17 ms·

I'm OK being left behind, thanks

• marnett 7mo ago
  > I didn't use Git when it first came out. Once it was stable and jobs began demanding it, I picked it up. What jobs aren’t requiring usage of these tools by now?
  • collinvandyck76 7mo ago
    Most are, implicitly at least. But at the time, there was definitely a period of transition with many shops continuing to use subversion for a while.
    • pjmlp 7mo ago
      And TFS, ClearCase, Mercurial, Plastic, Perforce, Fossil, CVS, RCS, .... Then there are those still using folders with timestamps.
  • bluGill 7mo ago
    You should be able to pick up tools and learn on need. There are better version control systems than git - always have been, but git won despite being worse. (Git was massively better than what was popular before it won) if you can't learn git quick then you shouldn't program at all - there are much harder tools you will need to know and many are company or project specific
    • Xenoamorphous 7mo ago
      Mercurial?
      • bluGill 7mo ago
        That is the one I know best but there are other options that people I tend to trust say are good. There are more options than I have time to give them an honest evaluation.
  • debugnik 7mo ago
    Just last year I migrated to Git a major code base that was still stuck in SVN. It's not even a legacy project, just a laggard. For some colleagues, this was their first time using Git on the job.
    • SoftTalker 7mo ago
      There are large projects still using CVS. Not to say everyone should, but git is only a tool. It isn't essential, and there are alternate ways to achive the same ends with different tools.
• redm 7mo ago
  I agree with the sentiment of this article. Sadly, I'm still disagreeing while crypto kiddies are driving past me in lambo's. If its the future of money, yes we'll get there eventually, but like every technology shift, there's a lot of money to be made in the transition, not after. * * I sold all crypto a few years ago and I'm a happier person :D
  • codingdave 7mo ago
    When you see people making money from something you did not get involved in, just remember: Someone will always be luckier than you, wealthier than you, etc. It doesn't matter. Measure yourself by your own life satisfaction, not by how others are doing. That is why I agree with the sentiment as well. I use AI a little. Not too much. And I'm as swamped with work as ever because my focus is on legacy stacks, where AI is really not strong.
  • lich_king 7mo ago
    Alternatively, there's money to be lost in the transition. The vast majority of "crypto investors" did not walk away from it any richer. Some folks have gotten lucky, but it's just that: their thesis about the future of money was evidently wrong, they just happened to get the timing right. Getting lucky for the wrong reasons is not a good investment strategy. Meanwhile, the main category of people who have consistently gotten rich off the "crypto revolution" were various scammers and pump-and-dumpers who have since moved on to meme stocks, AI content farming, and so on. But I wouldn't use crypto as a benchmark because AI has more substance. We can debate if it's going to change the world, but you can build some new types of businesses and services if you have near-perfect natural language comprehension on the cheap.
  • Aurornis 7mo ago
    > Sadly, I'm still disagreeing while crypto kiddies are driving past me in lambo's. I know a few people who got wealthy by being early to crypto. None of them had the correct reasoning at the time: They thought BTC was going to become a common way to pay for things or that “the flippening” was going to see worldwide currency replaced with BTC. They thought they’d be kings in a new economy but instead they’re just moderately wealthy with a large tax bill they’re determined to dodge. I know far more people who lost money on crypto, though. Some were even briefly crypto-rich but failed to sell before the crash or did things like double down on the altcoin bubble. The second group had gone quiet about their crypto while the few people in the first group gloat and evangelize (because continued evangelization is necessary to keep their portfolios pumped). This creates an intense survivorship bias where it appears like all the crypto kiddies are wealthy, but a quiet mass of people who played with crypto are most definitely not.
• butILoveLife 7mo ago
  This would hit harder if Bitcoin didn't win and AI coding didn't completely change our jobs. Why not simply evaluate things instead of ignoring them until its too late? Sure, we don't have infinity time, but the fact that OP mentions these two things, means the pattern showed up enough.
  • eugenekolo 7mo ago
    I'm not sure Bitcoin won.. it just continues being a ponzi scheme that you can make money in. You can also accept that certain things and be happy in life either way. Don't need to chase get rich schemes. Some are more privileged than others in being able to do this.
  • mehagar 7mo ago
    You make it seem like AI coding has already "totally changed" our jobs. This is exactly the FOMO the article talks about ("until its too late"). It hasn't. I'm still using the same workflows without AI tools, and so are most of my teammates.
    • butILoveLife 7mo ago
      To be fair, I would have talked like you in January 2026. But things have changed since Feb.
  • techblueberry 7mo ago
    What is too late? If you want to use cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange, go ahead, it’s right there! There’s this irony to the FOMO in crypto, which is people argue the “sensible” thing (it’s the future of money) to create FOMO for the insensible thing (it’s a lottery ticket). You’re right it’s too late to buy a lottery ticket, but the vision wasn’t a lottery, it was a medium of exchange! AI assisted coding is the same way. I use it every day, but if I decided to stop and wait a year, I could still pick it up, probably more easily when the tools are better. In fact, people who wait might do better than me because their mental model won’t be locked into a way of interacting that will be out of date in six months. Wouldn’t it be ironic if all the early adopters were the losers because they liked the hacky nature of it? This happened to a lot of early computer adopters, low level programmers, etc.
• argee 7mo ago
  I agree with the conclusion but not with the premise. The conclusion is, "I don't have to be an early adopter," but the premise seems to be "there is zero utility in getting in on anything early."
  • vaylian 7mo ago
    That's not quite what they write: > Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• Aldipower 7mo ago
  WordStar for DOS was great! A lot better then my hand-writing. But still, I get the point. :-)
  • badc0ffee 7mo ago
    I was a WordPerfect guy, personally.
• A_Duck 7mo ago
  I'm upvoting because it's useful to see and debate this viewpoint — shared by many engineers I know I do think it's a bad take though. Not all new trends are the same: the metaverse was an obvious flop and crypto hasn't found practical applications. AI isn't like those because it's already practically changed the way I get my job done. It takes time to learn skills, and getting started earlier will means more time to use them in your working life.
  • mehagar 7mo ago
    The way I see it is - AI still makes mistakes, and I have to know how things work at some point anyway. So I'd rather spend my time actually understanding fundamentals (in my case, CSS at the moment), than trying to keep up with the frequently changing AI tools and models. Once the tools and models stabilize more (as well as the pricing model), there's less risk in me learning something that is no longer relevant. Except when I choose to wait on learning how to use AI tools effectively, I get told I am going to be "left behind".
• adriancooney 7mo ago
  There are real productivity gains by using these tools right now. Instead of doing 1x your normal work, you can do 5x while still maintaining quality. This is like an accountant sticking to pen and paper because calculators are big and clunky.
  • nehal3m 7mo ago
    In your analogy that calculator would only produce a correct answer 80% of the time, and plausible looking but incorrect ones the other 20%. If that were the case I’d hire pen guy.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • braebo 7mo ago
      More like “Producing 80% of the correct answer” and the remaining 20% with some nudging and tweaking. Still extremely valuable.
    • adriancooney 7mo ago
      What's the error rate of the pen guy? Also, if your AI has a 20% error rate, you're not holding it right. You need to spend more time keeping it on rails - unit tests, integration tests, e2e tests, local dev + browser use, preview deployments, staging environments, phased rollouts, AI PR reviews, rolling releases. The error rate will be much closer to 0%.
      • davebren 7mo ago
        How does a phased rollout improve LLM error rates exactly?
        • adriancooney 7mo ago
          Error rate here is the rate of shipping bugs to customers.
• make_it_sure 7mo ago
  some people are not ok, some people lose their jobs and suffer because they are too complacent and it's too uncomfortable to adapt. This is the lazy guy path, is not the wise one.
  • giraffe_lady 7mo ago
    People mostly lose their jobs and suffer through no failure they were positioned to avoid, and often through no fault of their own at all. Spending your career chasing fads out of fear of being abandoned to penury is at least as limiting as mere conservatism towards new technologies. The risk is real and the fear is valid but that isn't the solution, no individual action you can take is the solution.
• heytakeiteasy 7mo ago
  Feels like a false equivalency. It's just my experience, but I've completely ignored crypto and the metaverse, and I don't get the sense I'm missing out on much. In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose, but I'm really enjoying it so far.
  • lapcat 7mo ago
    > Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose That's the point of the blog post. If you can't even say right now whether it's for the better, then there's no reason to rush in.
    • nehal3m 7mo ago
      And conversely if it is, then there is no point to getting in early since the whole point is to externalize knowledge and experience
    • colejohnson66 7mo ago
      I read OP as saying it is transformative, at least for them. Whether it's transformative for society is left to be decided.
  • xondono 7mo ago
    This depends very much on your line of work. As a freelancer I do a bit of everything, and I’ve seen places where LLM breezes through and gets me what I want quickly, and times where using an LLM was a complete waste of time.
    • pennomi 7mo ago
      For sure. The more specialized or obscure of things you have to do, the less LLMs help you. Building a simple marketing website? Probably don’t waste your time - an LLM will probably be faster. Designing a new SLAM algorithm? Probably LLMs will spin around in circles helplessly. That being said, that was my experience several years ago… maybe state of the art has changed in the computer vision space.
• MarkusWandel 7mo ago
  In general, a good strategy is just staying a little bit behind. Let the new fads play themselves out. Some have staying power. Bitcoin never did turn into a usable currency, just another speculator's toy. Luckily I am - so far - in a position where I can watch the AI thing from the sidelines to see how it plays out.
• throwaway330935 7mo ago
  >what's the point of "getting in early"? You're trying to make the point using BitCoin, but in the early 2000s I had just over 14,000 of them, so I can quite clearly see a point in getting in early.
  • flatline 7mo ago
    The bitcoin white paper was released in 2008.
  • bdcravens 7mo ago
    (Assuming you meant early 2010s, since Bitcoin didn't exist in the early 2000s) This underscores a main counter point: dipping your toes and casting a wide net often has a low cost, since back then you could mine (and even purchase) Bitcoin relatively inexpensively. If it hadn't worked out, then it wouldn't have hurt much at all.
  • jmye 7mo ago
    The argument about bitcoin was against it being "the future of currency". There is no point, whatsoever, to "getting in early" to that. If everyone had been talking about it like the casino that it actually is, then sure - some people made some good bets, and a lot of people made bad ones trying to get in early. Imagine being the person who sold all your bitcoin for whatever other stupid memecoin, to "get in early"? It's not a real counter-argument, it's just "I had a lot of dumb luck on this one specific thing, aren't you silly for not guessing as well as me".
