gap that truly separates you from me in any meaningful way can be covered in a few hours to catch up, you're not really leaving me behind.

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