5 ms·

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude.

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can't even be bothered to set up my Claude environment. I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart.

SockThief 9mo ago
That is the most down to earth summary of all things AI I've heard so far! Good luck with the cart and be good. :)
- xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
  Thank you SockThief!
citizenpaul 9mo ago
Can you expand on the tech stack and languages used?
- xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
  C# / Web Sockets / React. Lots of legacy code. Great group of engineering folks.
chasd00 9mo ago
I'm similar ( turning 50 in a couple month, wife+2 kids etc) and was telling my wife this morning that the world of software development has definitely changed. I don't know what it will look like in the future but it won't look like the past. It seems producing the text that can be compiled into instructions for a computer is something LLMs particularly good at. Maybe a good analogy is going from a bare text editor to a modern IDE. It's happening very fast though, way faster than the evolution of IDEs.
- falloutx 9mo ago
  I was saying this yesterday, There will be people building good software somewhere, but chances to it happening in current corporate environment is nearing zero. Change is mostly in the management, and not in the Software Development itself. Yeah we may be like 50% faster but we are expected to be 10x devs.
hibikir 9mo ago
You'd have to do even less copy-pasting. The switch to some agent that has access to your source code directory speed things up so much, the time spent pays for itself in the first day.
- xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
  I have access to chatgpt codex since i'm on the premium plan. Seems like the lowest barrier to entry for me (cost, learning curve). I will truly have to give this a go. My neighbor is also a dev and he is flabbergasted that i have not at least integrated it into a side project.
  - dwaltrip 8mo ago
    Ya you gotta try it. Just download it and start typing into the terminal instead of the ChatGPT text box on the web. You can also use cursor which is essentially vs code with these features baked in.
SecretDreams 9mo ago
> I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart. This is the way. I think I'd like to be a barista or deliver the mail once all the jobs are gone.
- re-thc 9mo ago
  > I think I'd like to be a barista or deliver the mail once all the jobs are gone. Those are even easier to automate or have already been most of the way.
  - SecretDreams 9mo ago
    Are you going in to a lot of coffee shops?
    - re-thc 9mo ago
      And? As people (the consumers) get automated away there will be less. We also have things like instant coffee, automatic coffee machines, etc that have all reduced the need for manual coffee.
      - SecretDreams 9mo ago
        It's hard to take you seriously with this rebuttal. You don't go to coffee shops and probably don't care for coffee if you're talking about instant coffee. Why even speak at all on this subject that you are not familiar with? Not every thought that enters your mind needs to be written out.
        re-thc 8mo ago
        > You don't go to coffee shops and probably don't care for coffee if you're talking about instant coffee. Who says I don't? What I do has nothing to do with the market. > Why even speak at all on this subject that you are not familiar with? You're not familiar with it. Living in your own world is not being familiar. The market is huge. Again what you and I do is NOT the market. > Not every thought that enters your mind needs to be written out. Exactly. I can go to coffee shops but still acknowledge other things exist. Unlike your reply.
Isamu 9mo ago
Same, except I am over 60 and when I think of opening a mobile food cart it is sort of a Blade Runner vibe, staffed by a robot ramen chef that grumbles at customers and always says something back to you in some cyber slang that you don’t understand.
jimbo808 9mo ago
I have read this same comment so many times in various forms. I know many of them are shill accounts/bots, but many are real. I think there are a few things at play that make people feel this way. Even if you're in a CRUD shop with low standards for reliability/scale/performance/efficiency, a person who isn't an experienced engineer could not make the LLM do your job. LLMs have a perfect combination of traits that cause people to overestimate their utility. The biggest one I think is that their utility is super front-loaded. If a task before would take you ten hours to think through the thing, translate that into an implementation approach, implement it, and test it, and at the end of the ten hours you're 100% there and you've got a good implementation which you understand and can explain to colleagues in detail later if needed. Your code was written by a human expert with intention, and you reviewed it as you wrote it and as you planned the work out. With an LLM, you spend the same amount of time figuring out what you're going to do, plus more time writing detailed prompts and making the requisite files and context available for the LLM, then you press a button and tada, five minutes later you have a whole bunch of code. And it sorta seems to work. This gives you a big burst of dopamine due to the randomness of the result. So now, with your dopamine levels high and your work seemingly basically done, your brain registers that work as having been done in those five minutes. But you now (if you're doing work people are willing to pay you for), you probably have to actually verify that it didn't break things or cause huge security holes, and