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I second this. This* is the matter against which we form understanding. This here is the work at hand, our own notes, discussions we have with people, the silen
by agumonkey 9mo ago
I second this. This* is the matter against which we form understanding. This here is the work at hand, our own notes, discussions we have with people, the silent walk where our brain kinda process errors and ideas .. it's always been like this since i was a kid, playing with construction toys. I never ever wanted somebody to play while I wait to evaluate if it fits my desires. Desires that often come from playing.
Outsourcing this to an LLM is similar to an airplane stall .. I just dip mentally. The stress goes away too, since I assume the LLM will get rid of the "problem" but I have no more incentives to think, create, solve anything.
Still blows my mind how different people approach some fields. I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them .. but I'm not in that group.
- Akranazon 9mo agoEverything you have said here is completely true, except for "not in that group": the cost-benefit analysis clearly favors letting these tools rip, even despite the drawbacks.
- agumonkey 9mo agoOh I'm well aware of this. I admitted defeat in a way.. I can't compete. I'm just at loss, and unless LLM stall and break for some reason (ai bubble, enshittification..) I don't see a future for me in "software" in a few years.
- acedTrex 9mo agoYep, its a rather depressing realization isnt it. Oh well, life moves on i suppose. I think we realistically have a few years of runway left though. Adoption is always slow outside of the far right of the bell curve.
- agumonkey 9mo agoi'm sorry if I pulled everybody down .. but it's been many months since gemini and claude became solid tools, and regularly i have this strong gut feeling. i tried reevaluating my perception of my work, goals, value .. but i keep going back to nope.
- gspr 9mo agoI hear you. And maybe you're right. Maybe I'm deluding myself, but: when I look at my skilled colleagues who vibecode, I can't understand how this is sustainable. They're smart people, but they've clearly turned off. They can't answer non-trivial questions about the details of the stuff they (vibe-)delivered without asking the LLM that wrote it. Whoever uses the code downstream aren't gonna stand (or pay!) for this long-term! And the skills of the (vibe-)authors will rapidly disappear. Maybe I'm just as naive as those who said that photographs lack the soul of paintings. But I'm not 100% convinced we're done for yet, if what you're actually selling is thinking, reasoning and understanding.
- shinycode 9mo agoThe difference with a purely still photograph is that code is a functional encoding of an intention. Code of an LLM could be perfect and still not encode the perfect intention of the product. I’ve seen that in many occasions. Many people don’t understand what code really is about and think they have a printer toy now and we don’t have to use pencils. That’s not at all the same thing. Code is intention, logic, specific use case all at once. With a non deterministic system and vague prompting there will be misinterpreted intentions from LLM because the model makes decisions to move forward. The problem is the scale of it, we’re not talking about 1000 loc. In a month you can generate millions of loc, in a year hundreds of millions of loc. Some will have to crash and burn their company before they realize that no human at all in the loop is a non sense. Let them touch fire and make up their mind I guess.
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago> Code is intention, logic, specific use case all at once. With a non deterministic system and vague prompting there will be misinterpreted intentions from LLM because the model makes decisions to move forward. The problem is the scale of it, we’re not talking about 1000 loc. In a month you can generate millions of loc, in a year hundreds of millions of loc. People are also non deterministic. When I delegate work to team of five or six mid level developers or God forbid outsourced developers, I’m going to have to check and review their work too. It’s been over a decade that my vision/responsibility could be carried out by just my own two hands and be done on time within 40 hours a week - until LLMs
- stareatgoats 9mo agoSomehow I appreciate this type of attitude more than the one which reflects total denial of the current trajectory. Fervent denial and AI trash-talking being maybe the single most dominant sentiment on HN over the last year, by all means interspersed with a fair amount of amazement at our new toys. But it is sad if good programmers should loose sight of the opportunities the future will bring (future as in the next few decades). If anything, software expertise is likely to be one of the most sought-after skills - only a slightly different kind of skill than churning out LOCs on a keyboard faster than the next person: People who can harness the LLMs, design prompts at the right abstraction level, verify the code produced, understand when someone has injected malware, etc. These skills will be extremely valuable in the short to medium term AFAICS. But ultimately we will obviously become obsolete if nothing (really) catastrophic happens, but when that happens then likely all human labor will be obsolete too, and society will need to be organized differently than exchanging labor for money for means of sustenance.
- agumonkey 9mo agoI get crazy over the 'engineer are not paid to write loc', nobody is sad because they don't have to type anymore. My two issues are it levels the delivery game, for the average web app, anybody can now output something acceptable, and then it doesn't help me conceptualize solution better, so I revert to letting it produce stuff that is not maleable enough.
