6 ms·

Reading articles like this feels like being in a different reality. I don't work like this, I don't want to work like this and maybe most importantly I don't w

• lordnacho 1y ago
  But you also can't not swim with the tide. If you drove a horse-buggy 100 years ago, it was probably worth your while to keep your eye on whether motor-cars went anywhere. I was super skeptical about a year ago. Copilot was making nice predictions, that was it. This agent stuff is truly impressive.
  • rafaelmn 1y ago
    More like people telling us there will be no more professional drivers on the road in 5-10 years 10 years ago. Agents are like lane assist, not even up to the current self driving levels.
    • miltonlost 1y ago
      So many people are hyping AI like it's Musk's FSD, with the same fraudulance in overestimating its capabilities.
      • dingnuts 1y ago
        it's exactly like this. we're 3 years into being told all white collar jobs are going to be gone next year, just like we're ten years into being told we'll have self driving cars next year
        • johnnienaked 1y ago
          15 years into bitcoin replacing the USD too
    • throw234234234 1y ago
      Not sure the analogy is the same. A driverless car if it does something wrong can cause death - the cost of failure is very high. If my code doesn't come out right, as other posts here have said, I can just "re-roll the slot machine" until it does come out as acceptable - the cost is extremely low. Most of the "reasoning" models just increase the probability that the "re-run" will more likely be to preference of most people with RL to make it viable - tools like new agents know how to run tools, etc to give more data for the probability to be viable within a good timeframe and not run into an endless loop most of the time. Software until it is running after all is just text on a page. Sure I have to be sure what I'm committing and running is good, especially in critical domains. The cheap cost of iteration before actual commit IMO is the one reason why LLM's are disruptive in software and other "generative" domains in the digital world. Conversely real-time requirements, software that needs to be relied on (e.g. a life support system?), things that post opinions in my name online etc will probably, even if written by a LLM, will need someone accountable and verifying the output. Again as per many other posts "I want to be wrong" given I'm a senior in my career and would find it hard to change now given age. I don't like how our career is concentrating to the big AI labs/companies rather than our own intelligence/creativity. But rationally its hard to see how software continues to be the same career going forward and if I don't adapt I might die. I will most likely going forward, similar to what I do with my current team, just define and verify.
  • mnky9800n 1y ago
    I think the agent stuff is impressive because we are giving the AI scaffold and tools and things to do. And that is why it is impressive because it has some directive. But it is obvious if you don't give it good directives it doesn't know what to do. So for me, I think a lot of jobs will be making agents do things, but a lot won't. i think its really strange that people are all so against all this stuff. it's cool new computer tools, does nobody actually like computers anymore?
    • oblio 1y ago
      People are afraid that instead of skilled craft guild members they will become assembly line workers like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. And in 10 years unemployed like people in the Rust Belt.
      • avidphantasm 1y ago
        This, and no one will understand the software that is created. Then you are beholden to AI companies who can charge you whatever they want to maintain the AI code. Will this be cheaper than paying software engineers? Maybe, but I could also see it costing much more.
      • lucumo 1y ago
        There's a kind of karmic comedy in this. Programmers' jobs has always been to automate other people's jobs. The panic of programmers about their own jobs now is immensely funny to me. As has been the case for all those jobs changed by programmers, the people who keep an open mind and are willing to learn new ways of working will be fine or even thrive. The people rusted to their seat, who are barely adding value as is, will be forced to choose between changing or struggling.
        • oblio 1y ago
          The problem is that these days we're talking about millions of people. Those kinds of masses of people don't pivot on a dime.
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  • bloppe 1y ago
    An I the only one who has to constantly tell Claude and Gemini to stop making edits to my codebase because they keep messing things up and breaking the build like ten times in a row, duplicating logic everywhere, etc? I keep hearing about how impressive agents are. I wish they could automate me out of my job faster
    • mbrumlow 1y ago
      Did you tell them to not duplicate code?
    • Benjammer 1y ago
      Are you paying for the higher end models? Do you have proper system prompts and guidance in place for proper prompt engineering? Have you started to practice any auxiliary forms of context engineering? This isn't a magic code genie, it's a very complicated and very powerful new tool that you need to practice using over time in order to get good results from.
      • goalieca 1y ago
        It ain’t a magic code genie. And developers don’t spend most of their day typing lines of code. Lots of it is designing, figuring out what to build, understanding the code, maintenance considerations, and adhering to the style of whatever file you’re in. All these agents needing local context and still spit junk.
