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> One engineer at NVIDIA who had early access to the model went as far as to say: "Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I've had a limb amputated.” This quote i
by _alternator_ 6mo ago
> One engineer at NVIDIA who had early access to the model went as far as to say: "Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I've had a limb amputated.”
This quote is more sinister than I think was intended; it likely applies to all frontier coding models. As they get better, we quickly come to rely on them for coding. It's like playing a game on God Mode. Engineers become dependent; it's truly addictive.
This matches my own experience and unease with these tools. I don't really have the patience to write code anymore because I can one shot it with frontier models 10x faster. My role has shifted, and while it's awesome to get so much working so quickly, the fact is, when the tokens run out, I'm basically done working.
It's literally higher leverage for me to go for a walk if Claude goes down than to write code because if I come back refreshed and Claude is working an hour later then I'll make more progress than mentally wearing myself out reading a bunch of LLM generated code trying to figure out how to solve the problem manually.
Anyway, it continues to make me uneasy, is all I'm saying.
- alansaber 6mo agoThat's the path we've been going down for a few years now. The current hedge is that frontier labs are actively competing to win users. The backup hedge is that open source LLMs can provide cheap compute. There will always be economical access to LLMs, but the provider with the best models will be able to charge basically whatever they want and still have buyers.
- trvz 6mo agoOpen source LLMs aren’t about cost foremost, but stability.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- simianwords 6mo agoeh this kind of FUD needs to stop because it is kind of normal and expected and in fact good to have relation like this with technology.
- _alternator_ 6mo agoI would agree that taking a walk is a good thing to do when your tools go down, and in some ways it's similar to what we would do if the power or wifi were cut off. So, yes, it's just another technology we're coming to rely on in a very deep way. The whiplash is real, though, and it feels like it should be pointed out that this dependency we are taking on has downsides.
- deadbabe 6mo agoGiven that it’s so easy, would you still do this same job if paid half as much?
- paulryanrogers 6mo agoJobs will likely pay less as more people are enabled to create, especially if they don't need to be able to look under the hood
- Jeff_Brown 6mo agoIt's really not clear. We might all become unemployable. But as coders become more powerful, they can do more, which makes them more valuable, if they or the businesses empluying them can invent work to do. If all we can do is compete for the same fixed amount of work, though, it does look bleak.
- _alternator_ 6mo agoNo, I wouldn't. But most people won't have that choice; it doesn't work that way.
- deadbabe 6mo agoCompanies could fire expensive engineers then just hire cheaper ones boosted with AI agents.
- Aeolun 6mo agoWell, I wouldn’t have a different job that would pay me more… so yes?
- jmole 6mo agoThe meta here is to use LLMs to make things simpler and easier, not to make things harder. Turning tokens into a well-groomed and maintainable codebase is what you want to do, not "one shot prompt every new problem I come across".
- globular-toast 6mo agoHave you managed to do this? I find it takes as long to keep it "on the rails" as just doing it myself. And I'd rather spend my time concentrating in the zone than keeping an eye on a wayward child.
- fleebee 6mo agoI suspect the productivity hack is to embrace permissive parenting. As far as I can tell, to leverage LLMs most effectively you need to run an agent in YOLO mode in a sandbox. Naturally, you probably won't end up reviewing much of the produced code, but hey—you reached 10x development speed. If you truly do your due diligence and ensure that the code works as intended and understand it, we're talking about a totally different ballpark of productivity increase/decrease.
- dannyw 6mo agoYou’re still the one that’s controlling the model though and steering it with your expertise. At least that’s what I tell myself at night :) I haven’t really thought about this before, but you’re right, it feels a bit uneasy for me too.
- topspin 6mo ago> You’re still the one that’s controlling the model though We have seen ample evidence that this is not the case. When load gets too high, models get dumber, silently. When the Powers That Be get scared, models get restricted to some chosen few. We are leading ourselves into a dark place: this unease, which I share, is justified.
- 0x1ceb00da 6mo agoThe same can be said of the search engines.
