10 ms·

> 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 th

• 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.
  • dakolli 7mo ago
    All of these occulted skills, that we literally can't explain why they work are akin to gamblers superstitions. If I write something this way, it works. Its like a gambler who think they order in which the push the buttons on the slot machine makes a difference. Kind of weird tools also incorporate addictive gambling game's UX design. They're literally allowing you to multiply your output: 3x, 4x, 5x (run it 5 times for a better shot at a working prompt). You're being played by billionaires who are selling you a slot machine as a thinking machine.
    • zephen 7mo ago
      > All of these occulted skills, that we literally can't explain why they work are akin to gamblers superstitions. Yes, it's hard to see how, at this moment in time, "Anybody can write code with an LLM" is so different from "Anybody can make money in the stock market." The underlying mechanisms are completely different, of course, and the putative goal of the LLM purveyors is to make it where anybody really can write code with an LLM. I'm typically a nay-sayer and a perfectionist, but many not-so-great things become and stay popular, and this may fall into that category. > Kind of weird tools also incorporate addictive gambling game's UX design. It's unclear it started out this way, but since it's obviously going this way, it is certainly prudent to ask if some of this is by design. It would presumably be more worrisome if there were only a single vendor, but even with multiple vendors, it might be lucrative for them to design things so that "true insider knowledge" of how to make good prompts is a sought-after skill.
      • oro44 7mo ago
        Broadly speaking, LLMs are destined to fail. Why? Because all the folks involved have created a technology in search for a problem to solve. That never, ever works. Steve Jobs of all people left this piece of wisdom behind. Its amazing how few actually apply it. The internet was never this - its origins go back to the need to able to transmit data - darpa. And this is what we still do now...
        • zephen 7mo ago
          There are a few examples of technologies that only found their application later, such as the glue in post-it notes. And to be fair, Steve Jobs was a master of taking things that had been invented elsewhere, and making them work well enough to foster a demand. But your point stands. Who made the most money, Xerox PARC, or Apple?
  • dw_arthur 7mo ago
    Even two or three years ago I had ideas for projects but I could see the models were not ergonomic for my uses. I decided to wait for better models and sure enough the agentic models showed up which are much easier to use. Next thing I'm waiting on is building a new server for a powerful locally hosted LLM in 5 years. No need to go through the headaches and cost of doing it now with models that may not be powerful enough.
  • bonesss 7mo ago
    Past the sea change: half the reason those prompt and harness solutions seem to work are LLM-lies, the testing is gassing you about how it works and the efficacy, defaulting to ‘yes’. If you test specific features of those solutions over time you see very inconsistent results, lots of lies, and seemingly stable solutions that one-shot well but suddenly experience behaviour changes due to tweaks on the backend. Tuesdays awesome agent stack that finally works is loading totally different on Thursday, and debugging is “oh, sorry, it’s better now” even when it isn’t. Compression, lies, and external hosting are a bad combo. Sometimes I imagine a world where computers executed programs the same way each time. You could write some code once and run it a whole calendar month later with a predictable outcome. What a dream, we can hope I guess.
    • skydhash 7mo ago
      People are doing toy projects and praising them, while some are testing them in real world situations and not findings them that useful. But the former is labelling the latter as luddites and telling them they will be left behind.
      • abustamam 7mo ago
        As someone on the intersection of both (I've built a lot of vibe coded toy projects and lead a vibe coding initiative at work), they're both right and both wrong. For a single dev team, vibe coding is great. Write specs, write plans, write code. I know what the project wants and needs because I'm the target market. At work, I haven't written more than a few lines of code since December. But I work with other people vibe coding this same project. Lots of changing requirements and rapid iteration. Lots of mistakes were made by everyone involved. Lots of tech debt. Sure, we built something in 2 mos that would have otherwise taken us 6 mos, but now I'm fixing the mess that we caused. I think the critical difference is the attitude towards our situation. My boss said to fix the AI harness so we can vibe code more confidently and freely. But other bosses might cut their losses and ban vibe coding. Who's right? I dunno. In both cases I'd just do what my boss wants me to do. But it's not that I don't want to be left behind. I don't want to lose my job. There's a difference.
