7 ms·

Best line: > I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without realizing anything at all. It's hard to say it's not actively happening. And we don'

by apsurd 6mo ago

Best line: > I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without realizing anything at all. It's hard to say it's not actively happening. And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care? (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)

rdevilla 6mo ago
> (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.) I'm taking a break from this industry until the madness blows over. I cannot even, anymore.
- jspash 6mo ago
  With the current direction of this industry, I fear you will come back to something that is both unrecognisable and terrifying.
  - gcheong 6mo ago
    If there is anything left to come back to.
  - usefulcat 6mo ago
    More likely you’ll return to an industry utterly swamped in technical debt.
  - pocksuppet 6mo ago
    You could be the only one producing sane products in an insane world. But you won't get paid for it. The people mandating Claude Code are the people dictating large-scale money flows.
embedding-shape 6mo ago
> (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.) As I haven't been a typical full-time employee in software development for some time, could you possibly just like leak the entire email where this was announced or something? (open invitation to others who could too, if parent cannot) I'm very curious to see how it was announced and what possible reasoning they could have for that. Don't get me wrong, I use agents for lots of coding too, but forcing people to use tools they might not want to use doesn't feel like the right way. I was also allowed to use vim whenever I wanted for most of my career, something that feels more and more rare when speaking with people just starting their careers now.
- apsurd 6mo ago
  The official declaration came about in a team-meeting. We're a tiny startup, 3 full-time eng with the CTO co-founder driving the AI transformation. We have scheduled onboarding meetings to get the entire company finding automation opportunities with specifically Claude (CC, Cowork). For eng specifically, there is "acknowledgement" that we all may have different setups, but we should all be unifying our prompts, strategies, pipelines, Agents, and so... it's CC. I still use Cursor so I'm the only one not on CC; my eye-brow was especially raised. I don't want to be doxxed lol, so ironically I'll be sharing in the sense that on one hand I am unsettled by the mandate, on the other hand, for a tiny startup it's seems the state of the industry, less so company specific. Startups (think they) are in a fight for their life, so the mandate comes from everyone contributing 10x or whatever. The expectation is that agentic coding should 3x/5x/10x your feature output, because that's how we're going to win. I have many thoughts. But I'll focus on that last one: the mandate is literally more features, more code, because it gets us closer to winning. In my small engineering circles, surprisingly, this is like the defacto stance. All things considered, might as well ship more code!
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - blipvert 6mo ago
    I shall wait your collected thoughts. I’ll suggest The Mythical LLM Month as a title.
    - observationist 6mo ago
      How about The Million Dollar Mythos Month Some of these AI trends are starting to look more like gacha game moneysinks than productivity tools.
    - apsurd 6mo ago
      You made my day with this line =P. tbh I have been struggling with the state of software in the agentic era. I'm pro LLM, there's undeniable leverage in its coding abilities. I do want to write this post! I'll start with hopefully this distillation: In the agentic era, if shipping code is a commodity, then why ship more code? we can say this for the entire concept of "build" - we've commoditized building anything software related, i don't understand how this translates to therefore BUILD MORE. So then the more nuanced conversation is that taste and judgement is the leverage. i agree with this. But its hand wavy in that we can't agree on what taste is. and also accelerationists hold true that all can be encoded. more agents. i don't even disagree with this entirely. What I'm missing is that AI-native software engineers are going to brute force their way to PMF, to judgment, taste, enlightenment, consciousness. But why is this a straight line? Just add more agents. add a "designer", a "sales" and "user researcher" agent. just add more agents. You don't know what you don't know, is my retort. It's surreal to me that we're living through the equivalent of the smartest software engineers effectively giddily prompting, with full conviction mind you, "add more pop!" to make their thing better. Just needs more pop!
add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
> And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care? People here are warning about this daily. And outside this tech bubble full of people trying to profit from it, higher percentages of people elsewhere do realize and do care.
- apsurd 6mo ago
  That's a good point. But I also think about the unprecedented adoption of chatGPT. Global mass consumer adoption of all ages, and people giddy about offloading their jobs to chatGPT not connecting the very simple straight line to "you think your boss is going to pay you to ask chatGPT?"
elzbardico 6mo ago
I sometimes see myself writing too much manual code, so I reprompt my work in another directory for claude, and let it do whatever the fuck he wants, because I know for a fact that my company is monitoring claude usage as a metric.
drzaiusx11 6mo ago
Anyone claiming these systems are for the "democratization of software engineering (or any knowledge field)" are simply not grasping the reality at hand. It's not like our corporate leadership is being subtle in any way about their openly stated end goals here. We are simply instructed to continuously burn our enormous piles of "thought tokens" for their machines. The same machines only made possible by the theft of humanity's collective works at unimaginable scales. We must hold up these statistical facsimiles of human work, now rendered by machine, as the inevitable future output of humanity. To do otherwise is the way of the luddites. The gods of unbounded growth, efficiency and productivity have come to demand our sacrifice. Who are we to stand in their way when countless skilled laborers before us have fallen to automation? Our number has been called as it were, and to reject what they demand is to reject "progress" itself. The march continues as it has since before the dawn of industrialization, relentless and indifferent to any and all that are crushed beneath it. I don't know when the last bastion of "inefficiency" will fall, but at some point humanity may collectively grow to regret some forms of automation. Time will tell. There's a certain simplicity and beauty in honing and stewarding a craft towards mastery that automation doesn't provide. I feel this is an innately human desire. Many cultures in the past used to place a great emphasis in this very personal endeavor. Sadly it seems each decade we slowly suppress these basic human needs, too tantalized by Western values of having ever "more" of everything, much to our detriment.