- wiseowise 6mo ago> It's literally higher leverage for me to go for a walk Touching grass while you're outside might yield highest leverage.
- tshaddox 6mo agoAssuming that local models are able to stay within some reasonably fixed capability delta of the cutting edge hosted models (say, 12 months behind), and assuming that local computing hardware stays relatively accessible, the only risk is that you'll lose that bit of capability if the hosted models disappear or get too expensive. Note that neither of these assumptions are obviously true, at least to me. But I can hope!
- i_love_retros 6mo agoIt makes me uneasy because my role now, which is prompting copilot, isn't worth my salary.
- some-guy 6mo agoI disagree. The amount of slop I need to code review has only increased, and the quality of the models doesn’t seem to be helping. It still takes a good engineer to filter out what is slop and what isn’t. Ultimately that human problem will still require somebody to say no.
- i_love_retros 6mo agoIs anyone really reviewing code anymore though? It sounds like you are, but where I work its pretty much just scan the PR as a symbolic gesture and then hit approve. There's too much to review, to frequently.
- some-guy 6mo agoI'm in a large enterprise context--you have to use human reviewers if you don't want to end up like Github's status page. So much context exists outside of the code that the bots are either not provided or are far too large of contexts for current windows.
- phist_mcgee 6mo agoParable of the mechanic who charges $5k to hit a machine on the side once with a hammer to get it working. $5 for the hammer, $4995 for the knowledge of where to hit the machine etc etc.
- jstummbillig 6mo ago> This quote is more sinister than I think was intended; it likely applies to all frontier coding models. As they get better, we quickly come to rely on them for coding. It's like playing a game on God Mode. Engineers become dependent; it's truly addictive. What's the worst potential outcome, assuming that all models get better, more efficient and more abundant (which seems to be the current trend)? The goal of engineering has always been to build better things, not to make it harder.
- _alternator_ 6mo agoWorst case? I dunno, maybe the world's oldest profession becomes the world's only profession? Something along those lines.
- FeteCommuniste 6mo ago> the world's oldest profession becomes the world's only profession Until the sexbots come out the other side of the uncanny valley, that is.
- shellwizard 6mo agoDeath by snu snu
- Jtarii 6mo ago>What's the worst potential outcome, assuming that all models get better, more efficient and more abundant Complexity steadily rises, unencumbered by the natural limit of human understanding, until technological collapse, either by slow decay or major systems going down with increasing frequency.
- motoxpro 6mo agowhy would the systems go down if the models are better at the humans at finding bugs. Playing a bit of devils advocate here, but why would the models be worse at handling the complexity if you assume they will get better and better. All software has bugs already.
- Alex_L_Wood 6mo agoWell, they obviously are going to say that, they have vested interest in OpenAI and thus Nvidia stock price growing. Also, I honestly can’t believe the 10x mantra is being still repeated.
- dandaka 6mo agoWriting code is 10-100x faster, doing actual product engineering work is nowhere near that multipliers — no conflict!
- giwook 6mo agoReviewing code is slower now though because you didn't write the code in the first place so you're basically reviewing someone else's PR. And now it's like a 3000 line PR in an hour or two instead of every couple weeks.
- 32df 6mo agoArent most people just almost skipping this step entirely? How else can you end up in a net benefit situation? Reviewing code is more intense than writing/reviewing simultaneously.
- mwwaters 6mo agoYeah, that’s the issue. There is a lot of boilerplate or I can ask for ideas, but outside of boilerplate the review step make generation seemingly worse.
- dandaka 6mo ago1/ Reviewing code can't be more intense than writing. I can't understand where this statement comes from! If that would be true, why would senior developers review code of junior, instead of writing themselves from scratch? 2/ I think we need to build more efficient ways to 'QA code' instead of 'read with eyes' review process. Example — my agents are writing a lot of tests and review each other.