      • dingnuts 1y ago
        guy 1: I put money in the slot machine everyone says wins all the time and I lose you: HAVE YOU PUT MORE TOKENS IN???? ARE YOU PUTTING THEM IN THE EXPENSIVE MACHINES??? super compelling argument /s if you want to provide working examples of "prompt engineering" or "context engineering" please do but "just keep paying until the behavior is impressive" isn't winning me as a customer it's like putting out a demo program that absolutely sucks and promising that if I pay, it'll get good. why put out the shit demo and give me this impression, then, if it sucks?
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  • kellyjprice 1y ago
    I'm not trying to discount it the analogy, but I'd much rather live without cars (or a lot less).
  • verisimilidude 1y ago
    AI's superpower is doing mediocre work at high speed. That's okay. Great, even. There's lots of mediocre work to do. And mediocre still clears below average. But! There's still room for expertise. And this is where I disagree about swimming with the tide. There will be those who are uninterested in using the AI. They will struggle. They will hone their craft. They will have muscle memory for the tasks everyone else forgot how to do. And they will be able to perform work that the AI users cannot. The future needs both types.
    • jon-wood 1y ago
      My ongoing concern is that most of us probably got to being able to do good work via several years of doing mediocre work. We put in the hours and along the way learned what good looks like, and various patterns that allow us to see the path to solving a given problem. What does the next generation do when we’ve automated away that work? How do they learn to recognise what good looks like, and when their LLM has got stuck on a dead end and is just spewing out nonsense?
      • commakozzi 1y ago
        they will be judging the merit of work in much broader context.
      • hooverd 1y ago
        they don't!
  • beefnugs 1y ago
    This doesn't make aaaaany sense: IF this actually worked, then why would all the biggest companies in the world be firing people? They would be forcing them all to DO THE TIDE and multiple their 10 billion dollar dominance to 100 billion dollar or more dominance. The truth is something like: for this to work, there is huge requirements in tooling/infrastructure/security/simulation/refinement/optimization/cost-saving that just could never be figured out by the big companies. So they are just like... well lets trick as many investors and plebs to try to use this as possible, maybe one of them will come up with some breakthrough we can steal
    • fragmede 1y ago
      > why would all the biggest companies in the world be firing people Because of section 174, now hopefully repealed. Money makes the world go round, and the money people talk to the people with firing authority.
  • fzeroracer 1y ago
    Sometimes it's a good thing to not swim with the tide. Enshittification comes from every single dipshit corporation racing to the bottom, and right now said tide is increasingly filling with sewage. There's a huge disconnect I notice where experienced software engineers rage about how shitty things are nowadays while diving directly into using AI garbage, where they cannot explain what their code is doing if their lives depended on it.
• raincole 1y ago
  > in a different reality. It is. And one reality is getting bigger each day and the other is shrinking.
• logicchains 1y ago
  >I don't work like this, I don't want to work like this and maybe most importantly I don't want to work with somebody who works like this. It suggests you've had very positive life experiences, that you trust human developers so much more than computers.
  • sbalough 1y ago
    I don’t think that was his argument. It would be one thing if we reach a point where humans trust a higher AI intelligence to create/keep software systems predictably meeting requirements. We aren’t there yet. So, it’s important to make sure any AI code is reviewed and approved by humans.
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• majormajor 1y ago
  The market for utility software like this predates the internet, we used to pass them around on floppies. It was never subject to particularly high QA or scrutiny. It just has to be "adequate." But it's never displaced the market for highly-produced, highly-planned, "central" software pieces that the utilities glue together and help you work with, etc. The growth of that software-as-big-business has only enlarged the need for utilities, really, to integrate everything, but it's a tough space to work in - "it's hard to compete with free." One classic move is selling support, etc. Might be tough to do non-LLM-driven software development there - the selling support for your LLM-created-products model is still viable, but if there's an increase in velocity in useful utility creation or maintenance, possibly the dev headcount needs are lower. But does anyone know how to use LLMs to make those giant ones yet? Or to make those central core underlying libraries you mention? Doesn't seem like it. Time will tell if there's a meaningful path that is truly different from "an even higher level programming language." Even on the edges - "we outgrew the library and we have to fork it because of [features/perf/bugs]" is a pretty common pattern when working on those larger projects already, and the more specific the exact changes you need are, the less the LLM might be able to do it for you (e.g. the "it kept assuming this function existed because it exists in a lot of similar things" problem). What I hope is that we can find good ways to leverage these for quality control and testing and validation. (Though this is the opposite of the sort of greenfield dev demos that get the most press right now.) Testing/validation is hard and expensive enough that basically nobody does a thorough job of it right now, especially in the consumer space. It would be wonderful if we could find ways to release higher quality software without teams of thousands doing manual validation.
