4 ms·

Seems like the upside is that it makes the job way easier? What am I missing?

cj 6mo ago
It seems like a lot of developers have philosophical disagreements with the direction of AI combined with fear of change and fear that AI makes them less competitive in the job market. I see people regularly boycotting or rejecting AI for a variation of these reasons, and it feels a lot like self-sabotage.
- renegade-otter 6mo ago
  My biggest challenge is to look productive while still having some time and focus left to be a good expert. After all - we are just code reviewers now, and you are a no good reviewer if you never get any shovel time yourself. The juniors are eliminated and the seniors indulge in cognitive surrender because it feels good.
zbentley 6mo ago
What do you do all day at your job? Serious question. I think the reason that there's such a disconnect among AI-for-work users about whether it's a panacea or bullshit accelerator is that different software developers have massively different duties and conceptions about what their job is or should be.
- sanderjd 6mo ago
  1. Communicate with people about what to build, fix, or improve, and about our progress with current ongoing work. 2. Figure out what components already exist and what new things we need to build and how things should be integrated. 3. Actually build the things according to what was figured out in the previous step. 4. Review my own work and other people's work. 5. Release things and make sure they work. 6. Respond to emergent issues in things that have been released. I find the current generation of AI tooling to be very useful for all of these tasks. Less so for task #1 than the others. What are other people doing that is different?
sdevonoes 6mo ago
Im your CEO. I see you and the rest of your peers have doubled your productivity in the last 2 months because of claude. Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit. Now of course, you may think you are such a good engineer that companies will kill for you… perhaps that’s true now, but its not true for 90% of the engineers out there. And as the pool of engineers gets reduced, the chances of you being not as good as you thought go up. So the real question is: can you (we all) still make a good living by not using llms. You know support each other and fuck the higher ups? No, we cant. Wwe are full of ourselves, full of elitism (this is HN). We are rational folks, we believe in numbers, in data; we know what we deserve. fuck the rest. The ones who win are the higher ups, of course, not us.
- turblety 6mo ago
  > Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit. Is this a thing? Are there companies out there that don't want to go faster?
  - Andrex 6mo ago
    The market can sneeze and suddenly there's a wave of hiring freezes, sounds plausible to me.
- saxelsen 6mo ago
  In reality, I think it's more likely that the lay-offs will be when the marginal rate of growth slows down. Once executives see that growth doesn't change much when hiring, they stop hiring, and once they see that growth doesn't decrease much when firing, they start firing. There's still an opportunity for engineers to eat their bosses lunch and just start their own company. It's never been easier to start a lower cost competitor. Employment isn't a social law of nature: it's a transaction of money for "units of work", just like the business might have with other vendors. Governments should be making it easier to become a vendor.
- koonsolo 6mo ago
recursive 6mo ago
Some of us still haven't figured out how to hold it right. So on average it doesn't make anything easier. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just fails. Net effort change for me is about a wash. I know this is different from most peoples' experience, and I don't know I suck at using it. But I'm not generally inclined to use it much as a result.
- sanderjd 6mo ago
  Yep I understand this. But what I don't understand is, "wow this is incredibly useful! ... but I'm not gonna use it".
  - recursive 6mo ago
    It's not actually useful for me. But I still use it anyway.
    - sanderjd 6mo ago
      The total opposite thing :)
      - recursive 6mo ago
        Oh right. Along those lines sometimes I do long hand multiplication or division instead of using a calculator. I think it's a valuable skill. If I don't do it, I'll probably forget how.
        sanderjd 6mo ago
        Yep! But if I were doing my job as an accountant, I would not spend time doing any of that work using long hand division, I would use a spreadsheet. To me, it's a professionalism thing. If I'm doing a job, I should use the best tool (for me) for that job. (edit: I'm absolutely not suggesting that you are unprofessional! It sounds like AI tools are not the best tool for the job, for you. But they are for me, at the moment.) If I'm doing a hobby or personal development in general, then I can use whatever tools I want for that. It's interesting though, for a long time I said that if I were going to do a personal programming project I was excited about, I would write all the code by hand, because I do really miss doing that, and I also worry about forgetting how to. But now I'm not so sure. I find my daydreaming about personal projects to be a lot more focused on the outcome than the process, lately. More like "wow, I could do so much in an hour or two a day now! think of the possibilities!" than an excitement about writing code and creating pleasant abstractions.
SiempreViernes 6mo ago
If it really does make your job easier that's great for you, but if it isn't making you more profitable then the company as a whole is wasting money and some people will have to go until your job is about as stressful as before.
- sanderjd 6mo ago
  I think if companies feel that AI usage turns out to be wasting money, with negative ROI, then certainly nobody has anything to worry about here! Companies will definitely turn off this spigot the moment they think it's a net negative to their bottom line. The revealed preference is very far in the opposite direction at the moment.