clean up the redundant code and other exceedingly verbose garbage it generated. This is not the same process as verifying your own code. First, LLM output is meant to look as correct as possible, and it will do some REALLY incorrect things that no sane person would do that are not easy to spot in the same way you'd spot them if it were human-written. You also don't really know what all of this shit is - it almost always has a ton of redundant code, or just exceedingly verbose nonsense that ends up being technical debt and more tokens in the context for the next session. So now you have to carefully review it. You have to test things you wouldn't have had to test, with much more care, and you have to look for things that are hard to spot, like redundant code or regressions with other features it shouldn't have touched. And you have to actually make sure it did what you told it to, because sometimes it says it did, and it just didn't. This is a whole process. You're far from done here, and this (to me at least) can only be done by a professional. It's not hard - it's tedious and boring, but it does require your learned expertise.
wallstbot 9mo ago
That you started at around 35 is a salient point, no? What did you do before?
- xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
  Sold financial products before. Curious why you think my starting age was important?
lbrito 9mo ago
What were you doing before programming, at age 35? Different career?
- xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
  Yes completely different career. Sold financial products.
  - lbrito 9mo ago
    Very interesting! Thanks for sharing. Its hard (or at least in my experience) to find people to change career - more so in their mid-thirties. I'm the opposite -- software developer career, now in mid 30s, and the AI crap gets me thinking about backup plans career-wise.
daxfohl 9mo ago
Same situation (50 last week, 2 kids) though have been unemployed for a year. Part of me thinks that, rather than taking jobs, AI is actually the only reason a lot of jobs still exist. The rest of tech is dead. Having worked in consulting a while ago, you can kind of feel it when you're approaching the point where you've implemented all the high value stuff for a client and, even though there's stuff you could do, they're going to drop you to a retainer contract because it's just not the same value. That's how the whole industry feels now. The only investment money is flowing into AI, and so companies with any tech presence are touting their AI whatevers at every possible moment (including during layoffs) just to get some capital. Without that, I wonder if we'd be seeing even harsher layoffs than we already are.
- mrsilencedogood 9mo ago
  Software will ALWAYS be an attractive VC target. The economics are just too good. The profit margins are just inherently fat as fuck compared to literally anything else. Your main expense is headcount and the incremental cost of your widget is ~$0? It's literally a dream. It's also why so much of AI is targeting software, specifically SAAS. A SaaS company with ~0 headcount driven by AI is basically 100% profit margin. A truly perfect conception of capitalism. Meanwhile I think AI actually has a decent shot at "curing" cancer. AI-assisted radiology means screening could be come significantly cheaper, happen a lot more often, and catch cancers very early, which is extremely important as everyone knows to surviving it. The cure for cancer might actually just involve much earlier detection. But pfft what are the profit margins on _that_?
  - b3kart 9mo ago
    It’s funny that perfect capitalism (no payroll expenses) means nobody has money to actually buy any of the goods produced by AI. Re cancer: I wonder how significant is the cost of reading the results vs. the logistics of actually running the test
    - daxfohl 9mo ago
      Bots using bots to write software for bots. And it only cost 5 trillion dollars! The best part? Bots don't get cancer, so that problem is solved too!
chinathrow 9mo ago
> I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart. Please keep us posted. I'm thinking of becoming a small time farmer/zoo keeper.
- xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
  Not sure if this is sarcasm or not but I will keep everyone posted haha
  - chinathrow 9mo ago
    Absolutely not, I've been earning my living as a coder for now 25y and eventually, enough is enough.
fapjacks 9mo ago
Weird side question, but any chance you use(d) the same name on Playstation Network?
- xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
  No, xbox ecosystem with different user name.
  - fapjacks 9mo ago
    That's fair. It would have been a weird reunion anyway.
torginus 9mo ago
Is it just me, or does Claude Code's UI design which both prevents copy-pasting large snippets and viewing the code as its generated feel incredibly discomforting?
datsci_est_2015 9mo ago
How does code review usually go for you? Our org’s bottleneck is often code review, which is how we reduce bus factor and other risks. Getting to the pull request faster doesn’t really save us that much time.
AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
Fellow old here… Sorry to tell you but robotic food carts are going to be impossible to compete against So you’ll need some kind of humanistic hook if you want to get reliable customers Expect there will be two worlds that are extremely different: the machine world of efficiency that most people live inside as gears of machine capitalism The biological world where there’s no efficiencies and it’s primarily hunter gatherers with mystical rituals The latter one is only barely still the majority worldwide (only 25-30% of humans aren’t on the internet)

