4 ms·

That seems like a steal? Engineers are paid much more to do much less

CGamesPlay 2y ago
No, I'm paid much more to do much more than what I did in this simple task. Claude didn't even test the changes (in this case, it does not have the hardware required to do that), or decide that the feature needed to be implemented in the first place. But my comparison wasn't "how do I compare to Claude Code", it was "how does Aider compare to Claude Code". My boss does not use Aider or Claude Code, and would not be happy with the results of replacing me with it (yet).
- y1n0 2y ago
  I think you missed the point. The claim is that it would have cost you more to hire a person to do what either claude code or aider did.
  - CGamesPlay 2y ago
    I think I pretty directly addressed that point. Yes, it would be more expensive to hire me to do what Claude Code / Aider did, but nobody would be satisfied with my work if I stopped where Claude Code / Aider did.
    - radlad 2y ago
      They aren't necessarily saying it can replace you. They're saying that even though it's expensive, it's cheaper than your time (which can be better spent on other tasks, as you point out.)
      - codebolt 2y ago
        And with this increase in productivity, your boss needs fewer of you to do the work that would previously require a larger team.
      - baq 2y ago
        The first half is correct, but the conclusions shouldn’t be ‘we’re replicating our software engineers with Claude today’, they’re ‘our experienced engineers just 10x their productivity, we’ll never need to hire an intern’
        bhaney 2y ago
        You mean "our experienced engineers just 10x'd their productivity, so we can fire 90% of them"
        baq 2y ago
        Nah the value unlock is too great. For now. Don’t quote me next March.
        risyachka 2y ago
        Productivity gains decrease exponentially after a few weeks as your engineering skills become rusty very fast (yes, they do, in 100% cases) Thats the biggest part everyone misses. It’s all sunshine and rainbows until in a month you realize you start asking llm to think for you and at that point the code becomes shit and degrades fast. Like with everything else “use it or lose it” If you don’t code yourself- you will lose the ability to properly so it very fast, and you won’t realize it until too late
        MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
        If you're using the LLM poorly. Many team leads spend very little time programming, and spend a lot of time reviewing code, which is basically what working with LLMs is. If the LLM writes code that you couldn't have written yourself, you aren't qualified to approve it.
        snowwrestler 2y ago
        Accurate only for companies who think today “I have exactly as much engineering talent as I’ll ever need.” Which is approximately zero companies.
        2y ago
      - Suppafly 2y ago
        This, if you hire engineers, you want them doing tasks only engineers can do, not busy work.
- Sterling9x 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - CGamesPlay 2y ago
    I said that the AI literally does not have the hardware required to do the testing necessary. But ignoring that, automated testing is not sufficient for shipping software. Imagine shipping a website that has full test coverage but never once opening the browser. This isn't a fundamentally impossible problem for AI, but no amount of "good prompting" is going to get you there today.
beepbooptheory 2y ago
I know this is not really in the spirit of the room here, but before I ever dreamed of getting paid to code, I only learned to at all because I was cheap and/or poor cook/grad student that wanted to make little artsy musical things on the computer. I remember the first time I just downloaded pure data. No torrent, no cracks, it was just there for me and all it asked for was my patience. The only reason I ever got into linux at all was because I ended up with some dinky acer chromebook for school but didn't want to stop making stuff. Crouton changed my life in a small way with that. As I branched out and got more serious, learning web development, emacs, java, I never stopped feeling so irrationally lucky that it was all free, and always would be. Coming on here and other places to keep learning. It is to this day still the lovely forever hole I can excavate that costs only my sleep and electricity. This is all not gone, but if I was just starting now, I'd find hn and so and coding twitter just like I did 10 years ago, but would be immediately turned off by this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge, however small. I just probably would not of gotten into it. It just wouldn't feel like its for me: "oh well I don't really know how to do this anyway, I can't justify spending money on it!" $0.76 for 50 loc is definitely nuts, but even $0.10 would of turned me way off. I had the same thoughts with all the web3 stuff too... I know this speaks more to my money eccentricities than anything, and I know we dont really care on here about organic weirdo self teachers anymore (just productivity I guess). I am truly not even bemoaning the present situation, everyone has different priorities, and I am sure people are still having the exciting discovery of the computer like I did on their cursor ide or whatever. But I am personally just so so grateful the timeline lined up for me. I don't know if I'd have my passion for this stuff if I was born 10 years later than I was, or otherwise started learning now. But I guess we don't need the passion anymore anyway, its all been vectorized!
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  This doesn't make much sense to me. Is there some reason a kid today can't still learn to code? In the contrary, you have LLMs available that can answer your exact personalized questions. It's like having a free tutor. It's easier than it's ever been to learn for free.
Bjorkbat 2y ago
Tangential, but this reminds me of something someone said on Twitter that has resonated with me ever since. Startups targeting developers / building developer tooling are arguably one of the worst startups to build, because no matter how much of a steal the price is relative to the value you get, developers insist they can build their own or get by with an open-source competitor. We're as misguided on value as we are on efficiency and automation (more specifically, the old trope of a dev spending hours to automate something that takes minutes to do).
- cwalv 2y ago
  I've noticed this tendency in myself and thought about the 'why' a lot, and I think it comes down to subconsciously factoring in the cost of lock-in, or worse, lack of access to fix/improve a tool I've come to rely on
  - TheDong 2y ago
    For me, a larger part than "cost of lock-in" is the "hacker spirit", the curiosity to understand how it works. Sure, I can pay google or fastmail to host a mailserver for me, but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling, etc. I want to know how all those pieces work. Sure, I can pay kagi to search its index of webpages for me, but that deprives me of the joy of creating and running a botnet to index webpages, storing 100s of terrabytes of scraped data, and writing my own search code. Targeting hackers is indeed a sucker's game.
    - lqstuart 2y ago
      I think this spirit is totally lost on most people in this field. It’s tempting to say younger generations but it’s everyone. It always amazes me when I meet someone who has spent 10+ years in this field and doesn’t even care how anything but their shitty Kafka-Flink pipelines work.
      - sgarland 2y ago
tropin 2y ago
Not everybody works in USA.

