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> I'm not convinced myself AI will have much impact on the developers landscape, beyond better autocompletion and doc generation. I’ve been a developer for 20

> I'm not convinced myself AI will have much impact on the developers landscape, beyond better autocompletion and doc generation. I’ve been a developer for 20 years. Using an LLM to generate context-specific prototypes has completely changed my productivity. It has allowed me to start and finish projects that were previously relegated to “maybe someday” (read: never). It’s not clear what the net result will be in the long run, but it’s already changing what and how I build things, and I’m not nearly as bearish as I was before a few successful projects. I don’t think AI is going to replace good engineers. It’s going to make good engineers better engineers. This alone will lead to some interesting outcomes I think.

SoftTalker 2y ago
> It has allowed me to start and finish projects that were previously relegated to “maybe someday” (read: never). I.e. stuff that probably never needed to get done, otherwise it would have been a higher priority than what you were otherwise working on.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  That is not true, see "mental health disorders" which I do suffer from. Me not doing something does not mean it never needed to be done. The opposite is true, too. Something I have done does not mean it had to be done, if that makes sense.
- haswell 2y ago
  I couldn't disagree more. The world is full of unsolved problems and many of them are just time-expensive to fix. Significantly lowering the activation energy and time investment required totally changes the calculus. I wrote about one concrete use case I built to help me solve a long-standing clutter problem in a comment on another thread [0]. Not only did this unblock a project I'd been trying to get going for awhile (declutter my place), it taught me about Linux Kernel Gadgets and started a cascade of new future project ideas. It also makes trying harder things lower risk, i.e. I can fail quickly vs. having to spend 20 hours to see if it's worth pursuing. Setting aside basic productivity, as a high functioning depressed person, activation energy is a huge deal. Having the ability to get an idea to a stage that I can actually see results and work on it is a game changer. - [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43314906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43314906
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    This kind of thinking is why we need cloud-connected apps to run our dishwashers now.
    - haswell 2y ago
      This seems like a very strange conclusion. In what way is "I can solve real problems faster than before" analogous or related to companies building frivolous/unnecessary cloud-connected features?
johnisgood 2y ago
This is my experience as well.

SoftTalker 2y ago

> It has allowed me to start and finish projects that were previously relegated to “maybe someday” (read: never). I.e. stuff that probably never needed to get done, otherwise it would have been a higher priority than what you were otherwise working on.

johnisgood 2y ago
That is not true, see "mental health disorders" which I do suffer from. Me not doing something does not mean it never needed to be done. The opposite is true, too. Something I have done does not mean it had to be done, if that makes sense.
haswell 2y ago
I couldn't disagree more. The world is full of unsolved problems and many of them are just time-expensive to fix. Significantly lowering the activation energy and time investment required totally changes the calculus. I wrote about one concrete use case I built to help me solve a long-standing clutter problem in a comment on another thread [0]. Not only did this unblock a project I'd been trying to get going for awhile (declutter my place), it taught me about Linux Kernel Gadgets and started a cascade of new future project ideas. It also makes trying harder things lower risk, i.e. I can fail quickly vs. having to spend 20 hours to see if it's worth pursuing. Setting aside basic productivity, as a high functioning depressed person, activation energy is a huge deal. Having the ability to get an idea to a stage that I can actually see results and work on it is a game changer. - [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43314906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43314906
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  This kind of thinking is why we need cloud-connected apps to run our dishwashers now.
  - haswell 2y ago
    This seems like a very strange conclusion. In what way is "I can solve real problems faster than before" analogous or related to companies building frivolous/unnecessary cloud-connected features?

johnisgood 2y ago

This is my experience as well.