SockThief 9mo ago

That is the most down to earth summary of all things AI I've heard so far! Good luck with the cart and be good. :)

xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
Thank you SockThief!

citizenpaul 9mo ago

Can you expand on the tech stack and languages used?

xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
C# / Web Sockets / React. Lots of legacy code. Great group of engineering folks.

chasd00 9mo ago

I'm similar ( turning 50 in a couple month, wife+2 kids etc) and was telling my wife this morning that the world of software development has definitely changed. I don't know what it will look like in the future but it won't look like the past. It seems producing the text that can be compiled into instructions for a computer is something LLMs particularly good at. Maybe a good analogy is going from a bare text editor to a modern IDE. It's happening very fast though, way faster than the evolution of IDEs.

falloutx 9mo ago
I was saying this yesterday, There will be people building good software somewhere, but chances to it happening in current corporate environment is nearing zero. Change is mostly in the management, and not in the Software Development itself. Yeah we may be like 50% faster but we are expected to be 10x devs.

hibikir 9mo ago

You'd have to do even less copy-pasting. The switch to some agent that has access to your source code directory speed things up so much, the time spent pays for itself in the first day.

xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
I have access to chatgpt codex since i'm on the premium plan. Seems like the lowest barrier to entry for me (cost, learning curve). I will truly have to give this a go. My neighbor is also a dev and he is flabbergasted that i have not at least integrated it into a side project.
- dwaltrip 8mo ago
  Ya you gotta try it. Just download it and start typing into the terminal instead of the ChatGPT text box on the web. You can also use cursor which is essentially vs code with these features baked in.

SecretDreams 9mo ago

> I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart. This is the way. I think I'd like to be a barista or deliver the mail once all the jobs are gone.

re-thc 9mo ago
> I think I'd like to be a barista or deliver the mail once all the jobs are gone. Those are even easier to automate or have already been most of the way.
- SecretDreams 9mo ago
  Are you going in to a lot of coffee shops?
  - re-thc 9mo ago
    And? As people (the consumers) get automated away there will be less. We also have things like instant coffee, automatic coffee machines, etc that have all reduced the need for manual coffee.
    - SecretDreams 9mo ago
      It's hard to take you seriously with this rebuttal. You don't go to coffee shops and probably don't care for coffee if you're talking about instant coffee. Why even speak at all on this subject that you are not familiar with? Not every thought that enters your mind needs to be written out.
      - re-thc 8mo ago
        > You don't go to coffee shops and probably don't care for coffee if you're talking about instant coffee. Who says I don't? What I do has nothing to do with the market. > Why even speak at all on this subject that you are not familiar with? You're not familiar with it. Living in your own world is not being familiar. The market is huge. Again what you and I do is NOT the market. > Not every thought that enters your mind needs to be written out. Exactly. I can go to coffee shops but still acknowledge other things exist. Unlike your reply.

Isamu 9mo ago

Same, except I am over 60 and when I think of opening a mobile food cart it is sort of a Blade Runner vibe, staffed by a robot ramen chef that grumbles at customers and always says something back to you in some cyber slang that you don’t understand.

jimbo808 9mo ago

I have read this same comment so many times in various forms. I know many of them are shill accounts/bots, but many are real. I think there are a few things at play that make people feel this way. Even if you're in a CRUD shop with low standards for reliability/scale/performance/efficiency, a person who isn't an experienced engineer could not make the LLM do your job. LLMs have a perfect combination of traits that cause people to overestimate their utility. The biggest one I think is that their utility is super front-loaded. If a task before would take you ten hours to think through the thing, translate that into an implementation approach, implement it, and test it, and at the end of the ten hours you're 100% there and you've got a good implementation which you understand and can explain to colleagues in detail later if needed. Your code was written by a human expert with intention, and you reviewed it as you wrote it and as you planned the work out. With an LLM, you spend the same amount of time figuring out what you're going to do, plus more time writing detailed prompts and making the requisite files and context available for the LLM, then you press a button and tada, five minutes later you have a whole bunch of code. And it sorta seems to work. This gives you a big burst of dopamine due to the randomness of the result. So now, with your dopamine levels high and your work seemingly basically done, your brain registers that work as having been done in those five minutes. But you now (if you're doing work people are willing to pay you for), you probably have to actually verify that it didn't break things or cause huge security holes, and clean up the redundant code and other exceedingly verbose garbage it generated. This is not the same process as verifying your own code. First, LLM output is meant to look as correct as possible, and it will do some REALLY incorrect things that no sane person would do that are not easy to spot in the same way you'd spot them if it were human-written. You also don't really know what all of this shit is - it almost always has a ton of redundant code, or just exceedingly verbose nonsense that ends up being technical debt and more tokens in the context for the next session. So now you have to carefully review it. You have to test things you wouldn't have had to test, with much more care, and you have to look for things that are hard to spot, like redundant code or regressions with other features it shouldn't have touched. And you have to actually make sure it did what you told it to, because sometimes it says it did, and it just didn't. This is a whole process. You're far from done here, and this (to me at least) can only be done by a professional. It's not hard - it's tedious and boring, but it does require your learned expertise.