• quantiq 1y ago
  This has to be someone working solely on personal projects right? Because I don't know anyone who actually works like this and frequently the code that AI will spit out is actually quite bad.
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• weitendorf 1y ago
  I've been working on AI dev tools for a bit over a year and I don't love using AI this way either. I mostly use it for boilerplate, ideas, or to ask questions about error messages. But I've had a very open mind about it ever since I saw it oneshotting what I saw as typical Google Cloud Functions tasks (glue together some APIs, light http stuff) a year ago. I think in the last month we've entered an inflection point with terminal "agents" and new generations of LLMs trained on their previously spotty ability to actually do the thing. It's not "there" yet and results depend on so many factors like the size of your codebase, how well-represented that kinda stuff is in its training data, etc but you really can feed these things junior-sized tickets and send them off expecting a PR to hit your tray pretty quickly. Do I want the parts of my codebase with the tricky, important secret sauce to be written that way? Of course not, but I wouldn't give them to most other engineers either. A 5-20 person army of ~interns-newgrads is something I can leverage for a lot of the other work I do. And of course I still have to review the generated code, because it's ultimately my responsibility, but I prefer that over having to think about http response codes for my CRUD APIs. It gives me more time to focus on L7 load balancing and cluster discovery and orchestration engines.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > but you really can feed these things junior-sized tickets and send them off expecting a PR to hit your tray pretty quickly This really hasn't been my experience Maybe I just expect more out of juniors than most people, though
• gabrieledarrigo 1y ago
  I know, it's scary. But I guess it's the direction we are aiming for.
  • recursive 1y ago
    Just to clarify, I'm not a member of that "we".
    • gabrieledarrigo 1y ago
      And that's fine, it's your choice. But everything, driven by multiple forces (from hype, to marketing, to real progress, to early adopters) is pointing to that future.
      • ath3nd 1y ago
        Yes, another web3, crypto and nft "inevitable" futures. Just give Sama a couple more trillion and AGI is juuuust behind the corner. It's a fact models aren't getting as cost efficient nor better with the same rate that the costs increases of training and running them. It's also a fact that they are so unprofitable that Anthropic feels like they gotta rug-pull your Claude tokens (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598254#44602695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598254#44602695) without telling you, let's just ignore those facts and fanboy with wide-closed about that future. A future framed as "inevitable" by a bunch of people whose job/wealth depends on framing it as such. Nah, hard pass.
        • gabrieledarrigo 1y ago
          > A future framed as "inevitable" by a bunch of people whose job/wealth depends on framing it as such. Nah, hard pass. I agree with you! I'm not saying that I like it; this is the perfect example of turbo capitalism applied to innovation. I also like to code and to build software, and the joy that comes from the act of creation. Only, I'm quite sure it's not going to last.
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• richardw 1y ago
  Scary part is: what if it’s inevitable? We don’t get to choose our environment, and toss one is forming around us. A friend’s dad only knows assembly. He’s the ceo of his company and they do hardware, and he’s close to retirement now, but he finds this newfangled C and C++ stuff a little too abstract. He sadly needs to trust “these people” but really he prefers being on the metal.
• vitaflo 1y ago
  >I don't want to work with somebody who works like this. You will most likely get your wish but not in the way you want. In a few years when this is fully matured there will be little reason to hire devs with their inflated salaries (especially in the US) when all you need is someone with some technical know-how and a keen eye on how to work with AI agents. There will be plenty of those people all over the globe who will demand much less than you will. Hate to break it to you but this is the future of writing software and will be a reckoning for the entire software industry and the inflated salaries it contains. It won't happen overnight but it'll happen sooner than many devs are willing to admit.
  • dingnuts 1y ago
    yes yes the chainsaw made lumberjacks obsolete
  • hooverd 1y ago
    > some technical know-how how do they develop the technical know-how? how will you review the AI agents when you understand nothing?
