I'm OK being left behind, thanks • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#691

Post by johnnyanmac » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 1:56 AM UTC

mh- wrote: post #379

tjpnz wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the tools available is one thing, but saying you're mandating their use at any level sounds like micro management to me. How would you feel if one of your subordinates started telling you how to do your job? I'm sure you would be mightily pissed off about it.

I don't think telling people what their job is counts as micro management . Part of their job right now is staying abreast of technological developments and experimenting with new ways of working. Re: some of them being upset about it- probably. Some people are also upset about being required to use Jira. I personally dislike using Okta.

>Part of their job right now is staying abreast of technological developments and experimenting with new ways of working.

Not necessarily. A carpenter has a job to make things. Not to use specific tools and keep up with the latest tools used for repairs. It can be suggested, but telling a caprenter what tool to definitely falls under micromanagement.

>Some people are also upset about being required to use Jira

Jira's job is to report metrics to management. That implicit to the job. Telling people how to perform their tickets is micromanagement. The whole goal of a non-junior employee is to trust they can estimate and accomplish their task.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#692

Post by Hasslequest » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 2:03 AM UTC

dakolli wrote: post #627

Hasslequest wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I run Qwen-3.5 based LLMs in the 20-35 parameter range on my laptop's iGPU and it works great for my use case, which includes coding, search, reasoning, and general tasks. Gemma3 is good too.

There are ones that are distilled with better reasoning models or abliterated for whatever you need, and the multimodal features work... fine.

Just started running local LLMs this week, and it is pretty much overkill for what anyone in my family needs. All it really lacks is some tools for it to use, which I am putting together now.

To be fair, the best model I have used is claude sonnet. I don't really know what I am missing with opus.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#693

Post by Hasslequest » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 2:04 AM UTC

dakolli wrote: post #626

Hasslequest wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really need a foundation model's capability

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#694

Post by abustamam » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 2:08 AM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #603

abustamam wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right that it is fear. But it's kind of a self fulfilling fear. Teams are requiring employees to use AI, probably because of this fear. Maybe it isn't directly taking my job, but it is necessary for me to use Ai to keep my job.

You can always hang your shingle and work for clients directly.

Sure, in the same way I can always quit being an engineer and become a farmer. It can work for some, but not everyone.

FWIW I do client work on the side. Full time client work has always been more draining than just having a regular job IME. Maybe I just can't find the right clients, but that's not something I have to worry about when I work for a company.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#695

Post by sarchertech » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 3:00 AM UTC

abustamam wrote: post #694

sarchertech wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always hang your shingle and work for clients directly.

Sure, in the same way I can always quit being an engineer and become a farmer. It can work for some, but not everyone. FWIW I do client work on the side. Full time client work has always been more draining than just having a regular job IME. Maybe I just can't find the right clients, but that's not something I have to worry about when I work for a company.

I wasn’t talking to everyone I was talking to you. And becoming a contractor is a lot more viable than becoming a farmer.

Client work is hard, but you have to decide if the freedom to work the way you want is worth it.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#696

Post by sarchertech » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 3:03 AM UTC

leptons wrote: post #658

sarchertech wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you are a JS dev and github comes out with a new search feature that's really good. it lets you use natural language to find open source projects really easily. So whenever you have a new project you check to see if something similar exists. And instead of starting from scratch you start from that and tweak it to fit what you want to do. If you were the type of person who makes tiny toy apps, or you worked on…

Nothing you described in this comment is only achievable with "AI". I've been able to search for and find open source projects since forever, and fork them and extend them, long before an LLM was a glimmer in Sam Altman's beady eye.

No it’s not at all. AI just makes finding it faster. But that’s my point AI isn’t that different from what you could already do before. Most of us didn’t do things that way before, so maybe programming like that is just a bad idea.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#697

Post by sarchertech » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 3:10 AM UTC

apsurd wrote: post #606

sarchertech wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds exactly right. I'm someone who learned the web back when IE6 was something we wished everyone was on, and also someone who learned the fundamentals of the web and CS in general enough to try writing a book about it to teach everyone else. Picking up the web early didn't help with the latter. I spent most of my early time memorizing tips and tricks that only applied to old browsers. I didn't pick up the fu…

web fundamentals and web development fundamentals are different. How HTML, CSS and javascript come together is extremely relevant to developers 20 years ago and today. I do support and agree with the parent comment, see the discussion, but I do credit getting into web development when it was raw and open paid dividends for me. Todays ecosystem is opaque in comparison. You don't think there's more friction today?

HTML CSS and JavaScript are just a small subset of web development.

And yes understanding them is still relevant. But when I started I was spending more time memorizing the the quirks of IE6 than I was learning how JavaScript, CSS, and HTML come together.

I think it you start directly in react you don’t learn the layer below it sure. But there’s no reason you have to start leaning react. There’s nothing inherent about starting today that forces you to start directly with React. You could start building a static webpage. And if you did that it would be easier and more fundamental than if you did that same thing 20 years ago because you can ignore most of the non-standard browser quirks.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#698

Post by sarchertech » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 3:12 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #677

sarchertech wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m at a big tech company top and essentially no one is a true believer more than 3 or 4 levels down from the top. We’re all just trying to keep our use metrics high enough to not get noticed. But for those top layers, I’ve never seen so much FOMO in all my life. We’re a very slow moving company but they act like we’ve got 2 weeks to go “AI first” or we’re dead in the water. I’ve never seen such a successful hype cyc…

Maybe AI is really good for vibe-coding bots that amplify FOMO?

It’s really good at spitting out prose that is frequently good enough to pass as human and bypass spam filters.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#699

Post by shepherdjerred » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 3:13 AM UTC

subarctic wrote: post #513

remus wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're only missing out if that's what you want to do. Who writes software and doesn't have a list of "I'll fix this one day" issues as long as their arm? This is honestly one of the things I enjoy most at the moment. There's whole classes of issues where I know the fix is probably pretty simple but I wouldn't have had time to sort it previously. Now I can just point claude at it and have a PR 5mins later. It's rea…

Claude code makes it so easy to do things the "right way" that it also makes it really easy for you to let scope creep get out of hand. I have a personal project that I haven't deployed yet that in some ways is way overengineered for its purpose. It's hard to blame the tool though, it's always telling me I'm making it more complicated than it needs to be but I don't listen

I've felt this recently. I've often been bad about scope creep. CC makes it so easy.

On the other hand, I can see these tools getting good enough that scope creep doesn't even matter.

ATM I usually get stuck around the review/verification stage. As in, my code works, I have tested that it works, but it is failing CI or someone left a PR comment. And for each comment I'll have to make sure it makes sense, make the change, test again, and get CI passing again.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#700

Post by sarchertech » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 3:19 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #624

sarchertech wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re not understanding what I’m saying. If you as a company want to do OOP, having one guy writing everything in imperative style hinders everyone else because their code has to interact with his.

AI isn’t like this because the final output is the same as hand coding.