by apsurd 6mo ago

rdevilla 6mo ago

> (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.) I'm taking a break from this industry until the madness blows over. I cannot even, anymore.

jspash 6mo ago
With the current direction of this industry, I fear you will come back to something that is both unrecognisable and terrifying.
- gcheong 6mo ago
  If there is anything left to come back to.
- usefulcat 6mo ago
  More likely you’ll return to an industry utterly swamped in technical debt.
- pocksuppet 6mo ago
  You could be the only one producing sane products in an insane world. But you won't get paid for it. The people mandating Claude Code are the people dictating large-scale money flows.

embedding-shape 6mo ago

> (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.) As I haven't been a typical full-time employee in software development for some time, could you possibly just like leak the entire email where this was announced or something? (open invitation to others who could too, if parent cannot) I'm very curious to see how it was announced and what possible reasoning they could have for that. Don't get me wrong, I use agents for lots of coding too, but forcing people to use tools they might not want to use doesn't feel like the right way. I was also allowed to use vim whenever I wanted for most of my career, something that feels more and more rare when speaking with people just starting their careers now.

apsurd 6mo ago
The official declaration came about in a team-meeting. We're a tiny startup, 3 full-time eng with the CTO co-founder driving the AI transformation. We have scheduled onboarding meetings to get the entire company finding automation opportunities with specifically Claude (CC, Cowork). For eng specifically, there is "acknowledgement" that we all may have different setups, but we should all be unifying our prompts, strategies, pipelines, Agents, and so... it's CC. I still use Cursor so I'm the only one not on CC; my eye-brow was especially raised. I don't want to be doxxed lol, so ironically I'll be sharing in the sense that on one hand I am unsettled by the mandate, on the other hand, for a tiny startup it's seems the state of the industry, less so company specific. Startups (think they) are in a fight for their life, so the mandate comes from everyone contributing 10x or whatever. The expectation is that agentic coding should 3x/5x/10x your feature output, because that's how we're going to win. I have many thoughts. But I'll focus on that last one: the mandate is literally more features, more code, because it gets us closer to winning. In my small engineering circles, surprisingly, this is like the defacto stance. All things considered, might as well ship more code!
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- blipvert 6mo ago
  I shall wait your collected thoughts. I’ll suggest The Mythical LLM Month as a title.
  - observationist 6mo ago
    How about The Million Dollar Mythos Month Some of these AI trends are starting to look more like gacha game moneysinks than productivity tools.
  - apsurd 6mo ago
    You made my day with this line =P. tbh I have been struggling with the state of software in the agentic era. I'm pro LLM, there's undeniable leverage in its coding abilities. I do want to write this post! I'll start with hopefully this distillation: In the agentic era, if shipping code is a commodity, then why ship more code? we can say this for the entire concept of "build" - we've commoditized building anything software related, i don't understand how this translates to therefore BUILD MORE. So then the more nuanced conversation is that taste and judgement is the leverage. i agree with this. But its hand wavy in that we can't agree on what taste is. and also accelerationists hold true that all can be encoded. more agents. i don't even disagree with this entirely. What I'm missing is that AI-native software engineers are going to brute force their way to PMF, to judgment, taste, enlightenment, consciousness. But why is this a straight line? Just add more agents. add a "designer", a "sales" and "user researcher" agent. just add more agents. You don't know what you don't know, is my retort. It's surreal to me that we're living through the equivalent of the smartest software engineers effectively giddily prompting, with full conviction mind you, "add more pop!" to make their thing better. Just needs more pop!

add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago

> And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care? People here are warning about this daily. And outside this tech bubble full of people trying to profit from it, higher percentages of people elsewhere do realize and do care.

apsurd 6mo ago
That's a good point. But I also think about the unprecedented adoption of chatGPT. Global mass consumer adoption of all ages, and people giddy about offloading their jobs to chatGPT not connecting the very simple straight line to "you think your boss is going to pay you to ask chatGPT?"

elzbardico 6mo ago

I sometimes see myself writing too much manual code, so I reprompt my work in another directory for claude, and let it do whatever the fuck he wants, because I know for a fact that my company is monitoring claude usage as a metric.

drzaiusx11 6mo ago

Anyone claiming these systems are for the "democratization of software engineering (or any knowledge field)" are simply not grasping the reality at hand. It's not like our corporate leadership is being subtle in any way about their openly stated end goals here. We are simply instructed to continuously burn our enormous piles of "thought tokens" for their machines. The same machines only made possible by the theft of humanity's collective works at unimaginable scales. We must hold up these statistical facsimiles of human work, now rendered by machine, as the inevitable future output of humanity. To do otherwise is the way of the luddites. The gods of unbounded growth, efficiency and productivity have come to demand our sacrifice. Who are we to stand in their way when countless skilled laborers before us have fallen to automation? Our number has been called as it were, and to reject what they demand is to reject "progress" itself. The march continues as it has since before the dawn of industrialization, relentless and indifferent to any and all that are crushed beneath it. I don't know when the last bastion of "inefficiency" will fall, but at some point humanity may collectively grow to regret some forms of automation. Time will tell. There's a certain simplicity and beauty in honing and stewarding a craft towards mastery that automation doesn't provide. I feel this is an innately human desire. Many cultures in the past used to place a great emphasis in this very personal endeavor. Sadly it seems each decade we slowly suppress these basic human needs, too tantalized by Western values of having ever "more" of everything, much to our detriment.