• A_Duck 7mo ago
  Crypto isn't bad because it failed to make early adopters rich — it did make them rich. It's bad because it has horrible externalities in scams, war crimes / sanctions evasion, organised crime — which most of those early adopters were well aware of.
  • gonzalohm 7mo ago
    All those apply to AI too, no?
  • edent 7mo ago
    You can make pretty much the same arguments for LLMs. Pollution, corruption, and war are all things I'm keen to avoid.
    • vaylian 7mo ago
      And thus it is reasonable to not use LLMs. And it's not only the training process that's problematic. There are so many individual LLM users who waste electricity on tasks that they would have solved by thinking for themselves just a few years ago.
  • aduwah 7mo ago
    Not to defend crypto, but this all applies to fiat too
    • hparadiz 7mo ago
      For whatever reason the folks on here refuse to understand that for a big chunk of this planet people get paid in inflationary currencies that they used to have to immediately convert to dollars and then stuff under a mattress because the local banking system is corrupt. In that environment cryptocurrency is a god send.
  • emoII 7mo ago
    I think you can actually replace crypto with LLMs/Diffusion models in this sentence and it will still hold true
• dgxyz 7mo ago
  I make my money cleaning up all the stupid fads. The tail end of the curve is profitable.
• fdghrtbrt 7mo ago
  Guy who's ok with being left behind (crypto, AI) did a MSc on the metaverse. Sounds like he tried to go with the hype once, got burned.
  • giraffe_lady 7mo ago
    Some might call that learning from our mistakes.
    • jmye 7mo ago
      People don't believe in that anymore. If your gut instinct was wrong, you're not only bound to it for all time, but you'd best angrily double down at every opportunity. God forbid you "flip flop" or consider new information, or whatever.
      • topaz0 7mo ago
        Fortunately the LLM will always see that your gut instinct was right all along.
  • edent 7mo ago
    You're welcome to read my MSc and see if I was "going with the hype" https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10542 https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10542 The answer was quite the opposite. I wanted to see if the technology lived up to the hype. The answer, unsurprisingly was no. If only Zuck had listened to me :-)
    • fdghrtbrt 7mo ago
      Wanna comment on why you'd be spending your time and energy doing free work for facebook?
• simianwords 7mo ago
  Its interesting to see this author's historical takes about AI. IMO it reads a little desperate and very much like the hype bros but from opposite side. Take a look at the articles if you don't believe. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/ai/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/ai/ - I'm OK being left behind, thanks! - Unstructured Data and the Joy of having Something Else think for you - This time is different - How close are we to a vision for 2010? - AI is a NAND Maximiser - Reputation Scores for GitHub Accounts - Agentic AI is brilliant because I loath my family - Stop crawling my HTML you dickheads - use the API! - Removing "/Subtype /Watermark" images from a PDF using Linux - LLMs are still surprisingly bad at some simple tasks - Books will soon be obsolete in school - Winners don't use ChatGPT - Grinding down open source maintainers with AI - Why do people have such dramatically different experiences using AI? - Large Language Models and Pareidolia - How to Dismantle Knowledge of an Atomic Bomb - GitHub's Copilot lies about its own documentation. So why would I trust it with my code? - LLMs are good for coding because your documentation is shit
  • PurpleRamen 7mo ago
    > IMO it reads a little desperate and very much like the hype bros but from opposite side. I would coin it Chill Guys, and I claim on average they are more often correct than hype bros. We all know the old saying that nobody ever was fired for selecting an established solution/technology. Being chill, staying safe, it's more beneficial in real business. Just wait until the hype has normalized and then start dabbling with the new, when all others starting doing it also. You may not be the frontrunner of a new wave, but you can still ride it well. You are only really left behind when everyone changed, and your income starts drying up, until then, it's just business as usual. And always remember: when ChatGPT started its hype, many were predicting Googles death and the end of Web searches. Now, 3(?) years later, Google is still around, the search is still going strong, and Gemini is seriously competing with ChatGPT. Hypes come fast and die fast.
    • simianwords 7mo ago
      this particular person seems to be more wrong than right though.
• pjmlp 7mo ago
  Agree with the message, coding since 1986, I have learned to not suffer from FOMO and wait for the dust to settle. Ironically one might even get projects to fix the mess left behind, as the magpies focus their attention into something else. In the case of AI, the fallacy is thinking that even if ridding the wave, everyone is allowed to stay around, now that the team can deliver more with less people. Maybe rushing out to the AI frontline won't bring in the interests that one is hoping for. EDIT: To make the point even clearer, with SaaS and iPaaS products, serverless, managed clouds, many projects now require a team that is rather small, versus having to develop everything from scratch on-prem. AI based development reduces even further the team size.
  • iLemming 7mo ago
    > wait for the dust to settle. Yeah, everyone is in panic mode - "they're killing all the horses", but one really needs to consider the similar historical events. When ATMs were rolled out in the 70s, everyone assumed tellers were on their way out. What actually happened was counterintuitive: the number of bank tellers increased for the next few decades. ATMs lowered the cost of operating a branch, so banks opened more branches, which required more tellers. The teller's job also shifted from cash handling toward relationship-building. The predicted elimination took 40+ years to materialize, and even then it was gradual. "Paperless office" in another example. Around 1970s futurists confidently predicted - computers would eliminate paper. Companies restructured workflows around that assumption. What happened, really? Paper consumption actually increased dramatically - laser printers and desktop publishing created more paper demand, not less. The prediction wasn't wrong, just half a century early. US horse population peaked around 21 million in 1915 and crashed to roughly 3 million by 1950. The tragedy wasn't that people prematurely killed off horses - it's that the infrastructure around horses (farriers, feed suppliers, carriage makers, stable hands) was devastated faster than those workers could adapt, but that also took decades. Imagine if in 1910, someone sold all their horses expecting automobiles to arrive in their rural county within two years, and then cars didn't reach reliable rural infrastructure until 1940. That's what it feels to me when companies lay off thousands of programmers because of AI. Yes, AI may replace programmers, but what would probably happen is that the meaning of "programmer" would change. Yet that won't happen within a year or two. Even with the unseen advancements in the AI research.
• bogzz 7mo ago
  It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or trying to switch careers? I went to get a flat tire fixed yesterday and the whole time I was envious of the cheerful guy working on my car. A flat tire is a flat tire, no matter whether a recession is going on or whether LLMs are causing chaos in white collar work. If I had no debt and a little bit saved up I might just content myself with a humble moat like that.
  • jghn 7mo ago
    > But will companies start hiring again? Anecdata, but the few people I know who were looking to switch gigs all had multiple offers within a few weeks. One thing they all had in common was taking a very targeted approach with their search and leveraging their networks. Not spamming thousands of resumes into the ether.
    • jmye 7mo ago
      > leveraging their networks Just finished a search - agree. The resume process is fundamentally broken, but a strong network makes it irrelevant. Lean on connections - there's a ton of opportunity out there.
    • GeoAtreides 7mo ago
      so you either are well connected or you starve, got it guess it's death and destitute for introverts edit: please explain the downvotes, i'm curious why you think i'm wrong if what op says it's true, that today only networking works, then it easily follows that if for some reasons you do not have a network then you don't get hired
      • bogzz 7mo ago
        Seems like that is the case, yes.
• dakolli 7mo ago
  The kid who showed his work in detail in math class is doing better in life 9/10 times than the kids that only knew how to use a calculator. Now consider how well the people who think you just need to know how to yell at the calculator are going to do? When Maps apps came around, people totally lost the brain muscle for being able to navigate. Using LLMs is no different, people over reliant on these tools are simply ngmi. They are going to be totally reliant on their favorite billionaire being willing to sell them competency via their thinking machines. I would caution everyone to consider if the Billionaires who are screaming that you're going to be left behind, laid off and redundant if you don't (pay them to) use their brain nerfing machine, whether or not they have your best interest at heart. You're not going to be left behind. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
  • dakolli 7mo ago
    Who the hell downvotes this lol
    • SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
      I think that framing your observations in terms of "Billionaires who are screaming" about a "brain nerfing machine" doesn't help think about the issues clearly or contribute to a healthy discussion.
  • Hasslequest 7mo ago
    Firstly, you can run the LLMs on your own machine. So I find the proprietary/moat narrative weak. Secondly, I find that correct usage of LLMs can accelerate learning. My brother used an LLM to generate flash cards for a driver's license test. I use LLMs to digest a ton of text and debug issues that would have been impossible to find (I would have given up) Have it generate, explain, review, compare code or general writing. It is like having access to wise old man in every field. They may have inferior reasoning capability, and their memory may falter, but they have seen everything in their corpus and are great at pointing you to external references. And you can delegate them to busywork.
    • 7mo ago
• stiiv 7mo ago
  > If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to assume that the tech will continue to improve in both ways: productivity gains will increase, onboarding will get easier. I think it will also become easier to choose a particular suite of products to use too. Waiting is not a bad idea.
  • nemomarx 7mo ago
    It also seems like skills with particular tech (prompt engineering, harnesses, mixture of experts set ups) doesn't always necessarily pay off when there's a sea change. Hard to predict what you'll want in a few years anyway, right?
    • stiiv 7mo ago
      Agreed! Investing lightly at this stage seems smart if your time/attention budget is tight.
    • bdcravens 7mo ago
      In my experience (and this may be confirmation bias on my part), casting a wide net and trying out new tech, while you maintain depth in the area relevant at the time, makes you ready for what's coming, even when you don't know what that may be.
      • zephen 7mo ago
        Curiosity is good and helps with your personal development, for sure. OTOH, tfa specifically said: > I feel the same way about the current crop of AI tools. I've tried a bunch of them. Some are good. Most are a bit shit. Few are useful to me as they are now. I'm utterly content to wait until their hype has been realised. So, it's not like he's being deliberate ignorant, rather simply deliberately slow-walking his journey.
• eqmvii 7mo ago
  A lot of people feel this way. But IMO the most fruitful thing for an engineering org to do RIGHT NOW is learn the tools well enough to see where they can be best applied. Claude Code and its ilk can turn "maybe one day" internal projects into live features after a single hour of work. You really, honestly, and truly are missing out if you're not looking for valuable things like that!
