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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#761

Post by sarchertech »

tetromino_ wrote: post #740
sarchertech wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever monitored and encouraged the use of a particular text editor or IDE? If you had an employee whose manager thought was a high performer, but you noticed they used notepad would you encourage that they regularly give vim a try? The reason we force people to use Jira is because it only works if everyone uses it. AI doesn’t work like that. If it does enhance productivity 50% then use will spread and the exp…

> The reason we force people to use Jira is because it only works if everyone uses it. In my experience, AI out of the box is at first a useless gimmick - until someone starts seriously playing with it and defines a skill file for integrating it with some internal tool. And another person starts playing with it and figures out that AI is pretty good at using another internal tool but only if the tool runs in --silent…

In my experience all the md files just pollute the context and make it less likely to do what I want it to do. I’m at a huge org with thousands of power users doing all of this and I haven’t seen anything resembling the results you’re seeing.

But even assuming this is the case, you don’t create enthusiastic power users with threats (implicit or explicit) and metric tracking. The only thing that does is force people to do the minimum to keep their job.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#762

Post by Izkata »

Aurornis wrote: post #333
nemomarx wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also seems like skills with particular tech (prompt engineering, harnesses, mixture of experts set ups) doesn't always necessarily pay off when there's a sea change. Hard to predict what you'll want in a few years anyway, right?

> (prompt engineering, harnesses, mixture of experts set ups) Prompt engineering as a specific skill got blown out of proportion on LinkedIn and podcasts. The core idea that you need to write decent prompts if you want decent output is true, but the idea that it was an expert-level skill that only some people could master was always a lie. Most of it is common sense about having to put your content into the prompt an…

> It’s also not as hard as the LinkedIn posts imply.

Keeping in mind the LinkedIn posters/audience (marketers/recruiters), it probably was quite hard for most of them.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#763

Post by QuiEgo »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #182
jghn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But will companies start hiring again? Anecdata, but the few people I know who were looking to switch gigs all had multiple offers within a few weeks. One thing they all had in common was taking a very targeted approach with their search and leveraging their networks. Not spamming thousands of resumes into the ether.

so you either are well connected or you starve, got it guess it's death and destitute for introverts edit: please explain the downvotes, i'm curious why you think i'm wrong if what op says it's true, that today only networking works, then it easily follows that if for some reasons you do not have a network then you don't get hired

fwiw this is how it's always been. You don't have to be some kind of extreme extrovert, but people who are good at what they do tend to enjoy working with other people who are good at what they do, and when they see someone they recognize as "I'd work with this guy again" they put in the minimal effort to stay in contact - a hello text every few months, a cup of coffee every few years, that type of thing. Thats all it takes. If you're not doing that, yeah, you're in for a world of hurt when you go job hunting.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#764

Post by QuiEgo »

tavavex wrote: post #615
bogzz wrote: post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

> A flat tire is a flat tire, no matter whether a recession is going on or whether LLMs are causing chaos in white collar work. If I had no debt and a little bit saved up I might just content myself with a humble moat like that. Bad idea. Automotive repair is barely a moat, because you don't need that much training to work those jobs. There's a lot of people who want to do it. And cars are definitely susceptible to r…

Electricians are on a rip right now with all the data center build outs and will likely always be in demand.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#765

Post by QuiEgo »

If you want to see the potential value of Claude, pick a somewhat isolated function in your code and tell Claude "write unit tests for this". Watch it write them, compile your code, validate the test, fix the ones it did something dumb on, and iterate. Laugh as you get 10 awesome tests and 2 really dumb ones you have to go in and clean up by hand for 5 minutes of work. Half a day of iterating later you'll have finished the extremely tedious test writing that would have taken you a day or two without Claude.

When doing a code review, tell Claude "review commit xyz". It finds things humans are not finding in reviews at this point.

Not sure about what you want to do for some design? Use Claude as a rubber duck - tell it "I'm deciding between implementing this with A or B and here's why... is there any thing I'm missing that would make the decision more clear, or any potential solution I've missed?" It has the context of your existing code, which can be incredibly helpful for stuff like this.