  • Aurornis 7mo ago
    > (prompt engineering, harnesses, mixture of experts set ups) Prompt engineering as a specific skill got blown out of proportion on LinkedIn and podcasts. The core idea that you need to write decent prompts if you want decent output is true, but the idea that it was an expert-level skill that only some people could master was always a lie. Most of it is common sense about having to put your content into the prompt and not expecting the LLM to read your mind. Harnesses isn’t really a skill you learn. It’s how you get th LLM to interact with something. It’s also not as hard as the LinkedIn posts imply. Mixture of Experts isn’t a skill you learn at all. It’s a model architecture, not something you do. At most it’s worth understanding if you’re picking models to run on your own hardware but for everything else you don’t even need to think about this phrase. I think all of this influencer and podcast hype is giving the wrong impression about how hard and complicated LLMs are. The people doing the best with them aren’t studying all of these “skills”, they’re just using the tools and learning what they’re capable of.
    • Izkata 7mo ago
      > It’s also not as hard as the LinkedIn posts imply. Keeping in mind the LinkedIn posters/audience (marketers/recruiters), it probably was quite hard for most of them.
• fantasizr 7mo ago
  somehow the ai bros are saying creating .md files is the real ingenuity, and couldn't be learned in say half a day. There's absolutely no rush to keep up with the latest code producing tools especially when they're all "pay to play".
• postalcoder 7mo ago
  The thing is, this post is hitting a straw man. ngmi culture was deeply toxic and pervasive in crypto. I think the people who are really into LLMs are having a blast.
  • stavros 7mo ago
    I'm definitely having a blast, but I agree with the author. You're not going to get left behind, the "getting left behind" rhetoric was just cryptocurrency pump-and-dumpers. It's fine to wait and not engage if you don't want to.
    • postalcoder 7mo ago
      I agree with you, which is why I think it's a straw man. How many real devs are actually banging the "you're getting left behind!" drums?
      • foolserrandboy 7mo ago
        The executives are, not the devs.
      • bena 7mo ago
        You're using a no-true-Scotsman to accuse the author of a strawman. Consider that.
      • apsurd 7mo ago
        It can be implicit though. The llm person having a blast is compelled to push everyone to see what they see. If they have a leadership role at their company, then the getting-left-behind drum does get banged in the form of "ai native company transformation" initiatives.
      • SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
        Lots, and not just online. I run into them regularly in my office, and so do my friends and family in tech. One of my coworkers is now spending all his time writing SKILLs, he's convinced that we'll never need to solve operational issues again if we have the right SKILLs.
• augusto-moura 7mo ago
  What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.
  • layer8 7mo ago
    > I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. It has often been the case for technologies though, like “now we’re doing everything in $language and $technology”. If you see LLM coding as a technology in that vein, it’s not a completely new phenomenon, although it does affect developers differently.
    • kjkjadksj 7mo ago
      Well the tech or the language had some feature to it that lead you to using it. By definition LLM coding doesn’t. It is like the job requirement turned into “ask jeff to write all your code and if you don’t we won’t hire you.”
      • layer8 7mo ago
        Technologies were imposed by management whether it made sense or not. Like, “all data exchange formats now have to use XML”, or “all applications must be J2EE now”, because it was the new hot thing. “You” weren’t making that choice, management imposed it. That’s the parallel I’m drawing.
        • sarchertech 7mo ago
          That was usually only the case where everyone had to be using it or it didn’t work. One person hand coding and one person having Claude still results in the same output that is compatible with each other. This is more like mandating that you use vim. I’ve never some something like that before in 20+ years.
• II2II 7mo ago
  I almost entirely agree with the author's assessment of new technology. Yet that statement rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes it is better to get into things early because it will grow more complex as time goes on, so it will be easier to pick up early in its development. Consider the Web. In the early days, it was just HTML. That was easy to learn. From there on, it was simply a matter of picking up new skills as the environment changed. I'm not sure how I would deal with picking up web development if I started today.
  • apsurd 7mo ago
    The web/html is a great analogy. I too am in no rush to be hyper effective with LLMs. In fact i want to deliberately slow down because ai-native coding is so exhausting. That said, your point about the leverage of learning html and web in the early days compared to now rings true. pre-compiled isomorphic typescript apps are completely unrecognizable from the early days of index.html
  • topaz0 7mo ago
    And yet, at some point most web developers will have picked it up after the "raw html" era -- that point has probably come, even.
  • ashwinsundar 7mo ago
    This isn't a good example - people were completing 6-month bootcamps and getting $100k offers to do web development not too long ago, decades after the web and HTML took off. After a few years they were making as much as anyone who learned HTML and Web 1.0 back in the 90s. Are the bootcampers better developers? Probably not. But they still were employable and paid relatively the same.