  • stiiv 7mo ago
    > Claude Code and its ilk can turn "maybe one day" internal projects into live features after a single hour of work. You really, honestly, and truly are missing out if you're not looking for valuable things like that! You're right, it's possible. But you might be both overestimating the ease of onboarding and underestimating the variety of tasks and constraints devs are responsible for. I've seen Claude knock out trivial stuff with a sufficiently good spec. But I've also seen it utterly choke on a bad spec or a hard task. I think these outcomes are pretty broadly established. So is the expectation that the tech will get better. Waiting isn't unwise.
    • smugma 7mo ago
      Waiting may not be “unwise” but acting now may be optimal. Even though tooling may be much better in 12 months, if it can improve quality or time now, that’s a net benefit. Bikers in the Tour de France used to not wear helmets. They were seen as uncouth (“why jump on the bandwagon?”). Helmets today are way better than they were then. But if the utility provided is greater than the cost, of course it makes sense to act sooner. I’m not explicitly arguing for investing in AI or other newfangled tech, I’m arguing that the premise of waiting may be “sounded” but also “leaves money on the table”, or in some cases, lives. The author talks about vaccines as a counter example but doesn’t really address the cost/benefit in any detail.
  • lopis 7mo ago
    You're only missing out if that's what you want to do. Not every software developer is interested in creating new software projects from scratch in an hour, or at all. It's totally find to do software development as a job, and then close your laptop and not see it until Monday. Learn the tools that suit when when you need them.
• nkozyra 7mo ago
  Not advocating for crypto here, but the ROI evaluations here are a bit incongruous. The risk of getting in early on crypto is you lose a little money. The risk of not is missing out on money. You can't simply replay that later, the way that you could invest the time to catch up on how git works.
• romaniv 7mo ago
  > weaponisation of FOMO This is in an excellent characterization of the kind of marketing tactic I see all over social media right now and that I find absolutely disgusting. The keyword here is fear. Despite faux-positive veneer, the messaging around certain technologies (especially GenAI) is clearly designed to induce anxiety and fear, rather than inspire genuine optimism or pique curiosity. This is significant, because fear is one of the most powerful tools to shut down rational thinking. The subliminal (although not very subtle) message there is something very primitive. "If you don't join our group, you will soon starve to death." This is radically different from how most transformative technologies were promoted in the past.
  • Theodores 7mo ago
    I think AI is not quite the same as crypto when it comes to FOMO. At the peak of the craze you could not write on HN that 'crypto is nonsense' unless you wanted to be modded down to oblivion, to be shadow banned forever. I exaggerate, but not much. With AI people are able to say 'this is nonsense' without people getting the pitchforks out. As for myself, I don't have the bandwidth to learn how to do clever things with AI. I know you just have to write a prompt and it all happens by magic, but I have been burned quite badly. First off, my elderly father got tricked out of all of his money and my mother's savings, which were intended for my niece, when she comes of age. It was an AI chatbot that did the deed. So no inheritance for me, cheers AI, didn't need it anyway! Then there was the time I wanted to tidy up the fonts list on my Ubuntu computer. I just wanted to remove Urdu, Hebrew and however many other fonts that don't have any use for me. So I asked Google and just copied and pasted the Gemini suggestion. Gemini specified command line options so that you could not review the changes, but the text said 'use this as you can review changes'. I thought the '-y' looked off, but I just wanted to do some drawing and was not really thinking. So I typed in the AI suggestion. It then began to remove all the fonts and the window manager, and the apps. It might as well have suggested 'sudo rm -fr /'. This was my wakeup call. I am sure an AI evangelist could blame me for being stupid, which I freely admit to. However, as a clueless idiot, I have been copying and pasting from Stack Overflow for aeons, to never be tricked into destroying all my work. My compromise is to allow some fun with cat pictures, featuring my uncle's cat, with Google Banana. This allows me to have a toe in the water. Recently I went on a course with lots of people with few of them being great intellects. I was amazed at how popular AI was with people that have no background in coding. They have collectively outsourced their critical thinking to AI. I did not feel the FOMO. However, I am old enough to remember when Word came out. I was at university at the time and some of my coursemates were using it. I had genuine FOMO then. What is this Word tool? I was intimidated that I had this to learn on top of my studies. In time I did fire up Word, to find that there was nothing to learn of note, apart from 'styles', which few use to this day, preferring to highlight text and making it bold or biglier. I haven't used a word processor in decades, however, it was a useful tool for a long time. Looking back, I could have skipped learning how to use a word processor, to stick to vi, latex and ghostscript until email became the way. But, for its time, it was the tool. AI is a bit like that, for some disciplines, you can choose to do it the hard way, using your own brain, or use the new tools. However, I have been badly burned, so I am waiting it out.
• hparadiz 7mo ago
  When did ignorance become a virtue? Or is it the contrarian montra?
  • bdcravens 7mo ago
    I see you haven't spent much time on Twitter the past 10 years :-)
    • hparadiz 7mo ago
      <insert no body quits twitter rick and Morty meme> This isn't Twitter though.
• aavci 7mo ago
  How else can you be in the right place and right time to discover a problem to solve that can’t be seen from afar?
• babarock 7mo ago
  I don't understand the rush to be "the first". Facebook isn't the first social media, Google isn't the first search engine, iPhone is not the first smart phone, Microsoft is not the first OS, the list goes on. Clearly there's an advantage for being an early adopter, but the advantage is often overblown, and the cost to get it is often underestimated.
• adampunk 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • lapcat 7mo ago
    > it will be nearly impossible to learn them from scratch. Are you claiming that all future generations of would-be programmers are doomed?
    • adampunk 7mo ago
      I'm saying that there's a cost to waiting, just like there's a cost to jumping in early. The cost is SPECIFICALLY that it is harder to jump in to a mature field with its own jargon and concerns. The assumption I think folks are making is their engineering prowess will save them here: whatever complicated thing that matters in AI land will be easily visible to an rank outsider. The whole premise of "imma wait" is not sober patience, it's the implied "imma wait until everything falls apart, then we'll go back to what I know how to do." that people don't like saying. It's an argument (often not even stated as such) that the people who don't jump in will be healthier and happier for just having ignored this wave. I think that's baloney. It's not FOMO I'm arguing about but the idea that real practices and infrastructure are being built right now that people are internalizing. Folks who aren't a part of it just aren't internalizing any of that. As the tech gets better (and it will!), those practices and infrastructure get more complex, more specialized. The idea that I can just wait years and then "engineer harder" to undertand this from the outside while being competitive is fantasy. Maybe some subset of people can, bully for them. Most people won't be able to. Future programmers aren't doomed. Future programmers who can't or won't adapt to the biggest change in computing since the slide rule are doomed.
      • lapcat 7mo ago
        > The cost is SPECIFICALLY that it is harder to jump in to a mature field with its own jargon and concerns. Hasn't that been the case for decades? What specifically is different now, such that for some reason it's harder to jump in now than it was before? If anything, LLMs are supposed to make things easier, aren't they? > it's the implied "imma wait until everything falls apart, then we'll go back to what I know how to do." that people don't like saying. You can read whatever assumption you want into the blog post, but it's not there in the words. You're dunking on a straw man.
• groundzeros2015 7mo ago
  I’m suprised nobody has mentioned that Claude is the realization of all this blockchain work - an internet computer you rent time from where the computation is measured in tokens :)
  • bdcravens 7mo ago
    You just described time-sharing. Cryptocurrency mining is much different, in that you can commit computation resources and never get paid.
    • groundzeros2015 7mo ago
      Indeed it’s much more similar to time sharing than cloud compute. But time sharing was never as global and accessible. It was a group in a company or in a university sharing a specific machine. The currency discussion is different too. Time sharing was just a local fee. Now people are talking about the tokens themselves can do for them.
      • hparadiz 7mo ago
        HN is generally sleeping on the next big tech that is coming for running this stuff locally. Which is quite performant and will soon be in everything.
• wolframhempel 7mo ago
  There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush Of course, you could just as well have - become an ActionScript specialist as it was clearly the future of interactive web design - specialized in Blackberry app development as one of the first mobile computing platforms - made major investments in NFTs (any time, really...) Bottom line - if you want to have a chance at outsized returns, but are also willing to accept the risks of dead ends, be early. If you want a smooth, mid-level return, wait it out...
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • bombcar 7mo ago
    Some of those things involve a bit of money as a gamble; others require some time learning tooling that can be repurposed (mobile game developers can obviously do mobile apps), and others would be dedicating years of your life into something that may be a dead end.
  • anticorporate 7mo ago
    There may be financial value in being early (if you're lucky), but there are other values in waiting. My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. I try to stay comfortable enough financially to have the luxury to make the decisions that allow me to keep doing things I care about when the opportunities come along. Deciding whether something new is the right path for me usually takes a little time to assess where it's headed and what the impacts may be.
    • 0x3f 7mo ago
      > My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. In the vast majority of cases, financial returns help maximize your impact on the things you care about. Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. The only real exceptions are things that specifically require you personally, like investing time with your family, or developing yourself in some way.
• keiferski 7mo ago
  I actually think the opposite approach might be the most optimal one, at least from a monetary perspective. That is, be on the cutting-edge of something, but be willing to bail out at the moment its future starts seeming questionable. Or even more specifically, maximize your foothold in it while minimizing your downside. Bitcoin is a good example: if you bought it 15 years ago and held it, you're probably quite wealthy by now. Even if you sold it 5 years ago, you would have made a ton of money. But if you quit your job and started a cryptocurrency company circa 2020, because you thought crypto would eat the entire economic system, you probably wasted a lot of time and opportunities. Too much invested, too much risked. AI is another one. If you were using AI to create content in the months/years before it really blew up, you had a competitive advantage, and it might have really grown your business/website/etc. But if you're now starting an AI company that helps people generate content about something, you're a bit late. The cat is out of the bag, and people know what AI-speak is. The early-adopter advantage isn't there anymore.
  • WindyMiller 7mo ago
    But you can't be on the cutting-edge of everything, and there are opportunity costs.
  • chrisandchris 7mo ago
    Maybe - but that's also a style of life definition, isn't it. I did not care at all about Bitcoin, and I'm still pretty fine. I even think, sitting Bitcoin out was better for me, because who (vrosdly speaking) cares about it today (besides speculating with it)?
