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The first 40 months of the AI era

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Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#71

Post by gobdovan »

refactor_master wrote: post #55
aidos wrote: post #7

> To what degree did I expand scope because I knew I could do more using the AI? Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.

If you’re an employee who can finish their work 25% faster but you’re not getting a 4-day work week, what are the incentives for not introducing creep?

Just sitting around and thinking of solutions to your own problems beats giving yourself work. As refactor_nietzsche would put it, resource slack is what lets you be a refactor_master instead of a refactor_slave. If you feel pressured into self-imposed creep, it's probably because you've internalized the idea that having too much slack makes you look dangerous to your superiors, so you default to playing the worker bee.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#72

Post by jofzar »

> I remember the first time I vibe-coded a small project. It was an app that generated placeholder cards for my MTG collection. I prompted the bot (now Claude, not ChatGPT).....

I would be interested what date this was? I am surprised if it's been recent that Claude didn't 1 shot this.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#74

Post by vaginaphobic »

theteapot wrote: post #35

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…

[dead]

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#75

Post by scared_together »

gobdovan wrote: post #69

Generating AI Content sucks, Consuming AI Content sucks, but combine them in the same loop and it's really addicting. AI Content Prosuming rocks. Since LLMs, if I see a video I think is interesting, I take the transcript, feed it into an LLM, I summarize it and ask it a couple of questions. I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on. I suppose that when you're the one generating the req…

> I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on.

Why not read the original news?

Okay, there are many reasons why you might not want to do that, such as ads, tracking, having to pay for a subscription if you only want one article, and just plain boredom. I wasn't trying to call you out, it was more of a question for society at large.

Why has it become more appealing to have a "content creator" turn 5 phrases of news into a 12 minute video and then have an LLM convert it back, rather than reading the 5 phrases?

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#76

Post by conception »

skydhash wrote: post #63
andai wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several of my friends who don't know any programming are creating video games and music software with AI agents. Much of what they are doing is incomprehensible to me. I often find that being a programmer is actually holding me back in this regard, because I feel the need to understand everything the code is doing, as well as the specialized knowledge (e.g. the math involved in audio processing and sound effects). Wh…

Have they shipped anything that people are using? The concerns are different and creating something usable by people is why software engineering exists.

I think that’s where software engineering is not quite getting what’s happening right now. People keep asking where are the apps?where all this great code? And the answer is becoming that people aren’t building apps to sell to other people. They’re building the apps that they themselves want to use. I’ve made dozens of apps that I have no interest in distributing or using outside of friends and family. The AI coding revolution is already here and it’s not in production software so much as it is in bespoke small group applications.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#77

Post by d675 »

skydhash wrote: post #63
andai wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several of my friends who don't know any programming are creating video games and music software with AI agents. Much of what they are doing is incomprehensible to me. I often find that being a programmer is actually holding me back in this regard, because I feel the need to understand everything the code is doing, as well as the specialized knowledge (e.g. the math involved in audio processing and sound effects). Wh…

Have they shipped anything that people are using? The concerns are different and creating something usable by people is why software engineering exists.

I'm an early-mid career SDET/SRE. Currently building a full web app with rest AP integrations, looks great and works great. Lots of functionality, useful and being hardened all b/c of AI. It's going to be live with customers soon I hope.

AI is not a feature of the product. GTM will be interesting, have some good ideas.

It's really up to you to be clever. I've never used Js/Ts/node/these apis etc. I started programming as a non-cs engineer to automate stuff and then got into SWE. This is truly an amazing time.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#78

Post by Rapzid »

theteapot wrote: post #35

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…

I feel like Google search results have gotten tremendously worse over the past 2 years too. It's almost like you have to use AI search to find anything useful now.

Which of course reduces traffic to sites and thus the incentives to create the content you're looking for in the first place :(

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#79

Post by nunez »

theteapot wrote: post #35

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…

This is facts. All of this talk about putting agent skills directly into repos (as Markdown!) is maddening. "Where were LITERALLY ALL OF YOU whenever the topic of docs as code came up?"

This is doubly maddening with NotebookLMs. They are becoming single sources of knowledge for large domains, which is great (except you can't just read the sources, which is very "We will read the Bible to you" energy), but, in the past, this knowledge would've been all over SharePoint, Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, etc.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#80

Post by nunez »

luckydata wrote: post #65
theteapot wrote: post #35

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…

then you should be delighted we have LLMs one of the use cases they are best suited to is writing documentation, much better than humans can.

They write good _looking_ documentation. How good those docs are is entirely on the person/people who prompted them into existence.
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