- 6mo ago
- littlestymaar 6mo agoThat's why local models are important. Of course they aren't alternative to the current frontier model, and as such you cannot easily jump from the later to the former, but they aren't that far behind either, for coding Qwen3.5-122B is comparable to what Sonnet was less than a year ago. So assuming the trend continues, if you can stop following the latest release and stick with what you're already using for 6 or 9 months, you'll be able to liberate yourself from the dependency to a Cloud provider. Personally I think the freedom is worth it.
- David_Mendoza 6mo agoThe cloud dependency problem goes deeper than the model layer though. Even if you run inference locally, your digital identity — your context, your applications, your behavioral history, is still custodied by whoever controls your OS. Local models solve one layer of the dependency stack, but the custody assumption underneath it remains intact. That's the harder problem.
- sharts 6mo agoOne might argue that it’s not too too different from higher level abstractions when using libraries. You get things done faster, write less code, library handles some internal state/memory management for you. Would one be uneasy about calling a library to do stuff than manually messing around with pointers and malloc()? For some, yes. For others, it’s a bit freeing as you can do more high-level architecture without getting mired and context switched from low level nuances.
- ofjcihen 6mo agoI see this comparison made constantly and for me it misses the mark. When you use abstractions you are still deterministically creating something you understand in depth with individual pieces you understand. When you vibe something you understand only the prompt that started it and whether or not it spits out what you were expecting. Hence feeling lost when you suddenly lose access to frontier models and take a look at your code for the first time. I’m not saying that’s necessarily always bad, just that the abstraction argument is wrong.
- moritonal 6mo agoI think it's more: when I don't have access to a compiler I am useless. It's better to go for a walk than learn assembly. AI agents turn our high-level language into code, with various hints, much like the compiler.
- noosphr 6mo agoIf your compiler produced working executable 20% of the time this would be an apt comparison.
- ofjcihen 6mo agoStill misses the mark. You aren’t useless in the same way because you are still in control of reasoning about the exact code even if you never actually write it.
- professoretc 6mo ago
- __alexs 6mo agoI feel like most engineers I talk to still haven't realised what this is going to mean for the industry. The power loom for coding is here. Our skills still matter, but differently.
- rglullis 6mo ago> power loom When the power loom came around, what happened with most seamtresses? Did they move on to become fashion designers, materials engineers to create new fabrics, chemists to create new color dyes, or did they simply retire or were driven out of the workforce?
- __alexs 6mo agoThere were riots and many people died. Many people lost their jobs. I didn't say this is good but it is happening. As individuals we should act to protect ourselves from these changes. That might mean joining a union and trying to influence how AI is adopted where you work. It might mean changing which if your skills you lean on most. But just whining about AI is bad is how you end up like those seamstresses.
- rglullis 6mo ago> Many people lost their jobs. On the other hand, a lot of those jobs were offshored to places where labor is cheaper. It would be interesting to compare how many people work in the textile industry in Bangladesh today compared to the US 50 years ago. > joining a union and trying to influence how AI is adopted where you work. Did the strong unions for car manufacturers in Detroit protected the long term stability of the profession? Did it ensure that the Rust belt was still a thriving economic area? > Just whining about AI is bad I'm not whining. I just think that we are witnessing the end of "knowledge workers" and a further compression of the middle class. Given that I'm smack in the middle of my economically active years (turning 45 this year), I am trying to figure out where this puck is going and whether I will be fast enough to skate there to catch it.
- 6mo ago
- keybored 6mo agoHelp. They’re constantly trying to make me try crack cocaine on the front page.
- HasKqi 6mo agoThis engineer had their brain amputated once they started using AI. All the AI-addicted can do is tinker with the AI computer game and feel "productive". They could as well play Magic The Gathering.
- davmar 6mo agoi wonder if this is how engineers felt when the first electronic calculators came out and engineers stopped doing math by hand. did we feel uneasy that a new generation of builders didn't have to solve equations by hand because a calculator could do them? i'm not sure it's the same analogy but in some ways it holds.
- hapticmonkey 6mo agoThe analogy would hold if there were 2 or 3 calculator companies and all your calculations had to be sent to them. If local models get good enough, I think it’s a very different scenario than engineers all over the world relying on central entities which have their own motives.