  • CodingJeebus 7mo ago
    Yeah it looks reasonable when you only pick success stories for your examples. If you sold the farm to get in early in the Metaverse, you're totally hosed now because that was a dead end. The idea of digital real estate was as terrible then as it is now.
    • keiferski 7mo ago
      I specifically wrote this: > Or even more specifically, maximize your foothold in it while minimizing your downside.
• aavci 7mo ago
  FOMO is making me feel like I should mess around with openclaw but I can’t see any use cases that I can’t accomplish with other tools. What should I do based on this article?
  • kxrm 7mo ago
    Why do you need a reason to try anything? Just go out and prove how useless it is. If, during your testing, you find that it has no good use case, toss it. Waiting for others to validate a tech for you is a mistake IMO.
  • edent 7mo ago
    I recommend going to the pub with some friends and having a chat about anything that isn't work.
    • aavci 7mo ago
      Nice blog btw
  • bombcar 7mo ago
    Don't just do something, stand there! Like investing in index funds, a big part of it is psychology of the individual as Jeeves would say. Find a way to scratch the FOMO itch without taking on too much risk.
• bonoboTP 7mo ago
  That's a reasonable strategy. I don't think spreading FOMO is good. But pragmatically, I enjoy working with the latest crop of AI models regarding all sorts of computer tasks, including coding but many other sysadmin stuff and knowledge organization. I didn't pick them up until last November and I don't think I missed out on much. Earlier models needed tricks and scaffolding that are no longer needed. All those prompting techniques are pretty obsolete. In these 3-4 months I got up to speed very well, I don't think 2 years of additional experience with dumber AI would have given me much. For now, I see value in figuring out how to work with the current AI. But next year even this experience may be useless. It's like, by the time you figure out the workarounds, the new model doesn't need those workarounds. Just as in image generation maybe a year ago you needed five loras and controlnet and negative prompts etc to not have weird hands, today you just no longer get weird hands with the best models. Long term the only skill we will need is to communicate our wants and requirements succinctly and to provide enough informational context. But over time we have to ask why this role will remain robust. Where do these requirements come from, do they simply form in our heads? Or are they deduced from other information, such that the AI can also deduce it from there?
• 0xblinq 7mo ago
  Comparing these tools to the crypto or NFTs hype is so out of touch with reality. This is more on the scale of the invention of the press, the telegraph, or the internet itself. "I'm ok being left behind, I will join this Internet thing when it really becomes useful"... Ok... you do you. Hope you don't get there too late.
  • WolfeReader 7mo ago
    The behaviors of NFT advocates and AI advocates are shockingly similar. Remember how NFTs were supposed to be the future or art ownership, and all it amounted to was awful pictures of bored apes and ahegao lamas? The NFT bros proudly displayed their shitty art - not because it was good, but because it signaled their allegiance. Now go on to any pro-AI blog. Look at the images. They've stopped trying to edit out the AI errors - they proudly display images with garbled text and bad anatomy. Just like before, it signals allegiance to AI consumption. Even the last sentence of your post is the same sentiment as "have fun staying poor" was for the crypto bros.
    • polothesecond 7mo ago
      > The behaviors of NFT advocates and AI advocates are shockingly similar. It’s the same people every time. Stupid, gullible idiots. Remember when HN was obsessed with the room temp superconductivity fraud a few years back? Remember the zealous indignation at anyone suggest skepticism? The empty attempts to downplay their rabid stupidity afterwards?
  • jmye 7mo ago
    > Hope you don't get there too late. Too late for what? Could no one start a viable internet business in 2005, or were they all taken in 1998? Is it impossible to learn machine learning today, if you weren't jumping into Tensorflow in 2015? Do you think it's impossible to learn OpenClaw today, if you weren't playing with it six months ago, and do you think there might not be a successor that "wins" and is easier to learn and use six months from now, or will I have "gotten there too late" to possibly leverage or learn agents? I just don't understand what it is you think anyone will be too late for, unless this is just self-justification and snide ego-boosting.
• linsomniac 7mo ago
  >I didn't use Git when it first came out. This really hinges on what you mean by "didn't use git". If you were using bzr or svn, that's one thing. If you were saving multiple copies of files ("foo.old.didntwork" and the like), then I'd submit that you're making the point for the AI supporters. I consulted with a couple developers at the local university as recently as a couple years ago who were still doing the copy files method and were struggling, when git was right there ready to help.
  • intrasight 7mo ago
    Pretty sure he meant he didn't use Git. I'm still stuck with TFS and SVN in my day jobs but use Git on and off on side projects. I really wish all my clients would just switch to Git.
    • ambicapter 7mo ago
      Git is old and busted, jj is the new hotness.
  • jmye 7mo ago
    Was "when it first came out" a confusing limiter, there? I guess it seems like the article was making the point that jumping on git the day it came out could've just meant learning the betamax of repos, and that it was better to wait a bit to see what mature tech looked like, rather than waiting until 202X to realize that saving multiple file versions was suboptimal. I don't understand how this, at all, makes "the point" for anyone.
    • LeonidasXIV 7mo ago
      Using Git when it came out would have probably meant to use Cogito, which has been dead for such a long time by now. Or have bet on Mercurial. Which is also close to dead. Or darcs, which has been big in certain environments and now practically extinct.
  • xigoi 7mo ago
    Git may have an arcane interface, but if you learn it, you can be sure what exactly will happen when you run a Git command. Unlike with LLMs.
• kxrm 7mo ago
  As someone further down the road in my career, I would argue that waiting is your prerogative but you do so at your own peril. I made these kind of mistakes early in my career, stuck it out with PHP for far too long ignoring all the changes with frontend design trends, react, etc. I was using jQuery far too late in my career and it really hurt me during interviews. What I was doing was seen as dated and it made ageism far worse for me. Showing a portfolio website that was using tables instead of divs. I had to rapidly skill up and it takes longer than you think when you stick too long with what works for you. If AI truly is a nothing-burger than guess what? Nothing lost and perhaps you learned some adjacent tech that will help you later. My advice is to NEVER stop learning in this field. Learning is your true superpower. Without that skill, you are a cog that will be easily replaced. AI has revealed to me who among my colleagues is curious, and a continuous learner. Those virtues have proven over the course of my 25+ year career in technology to be what keeps you relevant and marketable.
  • bombcar 7mo ago
    I think the point isn't "wait forever and never learn" but simply "you don't have to be at the forefront of the wave" - because the real ones will lift everything, and you can come it a bit later. It is easy NOW to look back and see the optimal path for a web developer, but was that obvious from the start? How many killer technologies lie unused today?
• surgical_fire 7mo ago
  Okay, this text was pretty good. Refreshing to read something that doesn't seem written by AI too (would be ironic given the contents). The only scenario where I think it pays off to be on top of the hype is of you are chasing money sloshing around the latest hype. You know, the hustle culture thing. If that's not your thing, waiting until things are established (if they ever get there) is harmless. And yeah, AI as it is now is at best moderately useful. I use it on a daily basis, but could do without it with little harm.
  • Krssst 7mo ago
    > Refreshing to read something that doesn't seem written by AI too (would be ironic given the contents). As much as I dislike the idea of not writing/checking code I am responsible for, it was a surprise to me seeing a few "anti/limited AI in coding" articles that don't pass an LLM detector. (I know those are not perfect but not much else one can do).
  • bombcar 7mo ago
    That's really the big difference - if you're a startup or founder (or apparently even an billionaire CEOwner) you gotta chase the hype because your customers are the VCs/shareholders and if you are NOT chasing hype they're going to have serious doubts about you. As an employee (perhaps even a highly stock-option compensated one) the equation is very different. Perhaps you're aligned if you're an employee of a startup/AI obsessed company. But for the vast majority they're not.
• bdcravens 7mo ago
  This is fine so long as you don't confuse stubbornness for caution. As technologies lose favor, and others suggested you expand your toolset, don't post about your frustration while you're standing in the unemployment line.
• aaurelions 7mo ago
  Why launch Voyager-1 if, in X years, no matter how far it flies, we’ll catch up to it and overtake it using a new version?
  • bdcravens 7mo ago
    Without lessons learned from Voyager-1 the successors would never be built.
  • krackers 7mo ago
    Because the planetary alignments won't allow for another launch any time soon... which I guess has a natural correspondence in that the macroeconomic conditions (read: bubble) mean that now is a great time to play around with things while they're basically giving it away to get you hooked.
• dakolli 7mo ago
  I love the Cryptocurrency analogy. The LLM hype monkeys are the same people that were screaming that NFTs/Digital Art was going to replace all the traditional art in gallaries in 10 years. They are literally the same people, and they are all addicted to money and hype. Ignore them.. Did handmade Swiss watch movements lose all demand when Asia started mass manufacturing watches? No. There is always going to be more demand for quality over slop. Its the same reason that handmade clothes are worth 100x more than clothes at a department store. This is all by design too, these billionaires selling thinking machines are trying to make us all dependent on their fountain of tokens. Don't fall for it. Just like how maps apps made everyone reliant on Google/Apple for your ability to navigate around your own city, these billionaires want to do the same think with your ability to think, build, plan and even learn/read. Don't fall for this scam, unlike other hype cycles like NFTs and Crypto this will actually damage more than just your bank account, it will fry your brain if you become over reliant on it. Take a second and consider why these LLM tool companies design their products like slot machines. They put multipliers in there UIs (run this x3,x4,x5) times so that you inevitably treat the thing like a slot machine. And it is like a slot machine, you have no way to control the results its quite random, in the case of llms they just have a better payout percentage, at the cost of making your brain become dopamine and structurally dependent on their output. They convince people there is some occulted art in the formation of a prompt, like a gambler who thinks if they press buttons in a certain order they'll get better results or many other gambling superstitions. If you're writing software please take a moment to breath, and ask yourself if its really that useful to have piles of code where you have little idea how things work, even if they do. Billionaires will sell you on the idea that this doesn't matter because the llm, that you conveniently have to pay them to use, will always be able to fix that bug. Don't fall for the ruling classes trick, they want you reliant on this thing so they can tell you that your input isn't as valuable, and therefor your salary and skills are not as valuable. We have to stop this now.
  • darkhorse13 7mo ago
    There's a shocking amount of overlap between AI & Crypto/NFT bros: https://mystudentfailedtheirmid.substack.com/p/theres-a-shocking-amount-of-overlap https://mystudentfailedtheirmid.substack.com/p/theres-a-shoc...