  • mekoka 7mo ago
    "It will grow more complex" is never a good reason to get into things early. It's just your mind playing FOMO tricks on you. Many developers who picked up the web in the early years struggle with (front-end) web development today. It doesn't matter if they fetched jQuery or MooTools from some CDN as it was done in the mid 00s. Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals. If you started today, you'd simply learn the hard way, as it's always been done: get a few books or register for a course. Carve some time every day for theory and practice. All the while prioritizing what matters the most to get stuff done quickly right now, with little fluff. You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today. That applies to abstractions, frameworks, and tooling, but also to the fundamentals. You'll probably learn ES6+ and TS, not JS WAT. A lot of the early stuff seems like an utter waste of time in retrospect. This is true for all tech. If you knew nothing about LLMs by the end of this year, you could find a course that teaches you all the latest relevant tricks in 5 to 10 hours for 10 bucks.
• gradus_ad 7mo ago
  But it's so easy to try something like Claude Code. It's not like you need to get up to speed. There is no learning curve*, that's the nature of AI. Just start using it and you'll see why it has attracted so much hype. *I should qualify that "using" CC in the strict sense has no learning curve, but really getting the most out of it may take some time as you see its limitations. But it's not learning tech in the traditional sense.
  • hombre_fatal 7mo ago
    I think it comes down to your own personality, appetite, and also how external factors like hype might impact you (resent, annoyance, curiosity, excitement).
  • we_have_options 7mo ago
    I've been playing with it on weekends for the last few months. 9 out of 10 projects, it's failed. Projects as simple as "set up a tmux/vim binding so I can write prompts in one pane and run claude in the other". Fails. I've been coding for over 20 years. If there is no learning curve, why doesn't it work for me? You can't say I'm not using it right, because if that was true, then all I need to do is climb the learning curve to fix that, the curve that you say doesn't exist.
    • gradus_ad 7mo ago
      Did it not work after the first try and you gave up? Did it not produce any usable code that you could hand tweak or build off of? I want to understand your definition of "failed" here.
      • laserlight 7mo ago
        What's your definition of "working"? Do you consider it working, when you have to put more effort into prompting back-and-forth than writing it the old way?
        • whateveracct 7mo ago
• imtringued 7mo ago
  I think this is particularly evident with AI. The early adopters started years ago and they've seen improvements over time that they started attributing them to their own skill. They tell you that if you didn't spend years prompting the AI, it will be difficult to catch up. However, the exact opposite is happening. As the models get better, the need for the perfect prompt starts waning. Prompt engineering is a skill that is obsoleting faster than handwriting code. I personally started using codex in march and honestly, the hardest part was finding and setting up the sandbox. (I use limactl with qemu and kvm). Meanwhile the agentic coding part just works.
• brandonmenc 7mo ago
  This is true in my experience. I waited until it seemed good enough to use without having to spend most of my time keeping up with the latest magical incantations. Now I have multiple Claude instances running and producing almost all of my commits at work. Yes, with a lot of time spent planning and validating.
• randusername 7mo ago
  Counterpoint: Mistakes are less costly in the beginning and the knowledge gained from them is more valuable. Over-sharing on social media. Secret / IP leaks with LLMs. That kind of thing. I agree: FOMO is an all-in mindset. Author admits to dabbling out of curiosity and realizing the time is not right for him personally. I think that's a strong call.
• wslh 7mo ago
  We've seen multiple ideas/products get quickly absorbed into frontier models, OSS, or well-funded startups. The cycle from "interesting idea" to "commoditized feature" is getting very short. Personally, there were three of these in the last year. And even if your product is genuinely great, distribution is becoming the real bottleneck. Discovery via prompting or search is limited, and paid acquisition is increasingly expensive. One alternative is to loop between build and kill, letting usage emerge organically rather than trying to force distribution.
• vablings 7mo ago
  There really isn't anything special to using AI anyways it's not rocket science. Sometimes I will use AI to write me some tailwind tags, sometimes I will use AI to write me a static site for a custom report. Most of my AI usage comes from doing things I don't enjoy doing like making a series of small tweaks to a function or block of code. Honestly, I just levelled the playing field with vim users and its nothing to write home about
  • mpalmer 7mo ago
    > There really isn't anything special to using AI anyways it's not rocket science Could have fooled me, the way some people manage to confuse themselves with it
• theptip 7mo ago
  Ok, here is the risk of being left behind - if we have moderately fast take-off, the 1-2 years required to upskill in AI might mean you find yourself unemployable when your role gets axed. I don’t think folks are taking seriously the possible worlds at the P(0.25) tail of likelihood. You do not get to pick up this stuff “on a timescale of my choosing”, in the worlds where the capability exponential keeps going for another 5-10 years. I’m sure the author simply doesn’t buy that premise, but IMO it’s poor epistemics to refuse to even engage with the very obvious open question of why this time might be different.