wallstbot 9mo ago

That you started at around 35 is a salient point, no? What did you do before?

xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
Sold financial products before. Curious why you think my starting age was important?

lbrito 9mo ago

What were you doing before programming, at age 35? Different career?

xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
Yes completely different career. Sold financial products.
- lbrito 9mo ago
  Very interesting! Thanks for sharing. Its hard (or at least in my experience) to find people to change career - more so in their mid-thirties. I'm the opposite -- software developer career, now in mid 30s, and the AI crap gets me thinking about backup plans career-wise.

daxfohl 9mo ago

Same situation (50 last week, 2 kids) though have been unemployed for a year. Part of me thinks that, rather than taking jobs, AI is actually the only reason a lot of jobs still exist. The rest of tech is dead. Having worked in consulting a while ago, you can kind of feel it when you're approaching the point where you've implemented all the high value stuff for a client and, even though there's stuff you could do, they're going to drop you to a retainer contract because it's just not the same value. That's how the whole industry feels now. The only investment money is flowing into AI, and so companies with any tech presence are touting their AI whatevers at every possible moment (including during layoffs) just to get some capital. Without that, I wonder if we'd be seeing even harsher layoffs than we already are.

mrsilencedogood 9mo ago
Software will ALWAYS be an attractive VC target. The economics are just too good. The profit margins are just inherently fat as fuck compared to literally anything else. Your main expense is headcount and the incremental cost of your widget is ~$0? It's literally a dream. It's also why so much of AI is targeting software, specifically SAAS. A SaaS company with ~0 headcount driven by AI is basically 100% profit margin. A truly perfect conception of capitalism. Meanwhile I think AI actually has a decent shot at "curing" cancer. AI-assisted radiology means screening could be come significantly cheaper, happen a lot more often, and catch cancers very early, which is extremely important as everyone knows to surviving it. The cure for cancer might actually just involve much earlier detection. But pfft what are the profit margins on _that_?
- b3kart 9mo ago
  It’s funny that perfect capitalism (no payroll expenses) means nobody has money to actually buy any of the goods produced by AI. Re cancer: I wonder how significant is the cost of reading the results vs. the logistics of actually running the test
  - daxfohl 9mo ago
    Bots using bots to write software for bots. And it only cost 5 trillion dollars! The best part? Bots don't get cancer, so that problem is solved too!

chinathrow 9mo ago

> I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart. Please keep us posted. I'm thinking of becoming a small time farmer/zoo keeper.

xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
Not sure if this is sarcasm or not but I will keep everyone posted haha
- chinathrow 9mo ago
  Absolutely not, I've been earning my living as a coder for now 25y and eventually, enough is enough.

fapjacks 9mo ago

Weird side question, but any chance you use(d) the same name on Playstation Network?

xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
No, xbox ecosystem with different user name.
- fapjacks 9mo ago
  That's fair. It would have been a weird reunion anyway.

torginus 9mo ago

Is it just me, or does Claude Code's UI design which both prevents copy-pasting large snippets and viewing the code as its generated feel incredibly discomforting?

datsci_est_2015 9mo ago

How does code review usually go for you? Our org’s bottleneck is often code review, which is how we reduce bus factor and other risks. Getting to the pull request faster doesn’t really save us that much time.

AndrewKemendo 9mo ago

Fellow old here… Sorry to tell you but robotic food carts are going to be impossible to compete against So you’ll need some kind of humanistic hook if you want to get reliable customers Expect there will be two worlds that are extremely different: the machine world of efficiency that most people live inside as gears of machine capitalism The biological world where there’s no efficiencies and it’s primarily hunter gatherers with mystical rituals The latter one is only barely still the majority worldwide (only 25-30% of humans aren’t on the internet)