• jwsteigerwalt 7mo ago
  At some point you commit the time to learn what you need to. I like to think of the analogy to SEO. The veterans in the industry are not who they are because they were at the front of the line. It’s because they have the 15 years of experience under their belt.
• rileymichael 7mo ago
  i’ve said this before, but the “left behind” narrative is FUD nonsense. as an llm avoider i’ve never felt further _ahead_ than now. all of my peers who never bothered to learn their tools (which gave tangible benefits) have opted into deskilling themselves further. it’s readily apparent who has bought into the llm hype and who hasn’t
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• mocmoc 7mo ago
  Wouldn't play that game with LLM's
• another-dave 7mo ago
  On the otherhand, when Cloud Computing started to come in, I knew a bunch of sysadmins. Some were in the "it'll never take off" camp and no doubt they know it now, kicking and screaming. But the curious early adopters were the ones best positioned to be leading the charge on "cloud migration" when the business finally pulled the trigger. Similarly with mobile dev. As a Java dev at the time that Android came along, I didn't keep abreast of it - I can always get into it later. Suddenly the job ads were "Android Dev. Must have 3 years experience". Sometimes, even just from self-interest, it's easier to get in on the ground floor when the surface area of things to learn is smaller than it is to wait too long before checking something out.
  • aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
    > On the other[ ]hand, when Cloud Computing started to come in, I knew a bunch of sysadmins. Some were in the "it'll never take off" camp and no doubt they know it now, kicking and screaming. > But the curious early adopters were the ones best positioned to be leading the charge on "cloud migration" when the business finally pulled the trigger. From a technological perspective, these sysadmins were right: in nearly all cases (exception: you have a low average load, but it is essential that the servers can handle huge spikes in the load), buying cloud services is much more expensive overall than using your own servers. The reason cloud computing took of is that many managers believed much more in the marketing claims of the cloud providers than in the technological expertise of their sysadmins.
    • bigstrat2003 7mo ago
      Yeah, most companies still should not be using cloud for stuff. I think a lot of people here who work for startups don't get that, because cloud makes a ton of sense if you're a new business that has a hundred other higher priorities than spending capital on infrastructure and sysadmins. But for most companies? They are better off with on prem.
  • SoftTalker 7mo ago
    > Suddenly the job ads were "Android Dev. Must have 3 years experience". So just read up on it and say you do. They don't really need 3 years experience, so you don't really need to have it.
• nsfmc 7mo ago
  > For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash. i'll just say, and i understand this is not the point of the article at all, but for all its faults, if you got in on flash as earl as html 2.0 and you were staring at an upcoming dead-end of flash in say, 2009, you also knew or had been exposed at that time to plenty of javascript, e4x and what were essentially entirely clientside SPAs, providing you a sort of bizarro view of the future of react in a couple of years. honestly, not a bad offramp even if flash itself didn't make it.
• sd9 7mo ago
  > If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. In contrast to the current top comment [1], I don't think this is a wise assessment. I'm already seeing companies in my network stall hiring, and in fact start firing. I think if you're not trying to take advantage of this technology today then there may not be a place for you tomorrow. I find it hard to empathise with people who can't get value out of AI. It feels like they must be in a completely different bubble to me. I trust their experience, but in my own experience, it has made things possible in a matter of hours that I would never have even bothered to try. Besides the individual contributor angle, where AI can make you code at Nx the rate of before (where N is say... between 0.5 and 10), I think the ownership class are really starting to see it differently from ICs. I initially thought: "wow, this tool makes me twice as productive, that's great". But that extra value doesn't accrue to individuals, it accrues to business owners. And the business owners I'm observing are thinking: "wow, this tool is a new paradigm making many people twice as productive. How far can we push this?" The business owners I know who have been successful historically are seeing a 2x improvement and are completely unsatisfied. It's shattered their perspective on what is possible, and they're rebuilding their understanding of business from first principles with the new information. I think this is what the people who emerge as winners tomorrow are doing today. The game has changed. Speaking as an IC who is both more productive than last year, but simultaneously more worried. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47454614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47454614
  • jghn 7mo ago
    > between 0.5 and 10 Hopefully not too many people are "enhanced" to the tune of 0.5x!
    • sd9 7mo ago
      That was deliberate. Some people report that it slows them down - fine.
  • coldpie 7mo ago
    > I find it hard to empathise with people who can't get value out of AI. It feels like they must be in a completely different bubble to me. I think it depends on why you do programming. I like programming for its own sake. I enjoy understanding a complex system, figuring out how to make change to it, how to express that change within the language and existing code structure, how to effectively test it, etc. I actively like doing these things. It's fun and that keeps me motivated. With AI I just type in an English sentence, wait a few minutes, and it does the thing, and then I stare out the window and think about all the things I could be doing with my life that I enjoy more than what just happened. I find my productivity is way down this year since the AI push at work, because I'm just not motivated to work. This isn't the job I signed up for. It's boring now. The money's nice, I guess. But the joy is gone. Maybe I should go find more joy in another career, even if it pays less.
• somenameforme 7mo ago
  The irony is that if LLMs live up to their potential then the value of software development as a skill is going to plummet, at least as far as something to do for others. I say it's ironic because obviously the people most interested in using LLMs for software development are software developers, and most are not working independently. It'd be like if we were all proactively getting involved in training our own replacements. I was highly skeptical of this happening not that long ago, but I have to say that it seems increasingly likely. LLMs are still quite mediocre at esoteric stuff, but most software development work isn't esoteric. There's the viable argument that software development largely isn't about writing code, but the ability to write code is what justifies software developer salaries, because there's a large barrier to entry there that most just can't overcome. The 80/20 law seems to apply to everything, certainly here - 80% of your salary is justified from 20% of what you spend your time doing. It's quite impossible to imagine what this will do to the overall market, because while this sounds highly negative for software developers, we're also talking about a future where going independent will be way easier than ever before, because one of the main barriers for fully independent development is gaps in your skillset. Those gaps may not be especially difficult, but they're just outside your domain. And LLMs do a terrific job of passably filling them in. It'd be interesting if the entire domain of internet and software tech plummets in overall value due to excessive and trivialized competition. That'd probably be a highly disruptive but ultimately positive direction for society.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• hideyoshi_th 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• homeonthemtn 7mo ago
  I think this is a carry over from the early 2000s boom and bust mindset. That if you jump in early enough on nearly any technology, you'll become a billionaire. So hop on board our burning platform! In general, we as a society have not adjusted to technology. We've gone through to much change to have any stable base lines. So we're going to float in insanity for a while until things finally settle down. Probably 2 wars, a famine, and several periods of resource scarcity away still, but we'll get there one day...
• LaGrange 7mo ago
  > Have fun being poor Not going to lie, I’d rather be poor. Not destitute - I’ve been poor but not destitute and I’d rather not go desperate - but poor? As in (because “poor” is very imprecise and can imply anything between utter poverty to “not owning three homes”) like having a low paying job but still enough to pay rent? I’d rather be that than do AI assisted software development. Genuinely the only thing stopping me now is that there’s actually way more skill and qualifications in most low-paying jobs than a typical software developer imagines, and acquiring those takes time and money itself. But by now I know multiple people who made the jump even before the latest madness, and they’re all happier. Some still code, but don’t even publish. Some are like “I haven’t used a proper computer in _months_ this is great.” All work hard jobs at odd hours. None regret.
• thr0w 7mo ago
  > What is there to be left behind from? Employment?
• danielbln 7mo ago
  A great blog article for 2023. In 2026 I think the wait is over..
• quantified 7mo ago
  > I wrote my MSc on The Metaverse. Learning to built VR stuff was fun, but a complete waste of time. There was precisely zero utility in having gotten in early. Wonderful life lesson on hype cycles. I am curious if hype literacy will join media literacy in academia.
• mvrckhckr 7mo ago
  It’s a personal choice, and both early and late(er) can be valid rational choices if it’s you who is making the choice and not just following a crowd (or even a single person).
• bartread 7mo ago
  I mean, whatever, man. This line, as one example: > For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash. Like a lot of tech Flash had its moment in the sun and then faded away, but that “moment” lasted a decade, and plenty of people got their start because of or built successful businesses around it. Did they have to pivot as Flash waned? Sure, but change is part of life. I’m sorry but I find the take expressed in this piece to be absolutely miserable and uninspiring. But, hey, congratulations on the 20:20 hindsight, I suppose.
• fantasizr 7mo ago
  the main value being created is by selling courses and convincing people they're late and need to catch up
• raincole 7mo ago
  > If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. I mean... yeah? It's obviously true. However people use LLM coding today not because they're "afraid of being left behind" or "investing into a new tech" or whatever abstract reasoning. It's because they're already reaping the benefit right away. It takes just a few hours to go through like 80% of the learning curve.
• JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  “There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero?” This is a great framing.
  • furryrain 7mo ago
    I'm less convinced. To keep and/or increase my current compensation, I have to be competitive in the software development market. (Whether I need AI to remain competitive is another matter.) The 16,000 new babies will be competing in different markets. Oh, and of those 16,000 babies, many are born in far less fortunate circumstances, they're already far behind their cohort. :/
    • JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
      > keep and/or increase my current compensation, I have to be competitive in the software development market Author’s point is that competitiveness can come in many forms. Having the same AI proficiency as everyone else isn’t differentiating. (And it isn’t table stakes.)
  • themacguffinman 7mo ago
    Isn't that what is implied by the toughest job market yet for junior level candidates? Author is very confident that the answer to his question is "no".
    • mablopoule 7mo ago
      I think the implication is that even though the technological landscape is evolving, it's not as if people born in the 60's couldn't foray into computer science because they arrived too late to study the ENIAC first.
  • 6thbit 7mo ago
    Not really, cause they will have lots of years to catch up to Only whatever is in vogue at the moment while adopting what surrounds them growing up. They won't have to unlearn and let go of their own pride or sunk cost into specializing on the wrong thing. I think the framing just doesn't help at all.
• wolvesechoes 7mo ago
  The biggest issue is - you will be left behind, in the end. This is the race you cannot win. You can try as much as you like, spend free time trying to catch up, and you, most likely, will lose. If you play this game, you've already lost. I am actually surprised by people willingly trying to be more productive, like... machines. And then crying when machines are proven to be better at being machines than meatbags.