- scottyah 6mo agogoogle/gemma-4-31B-it is honestly "good enough". It requires more than your current laptop for now, but it's not remotely inaccessible (especially if you're a SWE in the US)
- anikom15 6mo agoI think calculator is the wrong analogy. Go further back before even mainframes, when their were just a handful of purpose-built computers.
- bwhiting2356 6mo agoYou are now a manager. If your minions are out sick, project is delayed, not the end of the world.
- ransom1538 6mo ago"when the tokens run out, I'm basically done working." Oh stop the drama. Open source models can handle 99% of your questions.
- konfusinomicon 6mo agosoooooo about Claude going down. we're gonna need you to sign in on Saturday and make up for lost time or unfortunately we're going to have to deduct the time lost from your paycheck. and as an aside your TPS reports have been sub-par as of late..is everything OK?
- noosphr 6mo agoLLMs upend a few centuries of labor theory. The current market is predicated on the assumption that labor is atomic and has little bargaining power (minus unions). While capital has huge bargaining power and can effectively put whatever price it wants on labor (in markets where labor is plentiful, which is most of them). What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)? Anyone not using in house models is signing up to find out.
- mikestorrent 6mo agoI am still trying to figure out the business model of open weights. Like... it's wonderful that there are open LLMs, super happy about it, good for everyone, but why are there these? What is the advantage to their companies to release them?
- noosphr 6mo agoThe majority are released by socialists, and by socialist I mean the People's Republic of China. Which everyone seems to forget is a socialist country working towards world communism. They are a prestige propaganda tool on par with the space race. On top of that they insert a subtle pro-socialist bias in everything they touch. Ask deepseek about the US economic system for a blatant example. Now think what something as innocent seeming as the qwen retrieval models are doing in the background of every request.
- Melatonic 6mo agoIs China even really communist? If anything they seem to be fairly on the Capitalist side but just a bit opposite on the spectrum of the US. And much more authoritarian
- nemomarx 6mo agoThe usual thing to say is state capitalist but honestly they do keep a market around too. A little hybrid of everything, I guess? Just with the state ready to jump in and intervene if anything happens they don't like.
- Melatonic 6mo agoSuspect it will be like turn based directions for driving - soon we will have a whole group of people who can barely operate a vehicle without it
- rebolek 6mo agoHave a pet project never touched by LLM. Once the tokens run out, go back to it and flourish it like your secret garden. It will move slowly but it will keep your sanity and your ability to review LLM code.
- therealdkz 6mo ago[dead]
- eitally 6mo agoI have found something similar. I am easily distractible and if I don't have a written task backlog in front of me at all times, I find that when Claude is spinning I'll stop being productive. This is disconcerting for a number of reasons. Overall, I think training young people & new hires on agentic workflows -- and how to use agentic "human augmentation" productivity systems is critical. If it doesn't happen, that same couple of classes that lost academic progress during covid are going to suffer a double-whammy of being unprepared for workplace expectations. Fwiw, I haven't spoken with any management-level colleague in the past 9 months who hasn't noted that asking about AI-comfort & usage is a key interview topic. For any role type, business or technical.
- yoda7marinated 6mo agoCould you elaborate on your last point please? What level of AI comfort are hiring managers looking for? And what tends to be a red flag?
- llbbdd 6mo agoThe last job I got (couple months ago), the main technical interview was a bring-your-own-tools pair programming style interview, AI included, where they gave me a repo and a README detailing some desired features to add and bugs to fix. I didn't write a single line of code myself; I talked through my thought process and asked questions about what to consider from a technical and product perspective, while steering Claude through breaking the tasks into independent plans, reviewing the plans, coaching it to add specific tests, reviewing and iterating the tests, and steering it while it wrote the code. I got an offer the next morning. Apparently at least one of the other candidates just tried to get Claude to 1-shot the whole thing, which went off the rails, and left him unable to make progress. Based on my sample size of 1, the expectation right now is absolutely that you can leverage these tools to speed up your workflow, but if you try to offload the entire thing to a single hands-off prompt it leaves them justifiably wondering why they should hire you to do something they can do themselves.