Opus 4.6 is good enough that it's undeniable that it's going to change the industry at this point. It's just a question of how big the change will be. The earlier models were shit. Everyone I worked with spurned them, including me. Everyone around me using Opus 4.6 is saying "well, shit, this is real now" with varying degrees of excitement and unease.

AI is not some magic pill. A lot of software development is not writing code, it's requirements gathering and design. That part doesn't magically go away, in fact it becomes way more important. But AI is speeding up the writing code part of things - if, and only if, you put down a good plan first.

People will structure their code where AI can churn on it (specs in markdown, and TDD all over again), it's useful enough to be worth it. We're going to get segmented into engineers who can use it and engineers who can't.

For this technology I'd not wait. Start learning it.

We're all going to be more focused on being architects instead of developers.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#766

Post by xboxnolifes »

vunderba wrote: post #525
II2II wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost entirely agree with the author's assessment of new technology. Yet that statement rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes it is better to get into things early because it will grow more complex as time goes on, so it will be easier to pick up early in its development. Consider the Web. In the early days, it was just HTML. That was easy to learn. From there on, it was simply a matter of picking up new skills as th…

I think this applies a bit less to the AI sphere, which has the purported goal of making things easier and more automated over time. 90% of the time if you have an AI question you can just... ask the LLM itself. Remember all the hoopla over how people needed be a "prompt engineer" a couple years back? A lot of that alchemy is basically totally obsolete. Think about the hoops you had to jump through with early GenAI d…

Things will never be easier long term, you will just be expected to get more done. And if you dont spend time learning the tools, you will get less done than your competition.

The goal posts will move.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#767

Post by GeoAtreides »

QuiEgo wrote: post #763
GeoAtreides wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so you either are well connected or you starve, got it guess it's death and destitute for introverts edit: please explain the downvotes, i'm curious why you think i'm wrong if what op says it's true, that today only networking works, then it easily follows that if for some reasons you do not have a network then you don't get hired

fwiw this is how it's always been. You don't have to be some kind of extreme extrovert, but people who are good at what they do tend to enjoy working with other people who are good at what they do, and when they see someone they recognize as "I'd work with this guy again" they put in the minimal effort to stay in contact - a hello text every few months, a cup of coffee every few years, that type of thing. Thats all i…

>a hello text every few months, a cup of coffee every few years

sounds like hell to me

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#769

Post by oro44 »

forgetfulness wrote: post #350
genthree wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the AI assistants for ticket-writing. The beneficial use there would be to prompt for possibly-useful information that's not present, or call out ambiguity and let the writer decide how to resolve any of that. Coaching, basically. Suggesting actual text to include, for people who aren't already excellent at ticket-writing, just leads to noisier tickets that take more work to understand ("did they really mean t…

Lots of organizations don't want to accept that their velocity issues are quality issues. It's often a view held by an old guard that was there when the business experienced growth by adding features, while not having to bear any maintenance burden. The people who remain are either also oblivious to this, or simply have stopped caring. LLM-generated code hits all the right notes, it's done fast, in great volumes, and…

I dont get the craziness at all.

A firm that is led by people who can envision, very clearly, revenue-generating and cost-reduction projects - wins. Writing code by hand is absolutely irrelevant. Who fucking cares. The former is what matters.

Code generation acceleration only matters when those pre-requisites are met. How did Apple go from the verge of bankruptcy to where it is today?

All Im seeing is most people are not smart at all - no wonder they are so impressed by LLMs! They can't think straight. I only see this become even worse over-time. Perhaps this is the stated goal.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#770

Post by oro44 »

gnabgib wrote: post #689
oro44 wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broadly speaking, LLMs are destined to fail. Why? Because all the folks involved have created a technology in search for a problem to solve. That never, ever works. Steve Jobs of all people left this piece of wisdom behind. Its amazing how few actually apply it. The internet was never this - its origins go back to the need to able to transmit data - darpa. And this is what we still do now...

Can you stop using them? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462767

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