• Tade0 7mo ago
  To me the main question is the long term pricing. It is said that major providers more than break even on what they're charging. But at the same time that's not the point of capitalism, is it? The point is to charge close to the value you're providing. My lunch money is approximately $10 and I often blow through as much in Claude tokens generously provided by the company which hired me. But I'm not getting $10 value from those tokens, but much more. The cost of entry to this market is extremely high. Should Anthropic win and become an almost monopoly, it is bound to keep increasing prices to the point, where the value it's providing matches the cost. That's the endgame of every AI company out there. It's worth using these tools now, while there's still competition and moats weren't established.
  • fantasizr 7mo ago
    This is where I landed too. At least in the js frameworks "wars" it was reading the docs and prototyping angular and react for free. To try and keep up with the latest AI tools you're expected to spend ~$1k / year.
  • StingyJelly 7mo ago
    Luckily the models were built on copyrighted materials so hopefully the big players won't have strong legal standing to kill off model destilling. Then, with models like current deepseek or kimi k2.5, you are perhapy 1/2 years behind in their capabilities at the fraction of the cost. For real inference costs, look at prices on openrouter. For hobby, I wasn't able to burn trough more than $5 in a month.
  • StilesCrisis 7mo ago
    I don't think there's a universe where Google stops competing here, though. The second Anthropic gets greedy, there will be alternatives.
    • Tade0 7mo ago
      My worry is are two or even three companies at the top enough for healthy competition? You're not limited to one product - arguably it's better to have multiple subscriptions. If they decide to increase pricing in lockstep just like FAANG applied RTO policies, we as consumers are going to get the short end of the stick.
• nailer 7mo ago
  I'm glad I missed: GraphQL, Kubernetes, Microservices, the Metaverse. I'm glad I jumped early on: Linux, Python, virtualization, cloud, nodejs, Solana. I wish I'd gotten into Rust and LLMs earlier.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• hsaliak 7mo ago
  My experience so far tells me that the default path with AI tooling is that it lets us create without learning. So the author is right in that they can pay for a seat in this revolution whenever they want. A practitioner with more experience maybe a few percentage points more productive, but the median - grab subscription, get tool, prompt, will be mostly good enough.
  • nclin_ 7mo ago
    I think this is true at the solo developer scale, but I suspect experience will be much more evident when working with a team.
• m132 7mo ago
  The thing is, Bitcoin, at least before cryptocurrencies were picked up by "tech bros", was originally a way to disconnect from the corrupt, centralized banking system. LLMs, at the moment, are all about giving up your own brain and becoming fully dependent on a subscription-based online service.
• halapro 7mo ago
  The last comment is ridiculous. Newborns have a literal lifetime to catch up—rather, they will learn what they need when they need it.
  • quantified 7mo ago
    Actually, given the path their world is on (in the USA anyway), it's true. Falling economic opportunity, worsening physical environment, social atomization, increased indebtedness, etc.
    • drstewart 7mo ago
      You mean in Canada: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-falls-in-the-world-happiness-rankings-and-social-media-is-to-blame https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-falls-in-the-wor... https://financialpost.com/news/canada-manufacturing-longest-recession-in-generation https://financialpost.com/news/canada-manufacturing-longest-... https://thehub.ca/2026/02/02/canadas-spiralling-debt-problem-in-5-charts/ https://thehub.ca/2026/02/02/canadas-spiralling-debt-problem...
• grim_io 7mo ago
  Devs who never mentored or never had to delegate/explain the work to be done to someone else, might be in for a rough first few weeks/months. It is a skill, but not a special AI specific skill.
• tutanosh 7mo ago
  I understand and empathize with his sentiment, but I think he is missing the point. Using AI effectively as an engineer requires a paradigm shift in terms of how you work. You cannot approach your work as you did in the past, and use AI and expect it to be a big improvement. In fact, if you do that you will likely be disappointed, and worse off. Shifting your paradigm is one of the hardest things you can do, even more so if you have been in the field for a while, but it is also the most rewarding, and opens up many new possibilities. It's not about being left behind, as much as it is about limiting yourself unnecessarily, by staying in your comfort zone.
• bravetraveler 7mo ago
  It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
• null-phnix 7mo ago
  [dead]
• neya 7mo ago
  > I'm OK being left behind, thanks! > It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful. > I took part in a vaccine trial > Getting Jabbed With EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE! This is such a weird article. The author presents so many contradictory anecdotal experiences against the author's own conclusion.
  • marand23 7mo ago
    I think he used it as a counter-example where it made sense to him to be early. But you don't always have to be early, is his point, I think.
• mathgladiator 7mo ago
  I heard from a senior leader at Amazon that "Today, I am choosing how I fail". This has echoed in my head for many years. At any moment, you are failing at thousands of things that you may not even know about, and that is the gist of what I took away from it. The thing is that you have to be OK when you intentionally choose to not invest in something as regret is ultimately a poison. The other thing is this: you are not obligated to bring people with you and you have a choice of free association.
• lowken 7mo ago
  There’s a lot of truth to this post. I’m very pro AI, and I believe everyone should get comfortable with it because it’s not just the future, it’s already the present. If you want to stay competitive in today’s workforce, AI is going to be part of your toolkit. But on the other hand... I also only learned git when I needed it at a new job... So we can pump the breaks a bit.
• lionkor 7mo ago
  I had this with Rust. I always saw the huge hype, especially some years ago, and it was hugely off-putting. Ridiculous projects like rewriting famously full coverage branch tested projects like SQLite in Rust, or rewriting the GNU coreutils, and always spamming "blazing fast" and "written in Rust (crab emoji)" was very, very hostile to a C++ developer. When I eventually got around to using Rust, I was hooked, and now I don't use C++ anymore if I can choose Rust instead. The hype was not completely unjustified, but it was also misplaced, and to this day I disagree with most of those hype projects. It was no issue to silently pick up Rust, write some code that solves problems, and enjoy it as a very very good language. I don't feel a need to personally contact C or C++ project maintainers and curse at them for not using Rust. I do the same with AI. I'm not going around screaming at people who dare to write code by hand, going "Claude will replace you", or "I could vibe code this for 10 bucks". I silently write my code, I use AI where I find it brings value, and that's it. Recognize these tools for what they are: Just tools. They have use-cases, tradeoffs, and a massive community of incompetent idiots who like it ONLY because they don't know better, not because they understand the actual value. And then there's the normal, every day engineers, who use tools because, and ONLY because, they solve a problem. My advice: Don't be an idiot. It's not the solution for all problems. It can be good without being the solution to a problems. It can be useful without replacing skill. It can add value without replacing you. You don't have to pick a side.
• mazone 7mo ago
  Many companies usually want to compare themselves to Apple and at the same time say they are disruptors and innovators but Apple is probably the best company at being okey with being left behind. Many think about them as experts in products but for me they always been best att copy what others are doing and refine it, maybe not neccassary better technical but always seen the market fit better then others. Like poker, the later you need to take your decision the more information you have.
• nslsm 7mo ago
  >There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. No, they are not.
• DonsDiscountGas 7mo ago
  I started working in AI/ML about ten years ago. Reasonably early. Today, professionally and financially I'm doing about as well as a typical programmer. I find the field interesting so I have no regrets but I tend to agree with OP.
• asim 7mo ago
  I'm healthily skeptical of new technology. Meaning I'm not the early adopter. But I've also found over the years I don't get left behind. I become curious at the time things are stabilising. Maybe on the cusp where there's still a lot of pushback but there's also clear value. Crypto in 2014-2017. AI in 2023-2024. You don't have to feel FOMO but if you're a technologist, if you have a healthy desire to evolve, change and learn then you'll naturally pick things up. I went from total crypto skepticism in 2014 to investing most of what I had. I went from total AI skepticism to doing RAG for the Quran and agentic tech for the small web. I think there's value in staying true to who you are but also naturally discovering and learning on your own timeline.
• RobinL 7mo ago
  For me, it's beyond doubt these tools are an essential skill in any SWE's toolkit. By which I mean, knowing their capabilities, how they're valuable and when to use them (and when not to). As with any other skill, if you can't do something, it can be frustrating to peers. I don't want collegeues wasting time doing things that are automatable. I'm not suggesting anyone should be cranking out 10k LOC in a week with these tools, but if you haven't yet done things like sent one in an agentic loop to produce a minimal reprex of a bug, or pin down a performance regression by testing code on different branches, then you could potentially be hampering the productivity of the team. These are examples of things where I now have a higher expectation of precision because it's so much easier to do more thorough analysis automatically. There's always caveats, but I think the point stands that people generally like working with other people who are working as productively as possible.
• jedberg 7mo ago
  It's more about job seeking than anything. If you jump on a fad early, and it turns out to be the winner, when you're looking for work you can say you have X years of experience with it, which will be a few more than most of the other candidates. It also shows a passion for learning and improvement, something hiring managers are often looking for signals of. But of course it's a trade off. This rewards people who don't have family or other obligations, who have time to learn all the new fads so they can be early on the winners.
• j3th9n 7mo ago
  Tldr; dude makes wrong choices one after the other and copes with it by being ok with being left behind. "I wrote my Msc on The Metaverse", ....
• pgwalsh 7mo ago
  Solid piece, very wise. AI is fun but where I find it useful with code is first writing more thorough comments and then writing the base of your tests. Writing the actual code that's efficient is iffy at times and you better know the language well or you'll get yourself in trouble. I've watched AI make my code more complex and harder to read. I've seen it put an import in a loop. It's removed the walrus operator because it doesn't seem to understand it. It's used older libraries or built-ins that are no longer supported. It's still fun and does save me some time with certain things but I don't want to vibe code much because it removes the joy out of what you're doing.
• nubg 7mo ago
  His ignorance is my first-mover opportunity!
• jruz 7mo ago
  Have fun writing code yourself /s
• hota_mazi 7mo ago
  Whenever I hear "It's never too late to do X", I can't help but think "Well in this case, there is no harm in waiting a bit longer, is there?".