- chrismarlow9 6mo agoI use local models on a Mac mini for most things and fall back to the hosted ones when they can't get the job done. Of course you have to break the work into smaller pieces yourself that a local model can understand. One good side effect of this is that you end up actually learning the code and how it's structured.
- thinkthatover 6mo agowhat size models are you using? this sounds like a good idea
- iugtmkbdfil834 6mo agoDunno man. Yesterday I played with Qwen3.6-27B ( 128gb to play with though so 100k context set ) and I think right now the main benefit of hosted models is context, frontier models and.. my stuff is already there.
- matheusmoreira 6mo agoIt's very addictive indeed. After I subscribed to Claude, I've been on a sort of hypomanic state where I just want to do stuff constantly. It essentially cured my ADHD. My ability to execute things and bring ideas to fruition skyrocketed. It feels good but I'm genuinely afraid I'll crash and burn once they rug pull the subscriptions. And I'm being very cautious. I'm not vibecoding entire startups from scratch, I'm manually reviewing and editing everything the AI is outputting. I still got completely hooked on building things with Claude.
- jnpnj 6mo agoWho else is trying to leverage the situation so that they don't dig their own grave too fast ? - I often don't ask the LLM for precompiled answers, i ask for a standalone cli / tool - I often ask how it reached its conclusions, so I can extend my own perspective - I often ask to describe it's own metadata level categorization too I'm trying to use it to pivot and improve my own problem solving skills, especially for large code base where the difficulty is not conceptual but more reference-graph size
- ofjcihen 6mo agoThis is absolutely the proper way to do things. People either being forced to speed-code by KPIs or without the desire to understand what they’re making are missing out on how quickly you can learn and refine using LLMs
- quadrifoliate 6mo agoI do this sort of stuff too, but more because I have a fundamental mistrust of closed source anything. I don't like opaque binary firmware blobs, and I certainly don't like opaque answer machines, however smart they may be. The only LLM I would feel comfortable truly trusting is one whose training data, training code, and harness is all open source. I do not mind paying for the costs of someone hosting this model for me.
- goosejuice 6mo ago> than mentally wearing myself out reading a bunch of LLM generated code trying to figure out how to solve the problem manually. That's probably a bad sign. Skills will atrophy, but we should be building systems that are still easy to understand.
- epolanski 6mo agoI actually don't mind the coding part, but the information digging across the project is definitely by orders of magnitude slower if I do it on my own.
- cco 6mo agoWill the foundation for a skyscraper ever be dug with shovels again?
- gip 6mo agoTotally. That is why it is key important to have open source and sovereign models that will be accessible to all and always. At the end of the day, all these closed models are being built by companies that pumped all the knowledge from the internet without giving much back. But competition and open source will make sure most of the value return to the most of the people.
- Bridged7756 6mo agoNot sure what you're doing then, or what kind of jobs you all work in where you can or do just brainlessly prompt LLMs. Don't you review the code? Don't you know what you want to do before you begin? This is such a non issue. Baffling that any engineer is just opening PRs with unreviewed LLM slop.
- throwatdem12311 6mo agoThe demand for slop vastly outpaces any human’s ability to review code correctly. Don’t want to do ship unreviewed slop? They’ll fire you and find someone who will.
- lumost 6mo agoOut of curiousity why do you not refill tokens in this case? When I'm actively working on a project I'm prone to spending a few hundred dollars per day or a few thousand during the initial buildout of a new module etc.