  • fatata123 7mo ago
    [dead]
  • SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
    I don't think there's such a thing as a "fast take-off" where human experience with 2026-era LLM coding remains economically relevant.
  • msabalau 7mo ago
    But they have engaged with it, and made an assessment about it's current utility. We have no reason to believe that they won't keep an eye on this. Little to nothing about AI tools so far suggests that that one can't just as easily pick the skills later. Tools that will get "exponentially better" will almost certainly be unrecognizable to someone desperately engaging with them now, for not other reason the sake of "having 1-2 years of experience" Someone might reasonably choose to to bet on the upside. That doesn't imply that everyone else ought to fearfully hedge.
  • duskdozer 7mo ago
    Eh, I'm not super worried. After all, Every six months or so, the latest model changes everything and the former model was complete garbage. It's not just a new model—it's a new paradigm shifting the landscape of agentic development.
  • pianopatrick 7mo ago
    Won't AI getting better also mean AI will be getting easier to learn and use? Feels to me like there are at least one or two more paradigm shifts coming in how AI gets used which will make current tools obsolete. As one example, I think we will eventually get GUI dashboards to manage AI agents which will be easier to use than current CLI tools.
• garyfirestorm 7mo ago
  Counter point. It’s always advantageous to learn and grow as things evolve. This way you have an active role and maybe a say in how it will evolve. And maybe you could contribute towards that evolution (despite poor execution openclaw showed what LLMs could be doing) > There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Not long ago we were ridiculing genZ for not knowing why save icon looks like a floppy disk. Do you want to feel like that in next 5-10 years?
  • marcd35 7mo ago
    I agree with this point. There is absolutely a 'left behind' gap that is under-explored. My last job was a cable technician - making house calls to fix wifi, satellite tv, phone issues. Mostly elderly residents. The majority of them all were computer and phone illiterate. They were slow adopters to the fast-moving technology and many of them did not know how to operate their devices after we (UI/UX/hardware/software engineer 'we') removed them. I wonder if this also has contributed to the elderly lonliness problem - sure its probably mostly related to physical companionship, acceptance of aging, etc, but the world that they knew (in general and the technological world they grew up in) is no longer recognizable.
    • skydhash 7mo ago
      But maybe it doesn’t matter that much to them. I don’t know how to skin a rabbit, but that knowledge could be handy in some situations. But I don’t see myself being in that situation other than accidentally. My mother has a phone, but only use it to call. She has never needed a computer even though I spent my teenage years glued to one. But I have like 1 percent of a skill in cooking.
      • ryandrake 7mo ago
        Exactly. We look at older people and think “oh, look at those poor souls. They don’t know X and Y technologies and they keep doing things the old way! They must feel so left behind.” Nothing is further from the truth. My whole life I’ve lived in neighborhoods full of people 20+ years older than me and not once did I have a neighbor or friend who I thought was overwhelmed with the pace of modern life and upset about how different the world was becoming from what they are used to. This is a trope. People are resilient and adaptive, and as you get older you learn how to embrace new things that actually help and reject new things that don’t. As I get older, I find myself just not caring about a lot of things that younger people care about and not doing a lot of things they do. I don’t use social media, I still pay for things with cash and checks, I don’t understand or care about the Kardashians or reality tv. My phone is 8 years old. I listen to prog rock and new wave music, and I probably couldn’t name a single popular musical performer today (besides Taylor Swift because I have a daughter). I don’t feel even slightly “left behind” or “obsolete.”
• agentultra 7mo ago
  One area where it may end up leaving you behind is if you’re looking for a job right now. There are a lot of companies putting vibe coding in their job requirements. The more companies that do this the harder it will be to find employment if you’re not adopting this tool/workflow.
• logicchains 7mo ago
  Even if it reaches the end state of AGI, e.g. AI that's smarter and more capable than 90% of humans, there'll still be a huge learning curve to using it well, as anyone who's tried managing very smart humans can attest.