    • vitaflo 1y ago
      How do you review the machine code generated by the compiler?
      • hooverd 1y ago
        surely you can appreciate the difference between a compiler and a non-deterministic natural language interface?
• esafak 1y ago
  Imagine a future where creating software is about the designing the UX, overseeing the architecture and quality assurance. Implementation is farmed out.
  • karel-3d 1y ago
    But the architecture is the important (and hard) part!!! Not the UX!
    • esafak 1y ago
      Does it matter if the computer can do it? Can you calculate the cube root of 4? Users see and care about the UX; the product. They only notice the engineering when it goes wrong.
    • lobf 1y ago
      A customer doesn't care about architecture. They want a good UX.
      • karel-3d 1y ago
        The customer wants a working product!
• intended 1y ago
  I promise everyone one thing - there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. A lot of what is “working” in the article is closer to “jugaad”/prototyping. Something the author acknowledges in their opening- it’s a way to prototype and get something off the ground. Technically debt will matter for those products that get off the ground.
• stillsut 1y ago
  > Just keep it away from me I'm reminded of teaching bootcamp software engineering, when every day #1 we go through simple git workflows and it seems very intimidating to students and they don't understand the value. Which fair enough because git has a steep learning curve and you need to use it practically to start picking it up. I think this might be analogous to the shift going on with ai-generated and agent-generated coding, where you're introducing an unfamiliar tool with a steep learning curve, and many people haven't seen the why? for its value. Anyways, I'm 150 commits into a vibe coding project that still standing strong, if you're curious as to how this can work, you can see all the prompts and the solutions in this handy markdown I've created: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1.md https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...
  • fragmede 1y ago
    To the article's point, I built my own version of your agro tool that I use to manage my own git worktrees. Even if I had known about your project, I still would have built my own, because if I build it (with LLM assistance, obvs) then I get to design it for myself. Looking at other industries, music production is probably the one to look at. What was once the purview of record labels with recording studios that cost a million dollars to outfit, is now a used MacBook and, like, $1,000 of hardware/software. The music industry has changed, dramatically, as a result of the march of technology, and thus so will software. So writing software will go the way of the musician. What used to be a middle class job as a trumpet player in NYC before the advent of records, is now only a hobby except for the truely elite level practicioners.
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• tempodox 1y ago
  It does sound horrible. No more getting in the flow, no more thinking about anything, no more understanding anything. Just touch it with a ten-foot pole every few hours, then get distracted again. I guess if all you do is write React To-Do apps all day, it might even work for a bit.
  • fragmede 1y ago
    Unfortunately, I think the evolution of LLMs is going to put more areas of programming within this "React Todo app" envelope of capability that you suggest, and to have it work for longer, rather than going away.
• fragmede 1y ago
  > and maybe most importantly I don't want to work with somebody who works like this. Which, of course, is your perogative, but in what other ways do we, as fellow programmers, judge software libraries and dependencies so harshly? As a Vim user, do I care that Django was written with a lot of emacs? Or that Linus used emacs to write git? Or maybe being judgemental about programming languages; ugh, that's "just" a scripting language, it's not "real" programming unless you use a magnet up against a hard drive to program in ones and zeros. As a user, do I care that Calibre is written in Python, and not something "better"? Or that curl is written in good ole C. Or how about being opinionated as to whether or not the programmer used GDB or printf debugging to make the library?
• AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  Genuinely this is what it sounds like to accept obsolescence and I just can’t understand it. What are you attached to and identify with that you’re rejecting new ways to work? Change is the only constant and tools now look like superhuman tools created for babies compared to the sota at bell or NASA in the 1960s when they were literally trying to create superhuman computing. We have more access to powerful compute and it’s never been easier to build your own everything. What’s the big complaint?
  • hooverd 1y ago
    I think it's a great technology but if people's ability to put food on the table is compromised what's their incentive not to ventilate people working for AI labs?
    • AndrewKemendo 1y ago
      If people have shown anything recently it’s the unwillingness to actually do what you just said. If anyone cared enough to do anything, they would be burning everything down already It’s a lot of impotent rage because the only virtue people have is consumption, they don’t actually believe in anything. The ones who do believe in fairy tales are part of a dwindling population (religion) that is rightfully crashing. Welcome to the wasteland of the real