No, I'm paid much more to do much more than what I did in this simple task. Claude didn't even test the changes (in this case, it does not have the hardware required to do that), or decide that the feature needed to be implemented in the first place. But my comparison wasn't "how do I compare to Claude Code", it was "how does Aider compare to Claude Code". My boss does not use Aider or Claude Code, and would not be happy with the results of replacing me with it (yet).

y1n0 2y ago
I think you missed the point. The claim is that it would have cost you more to hire a person to do what either claude code or aider did.
- CGamesPlay 2y ago
  I think I pretty directly addressed that point. Yes, it would be more expensive to hire me to do what Claude Code / Aider did, but nobody would be satisfied with my work if I stopped where Claude Code / Aider did.
  - radlad 2y ago
    They aren't necessarily saying it can replace you. They're saying that even though it's expensive, it's cheaper than your time (which can be better spent on other tasks, as you point out.)
    - codebolt 2y ago
      And with this increase in productivity, your boss needs fewer of you to do the work that would previously require a larger team.
    - baq 2y ago
      The first half is correct, but the conclusions shouldn’t be ‘we’re replicating our software engineers with Claude today’, they’re ‘our experienced engineers just 10x their productivity, we’ll never need to hire an intern’
      - bhaney 2y ago
        You mean "our experienced engineers just 10x'd their productivity, so we can fire 90% of them"
        baq 2y ago
        Nah the value unlock is too great. For now. Don’t quote me next March.
        risyachka 2y ago
        Productivity gains decrease exponentially after a few weeks as your engineering skills become rusty very fast (yes, they do, in 100% cases) Thats the biggest part everyone misses. It’s all sunshine and rainbows until in a month you realize you start asking llm to think for you and at that point the code becomes shit and degrades fast. Like with everything else “use it or lose it” If you don’t code yourself- you will lose the ability to properly so it very fast, and you won’t realize it until too late
        MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
        If you're using the LLM poorly. Many team leads spend very little time programming, and spend a lot of time reviewing code, which is basically what working with LLMs is. If the LLM writes code that you couldn't have written yourself, you aren't qualified to approve it.
        snowwrestler 2y ago
        Accurate only for companies who think today “I have exactly as much engineering talent as I’ll ever need.” Which is approximately zero companies.
      - 2y ago
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      This, if you hire engineers, you want them doing tasks only engineers can do, not busy work.
Sterling9x 2y ago
[flagged]
- CGamesPlay 2y ago
  I said that the AI literally does not have the hardware required to do the testing necessary. But ignoring that, automated testing is not sufficient for shipping software. Imagine shipping a website that has full test coverage but never once opening the browser. This isn't a fundamentally impossible problem for AI, but no amount of "good prompting" is going to get you there today.

