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The AI Vampire

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: The AI Vampire

#81

Post by blibble »

Hammershaft wrote: post #15
iberator wrote: post #8

AI takes jobs faster than it creates new ones. It should be banned in current form. No junior positions available - only those who lasted even have the chance to use them in commercial settings. After layoffs you will get how BAD it is :/ (if you are 35+)

Even as a software developer affected by it, I don't think it should be banned. Productivity improvements are how we get richer in aggregate over the long term, even if those impacted (like you & me) might feel the brunt of transitional pain.

> Productivity improvements

jury's out on this one too

I can believe short term productivty gain

but from someone's who has spent years un-fucking codebases that were handed over to outsourced teams... this all looks very familiar

Re: The AI Vampire

#82

Post by singularity2001 »

TomasBM wrote: post #21

We're certainly in the middle of a whirlwind of progress. Unfortunately, as AI capabilities increase, so do our expectations. Suddenly, it's no longer enough to slap something together and call it a project. The better version with more features is just one prompt away. And if you're just a relay for prompts, why not add an agent or two? I think there won't be a future where the world adapts to a 4-hour day. If your…

1

Re: The AI Vampire

#83

Post by dwedge »

thunky wrote: post #74
dwedge wrote: post #13

Every time I say I don't see the productivity boost from AI, people always say I'm using the wrong tool, or the wrong model. I use Claude with Sonnet, Zed with either Claude Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.6, Gemini, and ChatGPT 5.2. I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in roo…

To each their own. > I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. So why use them if you see no benefit? You can refuse to use it, it's fine. You can also write your code in notepad.exe, without a linter, and without an Internet connection if you want. Your rodeo I don't understand the defensiveness.

> So why use them if you see no benefit?

I didn't say I see no benefit, I said I don't see the productivity boost people talk about. I conceded they are good for some things, and presumably that's what I use them for.

> You can refuse to use it, it's fine

Where do you work? Because increasingly, this isn't true. A lot of places are judging engineers by LoC output like it's 2000, except this time the LoC has to come from AI

Re: The AI Vampire

#84

Post by Scaevolus »

sublinear wrote: post #63
Scaevolus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many engineers get paid a lot of money to write low-complexity code gluing things together and tweaking features according to customer requirements. When the difficulty of a task is neatly encompassed in a 200 word ticket and the implementation lacks much engineering challenge, AI can pretty reliably write the code-- mediocre code for mediocre challenges. A huge fraction of the software economy runs on CRUD and some…

Complexity is not where the value to the business comes from. In fact, it's usually the opposite. Nobody wants to maintain slop, and whenever you dismiss simplicity you ignore all the heroic hard work done by those at the lower level of indirection. This is what politics looks like when it finally places its dirty hands on the tech industry, and it's probably been a long time coming. As annoying as that is, we should…

You're reading more dismissal than I wrote.

Most businesses can and many businesses do run efficiently out of shared spreadsheets. Choosing the processes well is the hard part, but there's just not much computational complexity in the execution, nor more data than can be easily processed by a single machine.

Re: The AI Vampire

#85

Post by thunky »

exfalso wrote: post #78
thunky wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each their own. > I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. So why use them if you see no benefit? You can refuse to use it, it's fine. You can also write your code in notepad.exe, without a linter, and without an Internet connection if you want. Your rodeo I don't understand the defensiveness.

I have the same experience and still use it. It's just that I learned to use it for simplistic work. I sometimes try to give it more complex tasks but it keeps failing. I don't think it's bad to keep trying, especially as people are reporting insane productivity gains. After all, it's through failure that we learn the limitations of a technology. Apparently some people encounter that limit more often than others.

> I have the same experience and still use it. It's just that I learned to use it for simplistic work.

OP said "I don't see the productivity boost from AI" and that they don't "believe the hype" without any qualification, but then went on to say that they use it every day. This makes no sense to me.

Isn't this like saying "I don't get anything out of reading books" immediately followed by "I read books for 4 hours every night"?