- nimchimpsky 6mo ago[dead]
- neya 6mo agoYou are 100% right to be cautious about this. That's why as stupid as it sounds, I've purposely made my workflow with AI full of friction: 1. I only have ONE SOTA model integrated into the IDE (I am mostly on Elixir, so I use Gemini). I ensure I use this sparingly for issues I don't really have time to invest or are basically rabbit holes eg. Anything to do with Javascript or its ecosystem). My job is mostly on the backend anyway. 2. For actual backend architecture. I always do the high level architecture myself. Eg. DDD. Then I literally open up gemini.google.com or claude.ai on the browser, copy paste existing code base into the code base, physically leavey chair to go make coffee or a quick snack. This forces me to mentally process that using AI is a chore. Previously, I was on tight Codex integration and leaving the licensing fears aside, it became too good in writing Elixir code that really stopped me from "thinking" aka using my brain. It felt good for the first few weeks but I later realised the dependence it created. So I said fuck it, and completely cancelled my subscription because it was too good at my job.I believe this is the only way that we won't end up like in Wall-E sitting infront of giant screens just becoming mere blobs of flesh.
- websap 6mo agoWait what? You don’t use the model to investigate new areas of the code you are unfamiliar with, because you can’t trust the model? How freaking bad is Gemini and internal tooling at Google? With Claude code, or codex, I am able to build enough of an understanding of dependencies like the front end, or data jobs, that I can make meaningful contributions that are worth a review from another human (code review). You have up obviously explore the code, one prompt isn’t enough, but limiting yourself is an odd choice.
- neya 6mo agoThe lack of trust isn't because of its abilities. The lack of trust is because OpenAI publicly suggested publicly about licensing our code bases. They hinted at a rug pull along the lines of "if you use our generated code, we would like to get a % of revenue you make from it" As for Claude - as mentioned I do use it. But, I remember they use your code for training their models. I am not ok with this. We just have different priorities.
- sigil 6mo ago"Every augmentation is also an amputation." – McLuhan https://driverlesscrocodile.com/technology/neal-stephenson-on-augmentation-as-amputation/ https://driverlesscrocodile.com/technology/neal-stephenson-o...
- singingtoday 6mo agoVery well put, and it mirrors my own thoughts.
- linzhangrun 6mo ago[dead]
- drusepth 6mo ago> It's literally higher leverage for me to go for a walk if Claude goes down than to write code because if I come back refreshed and Claude is working an hour later then I'll make more progress than mentally wearing myself out reading a bunch of LLM generated code trying to figure out how to solve the problem manually. Taking more breaks and "not working" during the work day sounds like something we should probably be striving to work towards more as a society.
- bamboozled 6mo agoThis was always the undelivered promise of "tech" in my opinion. I remember seeing the Apple advertisement from the 80s (??) when a guy gets a computer and then basically spends his afternoon chilling. Some how I've found myself living in a fairly rural place, and while farming can be hard, I don't want to downplay the effort of it, the type of farming people do around me is fairly chill / carefree. They work hard but they finish at 3pm and log off and don't think about work. Much o my career is just getting crushed by long hours, tight deadlines, and missing out on events because even though my job has always been automation focused, there is just so much to automate.
- andai 6mo agoA while ago I was at the supermarket. I suddenly became curious about some fact, and reached into my pocket to Google it. I found my pocket empty, and the specific pain I felt in that moment was the feeling of not being able to remember something. I thought it was interesting, because in this case, I was trying to "remember" something I had never learned before -- by fetching it from my second brain (hypertext). L1 cache miss, L2 missing.
- Dban1 6mo agoCyberpunk 2026
- Mauneam 6mo agoYou are that guy in early 1900s who would rather ride a horse than get in a car because cars "continued to make him uneasy."
- William_BB 6mo ago> I'll make more progress than mentally wearing myself out reading a bunch of LLM generated code trying to figure out how to solve the problem manually. I feel sorry for whoever has to work on that codebase. This is the literal definition of tech debt.
- LEDThereBeLight 6mo agoYou’re still living in the past. It will be an LLM working on it in the future.
- William_BB 6mo agoyeah. In the future when? 2, 3, 5 years from now on? Do you think current LLMs don't get confused by shitty code? That code they're writing now will need fixing tomorrow, not 5 years later.
- piokoch 6mo agoSoon, very soon, AI tools providers will figure that out. And rise prices accordingly.