- majormajor 9mo agoI wonder about who "anybody can now output something acceptable" will hit most - engineers or software entrepreneurs. Any implementation moat around rapid prototyping, and any fundraising moat around hiring a team of 10 to knock out your first few versions, seems gone now. Trying to sell MVP-tier software is real hard when a bunch of your potential customers will just think "thanks for the idea, I'll just make my own." The crunch for engineers, on the other hand, seems like that even if engineers are needed to "orchestrate the agents" and manage everything, there could be a feature-velocity barrier for the software that you can still sell (either internally or externally). Changing stuff more rapidly can quickly hit a point of limited ROI if users can't adjust, or are slowed by constant tooling/workflow churn. So at some point (for the first time in many engineers' career, probably) you'll probably see product say "ok even though we built everything we want to test, we can't roll it all out at once!". But maybe what is learned from starting to roll those things out will necessitate more changes continually that will need some level of staffing still. Or maybe cheaper code just means ever-more-specialized workflows instead of pushing users to one-size-fits-all tooling. In both of those cases the biggest challenge seems to be "how do you keep it from toppling down over time" which has been the biggest unsolved problem in consumer software development for decades. There's a prominent crowd right now saying "the agents will just manage it by continuing to hack on everything new until all the old stuff is stable too" but I'm not sure that's entirely realistic. Maybe the valuable engineering skills will be putting in the right guardrails to make sure that behavioral verification of the code is a tractable problem. Or maybe the agents will do that too. But right now, like you say, I haven't found particularly good results in conceptualizing better solutions from the current tools.
- Wobbles42 9mo agoI feel the same. Frankly, I am not sure there is a place in the world at all for me in ten years. I think the future might just be a big enough garden to keep me fed while I wait for lack of healthcare access to put me out of my misery. I am glad I am not younger.
- untrust 9mo agoImagine everyone who is in less technical or skilled domains. I can't help but resist this line of thinking as a result. If the end is nigh for us, it's nigh for everyone else too. Imagine the droves of less technical workers in the workforce who will be unseated before software engineers. I don't think it is tenable for every worker in the first world to become replaced by a computer. If an attempt at this were to occur, those smart unemployed people would be a real pain in the ass for the oligarchs.
- sdf2erf 9mo agoSo why havent you been fired already? .......
- agumonkey 9mo agogemini has only been deployed in the corp this year, but the expectations are now higher (doubled). i'll report by the end of the year..
- Der_Einzige 9mo agoYup. The majority of this website is going to find out they were grossly overpaid for a long time.
- anjel 9mo agoThe future is either a language model trained on AI code bloats and the ways to optimize the bloat away OR, something like Mercor, currently getting paid really well by Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini to pay very smart humans really well to proof language model outputs.
- samiv 9mo agoI feel the same. And I expect even a lot of the early adopters and AI enthusiasts are going to find themselves as the short end of the stick sooner than later. "Oops I automated myself out a job".
- agumonkey 9mo agoI've already seen this play out. The lazies in our floor were all crazy about AI because they could finally work few and finish their tasks. Until they realized that they were visibly replaceable now. The motto in team chats is "we'll lie about the productivity gains to management, just say 10% but with lots of caretaking" now
- gtowey 9mo agoMaybe. But it's also likely that these tools will produce mountains of unmaintainable code and people will get buried by the technical debt. It kind of strikes me as similar to the hubris of calling the Titanic "unsinkable." It's an untested claim with potentially disastrous consequences.
- rapind 9mo ago> But it's also likely that these tools will produce mountains of unmaintainable code and people will get buried by the technical debt. It's not just likely, but it's guaranteed to happen if you're not keeping an eye on it. So much so, that it's really reinforced my existing prejudice towards typed and compiled languages to reduce some of the checking you need to do. Using an agent with a dynamic language feels very YOLO to me. I guess you can somewhat compensate with reams of tests though. (which begs the question, is the dynamic language still saving you time?)
- zingar 9mo agoTests make me faster. Dynamic or not feels irrelevant when I consider how much slower I’d be without the fast feedback loop of tests.
- recursive 9mo agoStatic type checking is even faster than running the code. It doesn't catch everything, but if finding a type error in a fast test is good, then finding it before running any tests seems like it would be even better.
- rapind 9mo agoYou can (and probably should) still do tests, but there's an entire class of errors you know can't happen, so you need far less tests, focusing only on business logic for the most part.
- Wobbles42 9mo agoCompanies aren't evaluating on "keeping an eye on technical debt", but then ARE directly evaluating on whether you use AI tools. Meanwhile they are hollowing out work forces based on those metrics. If we make doing the right thing career limiting this all gets rather messy rather quickly.