• al_borland 7mo ago
  I prefer to move slower. I've accepted that I'm not going to create some unicorn startup (that was never an aspiration). As an employee at a company, my goal is to focus my time learning the things that are relevant to my job and that will be useful for 10 years, not 10 weeks. Chasing every new tech will lead to burnout and disillusionment at some point. AI probably isn't going away in the same way NFTs largely did, and I use it to some degree. However, I don't see a lot of value of being on the bleeding edge of AI, as the shape it takes for those skills that will be used for the next 10 years are still forming. Trying to keep up now means constantly adapting how I work, where more time is spent keeping up on the changes in AI than actually doing something useful with it. After the bubble pops, I think we'll start to see a much more clear picture of what the landscape of AI will look like long-term. Who are the winners, who are the losers, and what tools rise to the top after the hype is gone. I'll go deeper at that time. Right now, the only thing I'm allowed to use at work is Copilot, so I just use that and don't bother messing around with much more in my free time.
  • 1PlayerOne 7mo ago
    Same situation here, Copilot the only available option. But I get the feeling of things moving ahead...
• abrztam 7mo ago
  sure you can pick up any tool whenever you want, but from your employer's perspective AI is the best force multiplier since slavery, everything between it still required humans with leverage, the question is if your boss will need you at all by then
• mmmore 7mo ago
  One hidden premise of this is "AI tools are not useful now, even if they might be in the future." For example: > Few are useful to me as they are now. Except current AI tools are extremely useful and I think you're missing something if you don't see that. This is one of the main differences between LLMs and cryptocurrency; cryptocurrencies were the "next big thing", always promising more utility down the road. Whereas LLMs are already extremely useful; I'm using them to prototype software faster, Terrance Tao is using them to formalize proofs faster, my mom's using them to do administrative work faster.
  • edent 7mo ago
    Cool. But every time I use them I get a wrong answer faster. I know, I know. I'm prompting it wrong. I'm using the wrong model. I need to pull the slot-machine arm just one more time. I know I'm not as clever as Terrance Tao - so I'll wait until the machines are useful to someone like me.
• cjbgkagh 7mo ago
  > There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero? > No. That's obviously nonsense. That's does not obviously follow, I do worry about the ever increasing proportion of humanity who are no longer 'economically viable' and this includes people who are not yet born.
• vinayaksodar 7mo ago
  While you can certainly take a wait and watch approach on many things you also have to take a strategic bet on some otherwise you will never be at the forefront of any field.
• gabordemooij 7mo ago
  I find the hivemind terribly oppressing at times. AI tools are great, but in the end it seems to me that the results matter most. However we seem to go from hype to hype, again and again. It's all so tiresome. Why can't we just respect individual choices and focus less on the tools and more on the results?
• dist-epoch 7mo ago
  General idea is true, except for this particular technology. When AI will be easy to pick up and guide, guess what, there will be no need for a programmer to pick it up. AI will be using itself, Claude Manager driving Claude programmers. So leverage AI while you still can provide value doing so. It's literally a "use it or lose it situation".
• markbnj 7mo ago
  Adoption of a new technology has always sorted itself into buckets by early adopters, mainstream adopters and late adopters. I think this post is just demonstrating the mindset of the latter.
• muskstinks 7mo ago
  Crypto was interesting to think through and it was clear very early on how many flaws it has. It basically just moved the goal post to level deeper and it was quite an eye opener how few people even understood the major flaw of crypto: You can only do crypto savely with anything on blockchain and it has not solved any real issue off blockchain (which means you can literlay just send crypto to each other and thats it). But AI is a beast. Its A LOT to learn. RAG, LLMs, Architecture, tooling, ecosystem, frameworks, approaches, terms etc. and this will not go away. Its clear today already and it was clear with GPT-3 that this is the next thing and in comparison to other 'next things' its the next thing in the perfect environment: The internet allows for fast communication and we never have been as fast and flexible and global scaled manufactoring than today. Which means whatever the internet killed and changed, will happen / is happening a lot faster with ai. And tbh. if someone gets fired in the AI future, it will always be the person who knows less about AI and knows less about how to leverage than the other person. For me personally, i just enjoy the whole new frontier of approaches, technologies and progress. But i would recommend EVERYONE to regularly spend time with this technology. Play around regularly. You don't need to use it but you will not gain any gut knowledge of models vs. models and it will be A LOT to learn when it crosses the the line for whatever you do.
  • danny_codes 7mo ago
    That hasn’t been my observation and seems unlikely to be true. I suspect AI is a wicked learning environment. Narrow experience may hinder rather than help
    • muskstinks 7mo ago
      Plenty of frameworks and tools still exist. AI/LLMs are not getting stupid in something they are already good in (or very seldom if). So i see it more as an evolving thing not a wicked thing. Newest claude release made context better, for this information I already need to know claude and know what a context is and what the problem with context length is. I'm following AI for a few years now and def not have the feeling at all its wicked.
• nromiun 7mo ago
  Getting early into any technology only makes sense if you are building your business on top of it. Or you are making money from it in some way. Other than that it makes sense for the rest of us to wait. Of course those that believe that AI will convert into AGI and destroy society as we know it won't be convinced.
• cheevly 7mo ago
  Ive been using AI/LLMs for 3 years non-stop and feel like I've barely scratched the surface of learning how to wield them to their full potential. I can’t imagine the mindset of thinking these tools don’t take extreme dedication and skill to master.
• ge96 7mo ago
  If this is about vibe-coding. I remember when React was the hotness and I was still using jQuery, I didn't learn it immediatley, maybe a couple years later is when I finally started to use React. I believe this delayed my chance in getting a job especially around that time when hiring was good eg. 2016 or so. With vibe-coding it just sucks the joy out of it. I can't feel happy if I can just say "make this" and it comes out. I enjoy the process... which yeah you can say it's "dumb/waste of time" to bother with typing out code with your hands. For me it isn't about just "here's the running code", I like architecting it, deciding how it goes together which yeah you can do that with prompts. Idk I'm fortunate right now using tools like Cursor/Windsurf/Copilot is not mandatory. I think in the long run though I will get out of working in software professionally for a company. I do use AI though, every time I search something and read Google's AI summary, which you'd argue it would be faster to just use a built in thing that types for you vs. copy paste. Which again... what is there to be proud of if you can just ask this magic box to produce something and claim it as your own. "I made this". Even design can be done with AI too (mechanical/3D design) then you put it into a 3D printer, where is the passion/personality... Anyway yeah, my own thoughts, I'm a luddite or whatever
  • ge96 7mo ago
    It's funny too you'll hear people say they reverse-engineered something (not related to today's post) and you're like "wow that's impressive" but it turns out AI did it.
    • krackers 7mo ago
      I mean people use IDA for decompilation instead of reading assembly directly, and that's counted as as valid reverse engineering. Why shouldn't throwing it an LLM count as well? I think reverse engineering is one of the fields where "anything goes", it doesn't matter how you get to the answer as long as you get there. I do agree that the notion of difficulty needs to be recalibrated though, seemingly impressive RE tasks can now be done trivially with LLMs.
      • ge96 7mo ago
• josefritzishere 7mo ago
  This reasoning is solid and applies equally to AI. I do not need it crammed into every service and forced on me thank you very much "If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours."
• waynecochran 7mo ago
  This is one of those posts I would like look back on in a year or two. I am usually a late adopter with everything. This time is think its different. I am seeing what AI can do with my own eyes. I am creating new things at light speed and figuring out this all works. I don't think you want to be late to the party on this one.
• etwigg 7mo ago
  I don't think the "craftsman" self-identification is going to work for software engineers anymore. The tool capabilities are too dynamic, you have to be some sort of opportunistic pirate/entrepreneur. Sure you can jump in and get up to speed on some aspect of the toolchain later on, but the identity shift is the hard and slow part that I think it's wise to get started on ASAP.
  • aworks 7mo ago
    If this is a real strategic shift, some will adapt and some won't or can't. From Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents... but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"
• duskdozer 7mo ago
  Anyone obsessively insisting others adopt $tech with threats that you'll be obsolete, left behind, whatever, are just selling you something. If anything, they should be trying to keep it a secret, so that they stay among the elite few who get outsized benefits from $tech while everyone else plays in the mud.
• maxothex 7mo ago
  [dead]
• dreamcompiler 7mo ago
  It amazes me that companies are developing proprietary IP with somebody else's cloud-based AI that ingests and learns from everything that they type and it generates. These companies are paying for the privilege of having their IP stolen.
• sktrdie 7mo ago
  So? Economy is entertainment. When crypto was hype, billions were made and burned from building whatever entertaining thing around that. Now it's AI's turn. Billions will be made and burned. Economy is just a fun game. Let's have fun. The idea that everything needs to be "useful" is highly subjective. What is truly useful? Is it food? Shelter? Medicine?
• picafrost 7mo ago
  I am increasingly feeling okay with the idea of being left out. The worst parts of working professionally in a software development team have been amplified by LLMs. Ridiculously large PRs, strong opinions doubled down due to being LLM-"confirmed", bigger expectations coming from above, exceptionally unwarranted confidence in the change or approach the LLM has come up with. I am dying inside when I make a comment and receive a response that has clearly been prompted toward my comment and possibly filtered in the voice of the responder if not copied and pasted directly. Particularly when it's wrong. And it often is wrong because the human using them doesn't know how to ask the right questions. Fortunately, most of the fundamental technological infrastructure is well in place at this point (networking, operating systems, ...). Low skilled engineers vibe coding features for some fundamentally pointless SaaS is OK with me.
  • FromTheFirstIn 7mo ago
    Preach
• stefantalpalaru 7mo ago
  [dead]
• tracker1 7mo ago
  I remember working on a few early tools for VRML towards the end of the 90's... It was cool, but far from great... was remembered from the mention of VR in the article. That said, my only regret with Bitcoin was deleting my early wallets when I realized the coins were only worth $.25 ... if I'd had any inkling what they'd be worth someday, I'd probably have just bought $1000 worth back then and zipped it up until closer to today. I'm truly curious how many bitcoins were similarly deleted from existence.
• taraharris 7mo ago
  As long as it's not coupled with calls to tax and regulate those who do get in early and reap benefits from doing so, this is good and healthy. (I'm not the earliest adopter of crypto and AI by any means. I only rode up crypto a couple of times for 2X and 3X kinda gains on my investment, and I only started using Claude last year.)
• mindsandmach 7mo ago
  I'm reminded of the parable of the Chinese farmer (a quick Google search if you aren't familiar) when I see this sentiment. Is going all in on crypto good or bad? Maybe so, maybe not. We'll see. Is going all in on AI-assisted development good or bad? Maybe so, maybe not. We'll see. All I know is, I've always enjoyed building things. And I enjoy building things with AI-assisted tools too, so I'll continue doing it.