Re: The AI Vampire

#86

Post by the_other »

Bishonen88 wrote: post #22
fileeditview wrote: post #16

All this praise for AI.. I honestly don't get it. I have used Opus 4.5 for work and private projects. My experience is that all of the AIs struggle when the project grows. They always find some kind of local minimum where they cannot get out of but tell you this time their solution will work.. but it doesn't. They waste my time with this behaviour enormously. In the end I always have to do it myself. Maybe when AIs a…

At what point does the project outgrow the AI in your experience? I have a 70k LOC backend/frontend/database/docker app that Claude still mostly one shots most features/tasks I throw at it. Perhaps, it's not as good remembering all the intertwined side-effects between functionalities/ui's and I have to let it know "in the calendar view, we must hide it as well", but that takes little time/effort. Does it break down a…

> At what point does the project outgrow the AI in your experience? I have a 70k LOC backend/frontend/database/docker app that Claude still mostly one shots most features/tasks I throw at it.

How do you do this?

Admittedly, I'm using Copilot, not CC.

I can't get Copilot to finish a refactor properly, let alone a feature. It'll miss an import rename, leave in duplicated code, update half the use cases but not all.. etc. And that's with all the relevant files in context, and letting it search the codebase so it can get more context.

It can talk about DRY, or good factoring, or SOLID, but it only applies them when it feels like it, despite what's in AGENTS.md. I have much better results when I break the task down into small chunks myself and NOT tell it the whole story.

Re: The AI Vampire

#87

Post by fydorm »

larodi wrote: post #46

It's real and I've been telling all the people around me who get vested in this sort of exponential growth, to be very wary of the impeding burnout, which spares no soul hungry to get high on information. getting high on information is now a thing, it is not cyberpunk fiction anymore, and burnout is a real threat - VR or not. perhaps one can burn out on tiktok these days.

I noticed today that even with less sleep, I'm more energized than usual when I stayed up late but not consuming information.

Re: The AI Vampire

#88

Post by apazzolini »

MrScruff wrote: post #69
augment_me wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am with you on this, and you can't win, because as soon as you voice this opinion you get overwhelmed with "you dont have the sauce/prompt" opinions which hold an inherent fallacy because they assume you are solving the same problems as them. I work in GPU programming, so there is no way in hell that JavaScript tools and database wrapper tasks can be on equal terms with generating for example Blackwell tcgen05 warp…

There's going to be a long tail of domain-specific tasks that aren't well served by current models for the foreseeable future, but there's also no question the complexity horizon of the SotA models is increasing over time. I've had decent results recently with non-trivial Cuda/MPS code. Is it great code/finely tuned? Probably not but it delivered on the spec and runs fast enough.

> you can't win, because as soon as you voice this opinion you get overwhelmed with "you dont have the sauce/prompt"

> I've had decent results recently with non-trivial Cuda/MPS code.

Re: The AI Vampire

#89

Post by mbgerring »

mrkeen wrote: post #37
mbgerring wrote: post #25

This is a good time to repeat that software engineers need a union. We needed this ten years ago, and we need it a lot more now.

What concrete interests would you like such a union to protect? Should a strike happen if devs are told to use Claude, or should a strike happen if devs aren't given access to Claude?

Here are some easy ones:

- End H1B abuse and demand limits on offshoring

- Compensation transparency

- “Value capture,” as called out in the article. If new tools make engineers 10x more productive, that should be reflected in compensation

- End employment law workarounds like “unlimited PTO,” where your PTO is still limited in practice, but it’s not a defined or accruing benefit

- Protection against dilution of equity for employees

- A seat at the table for workers, not just managers, in the event of layoffs

- Professional ethics and whistleblower protections. Legally-protected strikes if workers decide to refuse on pursuing an ethically or legally dubious product or feature.

I could go on. There are a lot of abuses we put up with because of relatively high salaries, and it is now abundantly clear that the billionaire capital-owning class is dead set on devaluing the work we do to “reduce labor costs.” We can decide not to go along with that.

Re: The AI Vampire

#90

Post by Wilder7977 »

Hammershaft wrote: post #15
iberator wrote: post #8

AI takes jobs faster than it creates new ones. It should be banned in current form. No junior positions available - only those who lasted even have the chance to use them in commercial settings. After layoffs you will get how BAD it is :/ (if you are 35+)

Even as a software developer affected by it, I don't think it should be banned. Productivity improvements are how we get richer in aggregate over the long term, even if those impacted (like you & me) might feel the brunt of transitional pain.

"In aggregate" means few individuals on the planet, unfortunately, not the whole collectivity. This makes your statement almost almost surreal in my eyes.
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