• abustamam 7mo ago
  Broadly speaking I agree. But the reality for many SWEs is that if they don't learn new AI tools they'll get let go. It's use AI or be replaced by AI (or, more accurately, be replaced by someone using Ai) for many folks. I think it's a luxury to be able to ignore a trend like AI. crypto was fine to ignore because it didn't really replace anyone, but Ai is a different beast
  • gamerdonkey 7mo ago
    > It's use AI or be replaced by AI I think they want to sell that perception, but the biggest thing the tech execs want in their SWEs is fear. Fear that makes us stay in our jobs, even when raises and bonuses stagnate, because the market is scary with all the "AI layoffs" (which have largely been regular downsizing with the AI label slapped on). Fear that makes us use the LLMs and then put in extra hours when we don't see the 10x productivity gains that they expect. Fear that makes us erode our own skills and become dependent on these gatekeepers to maintain even a base level of productivity. So much of the advertising and discussion around AI is based around fear. It's inevitable. It will take your job. Render you useless. It will render humanity useless. You better get in now, or you'll both lose your job and could end up in a virtual hell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk).
    • abustamam 7mo ago
      I think you're right that it is fear. But it's kind of a self fulfilling fear. Teams are requiring employees to use AI, probably because of this fear. Maybe it isn't directly taking my job, but it is necessary for me to use Ai to keep my job.
      • sarchertech 7mo ago
        You can always hang your shingle and work for clients directly.
        • abustamam 7mo ago
• ozim 7mo ago
  I think it was challenging 2 or 3 years ago. I plunged a year ago and it already was quite easy to use mainstream tools. I could run some local models with Ollama by just installing it. I could use coding assistance in VSCode. Connecting with http API to use AI within applications you build was also easy for local models or cloud. There are loads of BS tools out there of course but I don’t use that many tools.
• isk517 7mo ago
  I've let tech pass me by many times, then the tech that passed me which I was never in a position to use got replaced by the next big tech innovation. I've found that you can climb aboard the train at anytime since everything new is a lot easier to get started on than learning C and having to manually allocate memory.
• spwa4 7mo ago
  This is the central thing that changes in a person with age. When you are born, the only thing you do is pick up new things. Literally nothing else. When you're young, picking up new things is how you improve your social position. It's what you do to even be talked to in the first place. It's what you do to get a girl/boyfriend, or be the best student in class, or to be the best (or worst even) employee at your first job ... Once you have a good social position, or at least one you're happy with, you stop doing this, and you grow ever more irritated at others doing it ... because it's your social position that they're coming after. And they're younger, more motivated and hungrier. More than that, a decent chunk of these people want a better social position, even if that means taking yours.
  • sarchertech 7mo ago
    Sure, but this is mostly irrelevant because software dev is one of the youngest fields. Something like 70% of professional devs are under 35 depending on which survey you look at. And the number of CS graduates exploded over the last decade. The only reason the numbers aren’t even more tilted is because people stopped hiring juniors 2 years ago. But they’re out there, and if there’s a new technology around that makes them vastly more productive than the seniors today, there’s nothing stopping companies from hiring them.
• casey2 7mo ago
  No. It just assumes there is no utility in the underlying tech, someone who believes vaccines don't work could make the same argument. Most people trust Morgan-Stanley when it comes to financial instruments more than some bozo on the internet. You do have to drag stubborn people, kicking and screaming, into the future or they will continue using old tech. The article is framed in the past tense, "someone tried", "the crypto grift was". As if it's not currently swallowing the world. I guess he is so maximally sensible that he self-assess faster than MS and realizes bitcoin just isn't for him every time. He has a strange hyper-specific definition of utility and productivity, (wrote my MSc, had fun) don't count.
• m463 7mo ago
  I don't know, I kind of wonder if this applies to all technologies equally. for example, (dodging the whole full-self-driving controversy) tesla cars have had advanced safety features like traffic aware cruise control and autosteer for over a decade. so, buying into safety early... for other technologies, there's sort of the rugpull effect. The people who get in early enjoy something with little drama vs the late adopters. ask people who bought into sonos early vs late, probably more exampless of this. so getting technology the founders envisioned, vs later enshittified versions.
• sirspacey 7mo ago
  i thought so too. but now we are onboarding project managers in non-tech fields to Claude Code and they are crushing it. on a terminal. vs code. the first thirty min is the hard part, after that the feedback loop kicks in. they ask for what they really want, they get it.
• JKCalhoun 7mo ago
  Some might be getting into AI in order to sell AI. As OpenClaw has shown, there is opportunity in this space to be a trailblazer. There are no doubt companies that are not tech-aligned that someone could help set up local LLMs for… For me though, I'm dabbling in AI because it fascinates me. Bitcoin was like, I don't know, Herbalife? —never interesting to me at all.