beepbooptheory 2y ago

I know this is not really in the spirit of the room here, but before I ever dreamed of getting paid to code, I only learned to at all because I was cheap and/or poor cook/grad student that wanted to make little artsy musical things on the computer. I remember the first time I just downloaded pure data. No torrent, no cracks, it was just there for me and all it asked for was my patience. The only reason I ever got into linux at all was because I ended up with some dinky acer chromebook for school but didn't want to stop making stuff. Crouton changed my life in a small way with that. As I branched out and got more serious, learning web development, emacs, java, I never stopped feeling so irrationally lucky that it was all free, and always would be. Coming on here and other places to keep learning. It is to this day still the lovely forever hole I can excavate that costs only my sleep and electricity. This is all not gone, but if I was just starting now, I'd find hn and so and coding twitter just like I did 10 years ago, but would be immediately turned off by this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge, however small. I just probably would not of gotten into it. It just wouldn't feel like its for me: "oh well I don't really know how to do this anyway, I can't justify spending money on it!" $0.76 for 50 loc is definitely nuts, but even $0.10 would of turned me way off. I had the same thoughts with all the web3 stuff too... I know this speaks more to my money eccentricities than anything, and I know we dont really care on here about organic weirdo self teachers anymore (just productivity I guess). I am truly not even bemoaning the present situation, everyone has different priorities, and I am sure people are still having the exciting discovery of the computer like I did on their cursor ide or whatever. But I am personally just so so grateful the timeline lined up for me. I don't know if I'd have my passion for this stuff if I was born 10 years later than I was, or otherwise started learning now. But I guess we don't need the passion anymore anyway, its all been vectorized!

idiotsecant 2y ago
This doesn't make much sense to me. Is there some reason a kid today can't still learn to code? In the contrary, you have LLMs available that can answer your exact personalized questions. It's like having a free tutor. It's easier than it's ever been to learn for free.

Bjorkbat 2y ago

Tangential, but this reminds me of something someone said on Twitter that has resonated with me ever since. Startups targeting developers / building developer tooling are arguably one of the worst startups to build, because no matter how much of a steal the price is relative to the value you get, developers insist they can build their own or get by with an open-source competitor. We're as misguided on value as we are on efficiency and automation (more specifically, the old trope of a dev spending hours to automate something that takes minutes to do).

cwalv 2y ago
I've noticed this tendency in myself and thought about the 'why' a lot, and I think it comes down to subconsciously factoring in the cost of lock-in, or worse, lack of access to fix/improve a tool I've come to rely on
- TheDong 2y ago
  For me, a larger part than "cost of lock-in" is the "hacker spirit", the curiosity to understand how it works. Sure, I can pay google or fastmail to host a mailserver for me, but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling, etc. I want to know how all those pieces work. Sure, I can pay kagi to search its index of webpages for me, but that deprives me of the joy of creating and running a botnet to index webpages, storing 100s of terrabytes of scraped data, and writing my own search code. Targeting hackers is indeed a sucker's game.
  - lqstuart 2y ago
    I think this spirit is totally lost on most people in this field. It’s tempting to say younger generations but it’s everyone. It always amazes me when I meet someone who has spent 10+ years in this field and doesn’t even care how anything but their shitty Kafka-Flink pipelines work.
    - sgarland 2y ago

tropin 2y ago

Not everybody works in USA.