- wtetzner 9mo ago> the cost-benefit analysis clearly favors letting these tools rip Does it? I have yet to see any evidence that they are a net win in terms of productivity. It seems to just be a feeling that it's more efficient.
- doug_durham 9mo agoI'll push it back against this a little bit. I find any type of deliberative thinking to be a forcing function. I've recently been experimenting with writing very detailed specifications and prompts for an LLM to process. I find that as I go through the details, thoughts will occur to me. Things I hadn't thought about in the design will come to me. This is very much the same phenomenon when I was writing the code by hand. I don't think this is a binary either or. There are many ways to have a forcing function.
- hed 9mo agoI think it's analogous to writing and refining an outline for a paper. If you keep going, you eventually end up at an outline where you can concatenate what are basically sentences together to form paragraphs. This is sort of where you are now, if you spec well you'll get decent results.
- agumonkey 9mo agoI agree, I felt this a bit. The LLM can be a modeling peer in a way. But the phase where it goes to validate / implement is also key to my brain. I need to feel the details.
- CTDOCodebases 9mo agoI wonder over the long term how programmers are going to maintain the proficiency to read and edit the code that the LLM produces.
- agumonkey 9mo agoPersonally I planned to allocate weekly challenges to stay sharp.
- p1esk 9mo agoI don’t read or edit the code my claude code agent produces. That’s its job now. My job is to organize the process and get things done.
- shinycode 9mo agoIn this case why can’t other agents just automate your job completely ? They are capable of that. What do you bring in the process of still doing manual organization ?
- p1esk 9mo agoI still have to tell it what to do, and often how to do it. I manage its external memory and guidelines, and review implementation plans. I’m still heavily involved in software design and test coverage. AI is not capable yet of automating my job completely – I anticipate this will happen within two years, maybe even this year (I’m an ML researcher).
- shinycode 9mo agoDo you mean, from your perspective, within 2 years humans won’t be able to bring anything of value to the equation in management and control ?
- p1esk 9mo agoNo, I mean that my job in its current form – as an ML researcher with a phd and 15 years of experience - will be completely automated within two years.
- blibble 9mo ago> I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them .. but I'm not in that group. people seem to have a inability to predict second and third order effects the first order effect is "I can sip a latte while the bot does my job for me"... well, great I suppose, while it lasts but the second order effect is: unless you're in the top 10%, you will now lose your job, permanently and the third order effect is the economy collapses as it is built on consumer spending
- cowlby 9mo agoAlternatively, another second order effect is can't sip latte anymore because you're orchestrating 8 bots do the work and you're back to 80%-100% time saturation.
- coldtea 9mo agoThe previous second order effect is more likely. For the one orchestrating 8 bots, 7 others are not needed anymore.
- dagss 9mo agoOr, there is just a lot more software written as the costs drop. I think most people work with software not tailored enough for their situation..
- coldtea 9mo ago>Or, there is just a lot more software written as the costs drop. Yeah, no, that's wishful thinking. The companies will just opt for higher margins.
- dagss 8mo agoWell, but the barrier to entry for new companies not doing that has dropped, and customers might slowly get used to paying less for tailor made.
- joquarky 9mo agoMy think/create/solve focus is on making my agentic coding environment produce high quality code with the least cost. Seems like a technical challenge worth playing with. It probably helps that I have 40 years of experience with producing code the old ways, including using punch cards in middle school and learning basic on a computer with no persistent storage when I was ten. I think I've done enough time in the trenches and deserve to play with coding agents without shame.
- re-thc 9mo ago> I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them These people just drool at being able to have work done for them to begin with. Are you sure it is just "code"?
- gedy 9mo ago> I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them .. but I'm not in that group. In my circles see some overlap with the people who are like: "Done! Let's move on" and don't worry about production bugs, etc. "We'll fix it later". I've always stressed out about introducing bugs and want to avoid firefighting (even in orgs where that's the way to get noticed). Too much leaning on coding tools and agents feels to sketchy to someone like me right now (maybe always tbh)
- cyber_kinetist 9mo agoActually for me it was the opposite: before I wasn't able to play around and experiment in my free time that much, because I didn't have enough energy left to actualize the thoughts and ideas I have since I have a day job. Now, since the bottleneck of moving the fingers to write code has gone down, I actually started to enjoy doing side projects. The mental stress from writing code has gone down drastically with Claude Code, and I feel the urge to create more nowadays!
- agumonkey 9mo agoyou have a point.. i'm still confused about how this will affect jobs, markets in a way a personal project is different from a job duty, here you're exploring, less if no deadline.. at work if I feel the llm is doing everything and I don't really master, i risk my job and my skills rot.
- dickersnoodle 9mo ago>I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them .. but I'm not in that group. +100 for this.