• ctoth 7mo ago
  The Programmer's Prayer Nothing is happening. And if it is, it's just hype. And if it isn't, it only works on toy problems. And if it doesn't, I'll learn it when it stabilizes. And if I can't, the gains all go to owners anyway. And if they don't, it's just managers chasing metrics. And if it isn't, well I'm a real programmer. And if I'm not, then neither are you.
• swframe2 7mo ago
  I've noticed 2 very obvious trends. The high-performers who previously wrote the most PRs are now using AI the most aggressively and the number PRs they produce has almost doubled. The other trend is that large teams are being split into smaller teams that work on new products. I hope the trend is more projects and less grunt coding. (I know the ai coders are not yet L6 but I suspect they will achieve L3-L5 this year).
• _345 7mo ago
  I would not have started my article with "I could get into Bitcoin anytime, why the rush". That is not the killer first example you think it is. It's been ~17 years of proof so far that you would've made a ton of money by simply mindlessly buying $200 of bitcoin every month after lower risk contributions are made, and just holding onto it. I mean if you did that you'd have contributed ~$38K USD by 2026 and had ~1.5B USD now if you started in 2010. BTC being so cheap back then dominates the whole process so to demonstrate my point more if you had heard about it all those years and were nervous about trying it and decided to wait until 2016, you'd still need to just put in $24K overall to come out with ~$450K by 2026. That's not biting your finger nails over the price changes, the hype cycles, the price drop scares. You just set and forget a $200 recurring buy a month and put your energy elsewhere and pocket half a million for basically no effort And if anything is possible in hindsight, then why in hindsight would you write an article acting like bitcoin was a bad decision to be an early adopter for
• Footprint0521 7mo ago
  Say what you want but the layoffs of people who don’t use these tools getting replaced with those who can have and continue to happen; I miss manual coding just as much as the next man but this seems like a hot take
• lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
  It is a far better investment to attend to the eternities rather than the times.
• hintymad 7mo ago
  > If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. I saw meme in X the other day, which roughly says that one does not have to learn if she learns slow enough in the age AI. I guess the undertone is that AI evolves faster than one can learn about the tricks of using it.
• bigbawls 7mo ago
  Had another 2-hour throwaway session today with an LLM. These only really happen in mature codebases tied up in complex business requirements. The last few times I’ve tried LLMs with this codebase it has not been fruitful. Weird because it’s impressive in other areas, especially tech with no real users lmao
• senordevnyc 7mo ago
  I’m running a solo saas. In the last six months, I’ve added about $300k in ARR. There’s zero chance I could have done this without AI. My velocity just keeps going up, month after month.
• mmargenot 7mo ago
  Especially when people pushing it are trying to capture your attention, it’s good to be deliberate about the tech that you introduce.
• diablevv 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• indubioprorubik 7mo ago
  I use AI not for what the various fraudsters hype it for. It utterly fails coding what i want each time. But it is a great tool to create things and not be censored/hindered by collaboration with humans. It liberates the lone nutters of the world to make music, create movies, do things, which society desperately tried to stop them from. Just because new things are frightening and money shies away from risk like the devil from holy water. Look at all those sequels. Each sequel in existence murdered a dozen artists hopes to create something new. A ton of it is garbage. But 1/1000 gets to realize a vision, that could never be marketed, never be discovered and is something new entirely. For that i love it and thank those who made it..
• temikus 7mo ago
  I’m in senior management and my take is - this is one of the very few times in our industry when the companies are actually both encouraging and investing in L&D at an unprecedented rate. When do you last remember a company being comfortable throwing 10,000$+ a year for you to learn a new skill and experiment at your own pace? This is why I’m encouraging my engineers so much - it’s free training! Take it while it lasts!
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• pedalpete 7mo ago
  Some people are comfortable living on the edge, but it isn't for most. I was developing in the metaverse space, and the problems we were facing led me to learn about the state of AI image generation (2018), and where the world was headed. People assume the thing you are focused on is the thing that must win in the end, but that just means you are too focused on your little part of the world to take in the bigger picture of what's out there. Prior to working in the metaverse (really a form of volumetric video, but I won't go into details), I was working in telehealth (2014). I did some research in augmented reality (2009), and lots of other areas of interest as well. Some people would say I wasted my time on these, but there was a mass of secondary learnings which I value every day.
• kkfx 7mo ago
  Honestly, those who lost money did so because they were aiming for profits, not for The Network State, or for having non-seizable money etc. On the other hand, for those who got in early because they were online and curious at the time, with a small amount of money back then has made them billionaires today, an extremely low risk. If they arrived a bit later, millionaires, still with a really soft risk. Then of course, there are MANY problems starting with BTC https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html but they generally aren't what most people talk about, and today, even if the complexity is insane, the documentation sparse, and the code quality questionable, Lightning is actually the only truly scalable solution we have for micropayments and payments of various amounts, generally not large ones. It has some absurd aspects, but that hardly matters. It works. More generally, we don't have a crystal ball; where we can, we diversify, certainly limiting risk but also taking a bit of a gamble; where we can't, we choose to watch and see how it goes, knowing that we'll pay for it in terms of returns. As things stand for me personally, given the level of IT obscenity in the traditional banking world, which in 2026 still doesn't have decent APIs open to retail customers, or at least decent export functions, shameful websites, a push towards completely unacceptable mobile apps, absurd limits etc etc etc, well, the worst CEx is less bad than the best bank. I don't trust either, but I distrust the CEx less than the bank, and given Wikileaks, Francesca Albanese, the protesters in Canada, the various private individuals illegally "sanctioned" by the EU Commission and so on, I'd say it's madness to rely on banks for anything more than the bare minimum. Most people today know nothing of this and don't weigh it up, but they will, and they'll pay for this delay with their lack of attention.
• Uncle_Clark 7mo ago
  This is definitely appearing in the AI tool space and industry as a whole. I feel like companies are pushing AI tools into the workplace because they are worried that a competitor is going to do something that revolutionizes productivity and credit is going to be given to the AI tool as the factor. There's a tough timing call that comes into play with this because there is no ability to predict, only to look in hindsight, it's more of a hedge to be in and say I bought a lottery ticket and had a chance during the AI boom than it is to not engage. I believe the saying is "you never win if you never play."
• sumanep 7mo ago
  > what's the point of "getting in early"? Ask this to the guy who deliver a pizza for a few bitcoins in the early stage
• nurettin 7mo ago
  Why not do fads in moderation? I've always done this. Don't convert it all to xhtml, just start closing your <tags> Don't go full UML code generation mode, just use it to illustrate core business logic. Don't buy an iPhone, get an n8. Don't be a cryptobro, just get one, set it aside. Don't go full TDD, but use it for bug fixes. Don't go full knowledge graph/org mode, just have a captain's log.md and an assets/ folder. Don't go full microservices, create modular monoloths. Don't go full agent teams, just use normal cli. etc. etc.
• dawdwa 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• adrianwaj 7mo ago
  Not only is he not being left behind, he might even have the liberty to abandon ship. So many humans are uploading their code into Github for the AIs to train on, and thus digging their own graves whereby they'll eventually be outsmarted by AI. On the other side of the coin, don't the AIs have to be weary about training on prior output in order to maintain the purity of their sources? The dogfooding for them will end up becoming overwhelming. Perhaps innovation should stay private or used to extract micropayments. Managing themselves well, hardware tinkerers have a solid future, because robots aren't as effective yet in the real-world. I think that is the next golden age, actually.
• neversupervised 7mo ago
  The mistake is that 1 every N waves of hype are in fact monumental shifts and it makes sense to embrace as soon as possible. Also being early to the right thing can have massive implications in appreciating the shift before the general public, which is upstream from making smart resource allocation (investments, career choices). I have a friend that went to super early OpenAI as a designer. He has more equity than most AI researchers there and made a 0.001% amount of wealth. Being early does very much matter in the right conditions.
• QuiEgo 7mo ago
  If you want to see the potential value of Claude, pick a somewhat isolated function in your code and tell Claude "write unit tests for this". Watch it write them, compile your code, validate the test, fix the ones it did something dumb on, and iterate. Laugh as you get 10 awesome tests and 2 really dumb ones you have to go in and clean up by hand for 5 minutes of work. Half a day of iterating later you'll have finished the extremely tedious test writing that would have taken you a day or two without Claude. When doing a code review, tell Claude "review commit xyz". It finds things humans are not finding in reviews at this point. Not sure about what you want to do for some design? Use Claude as a rubber duck - tell it "I'm deciding between implementing this with A or B and here's why... is there any thing I'm missing that would make the decision more clear, or any potential solution I've missed?" It has the context of your existing code, which can be incredibly helpful for stuff like this. Opus 4.6 is good enough that it's undeniable that it's going to change the industry at this point. It's just a question of how big the change will be. The earlier models were shit. Everyone I worked with spurned them, including me. Everyone around me using Opus 4.6 is saying "well, shit, this is real now" with varying degrees of excitement and unease. AI is not some magic pill. A lot of software development is not writing code, it's requirements gathering and design. That part doesn't magically go away, in fact it becomes way more important. But AI is speeding up the writing code part of things - if, and only if, you put down a good plan first. People will structure their code where AI can churn on it (specs in markdown, and TDD all over again), it's useful enough to be worth it. We're going to get segmented into engineers who can use it and engineers who can't. For this technology I'd not wait. Start learning it. We're all going to be more focused on being architects instead of developers.
• jonaustin 7mo ago
  I'd compare this more to the early days of the internet. Is it necessary to get involved right now? Perhaps not. Is it neat to be part of a transformative historical change just getting it's feet under it? Yep.
• deterministic 7mo ago
  He’s absolutely right. I always wait for the hype to die down before deciding whether to adopt new tech. Because most of the time, I’d just be wasting effort on something that turns out to be underwhelming. It’s the same with games. I give them a few months for the inevitable bug fixes and balance patches before jumping in. Saves a lot of frustration. And a lot of wasted time.
• b__d 7mo ago
  One of the maxims I live my life by: You are more likely to benefit from not being the first to adopt something new than to be disadvantaged by being second.
• Bishop197 7mo ago
  [dead]
• hknzerodark1 7mo ago
  [dead]
• hknzerodark1 7mo ago
  [dead]
• hknzerodark1 7mo ago
  [dead]
• hirogrammer 7mo ago
  [dead]
• edwardsrobbie 7mo ago
  [dead]