cj 6mo ago

It seems like a lot of developers have philosophical disagreements with the direction of AI combined with fear of change and fear that AI makes them less competitive in the job market. I see people regularly boycotting or rejecting AI for a variation of these reasons, and it feels a lot like self-sabotage.

renegade-otter 6mo ago
My biggest challenge is to look productive while still having some time and focus left to be a good expert. After all - we are just code reviewers now, and you are a no good reviewer if you never get any shovel time yourself. The juniors are eliminated and the seniors indulge in cognitive surrender because it feels good.

zbentley 6mo ago

What do you do all day at your job? Serious question. I think the reason that there's such a disconnect among AI-for-work users about whether it's a panacea or bullshit accelerator is that different software developers have massively different duties and conceptions about what their job is or should be.

sanderjd 6mo ago
1. Communicate with people about what to build, fix, or improve, and about our progress with current ongoing work. 2. Figure out what components already exist and what new things we need to build and how things should be integrated. 3. Actually build the things according to what was figured out in the previous step. 4. Review my own work and other people's work. 5. Release things and make sure they work. 6. Respond to emergent issues in things that have been released. I find the current generation of AI tooling to be very useful for all of these tasks. Less so for task #1 than the others. What are other people doing that is different?

sdevonoes 6mo ago

Im your CEO. I see you and the rest of your peers have doubled your productivity in the last 2 months because of claude. Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit. Now of course, you may think you are such a good engineer that companies will kill for you… perhaps that’s true now, but its not true for 90% of the engineers out there. And as the pool of engineers gets reduced, the chances of you being not as good as you thought go up. So the real question is: can you (we all) still make a good living by not using llms. You know support each other and fuck the higher ups? No, we cant. Wwe are full of ourselves, full of elitism (this is HN). We are rational folks, we believe in numbers, in data; we know what we deserve. fuck the rest. The ones who win are the higher ups, of course, not us.

turblety 6mo ago
> Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit. Is this a thing? Are there companies out there that don't want to go faster?
- Andrex 6mo ago
  The market can sneeze and suddenly there's a wave of hiring freezes, sounds plausible to me.
saxelsen 6mo ago
In reality, I think it's more likely that the lay-offs will be when the marginal rate of growth slows down. Once executives see that growth doesn't change much when hiring, they stop hiring, and once they see that growth doesn't decrease much when firing, they start firing. There's still an opportunity for engineers to eat their bosses lunch and just start their own company. It's never been easier to start a lower cost competitor. Employment isn't a social law of nature: it's a transaction of money for "units of work", just like the business might have with other vendors. Governments should be making it easier to become a vendor.
koonsolo 6mo ago

recursive 6mo ago

Some of us still haven't figured out how to hold it right. So on average it doesn't make anything easier. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just fails. Net effort change for me is about a wash. I know this is different from most peoples' experience, and I don't know I suck at using it. But I'm not generally inclined to use it much as a result.

sanderjd 6mo ago
Yep I understand this. But what I don't understand is, "wow this is incredibly useful! ... but I'm not gonna use it".
- recursive 6mo ago
  It's not actually useful for me. But I still use it anyway.
  - sanderjd 6mo ago
    The total opposite thing :)
    - recursive 6mo ago
      Oh right. Along those lines sometimes I do long hand multiplication or division instead of using a calculator. I think it's a valuable skill. If I don't do it, I'll probably forget how.
      - sanderjd 6mo ago
        Yep! But if I were doing my job as an accountant, I would not spend time doing any of that work using long hand division, I would use a spreadsheet. To me, it's a professionalism thing. If I'm doing a job, I should use the best tool (for me) for that job. (edit: I'm absolutely not suggesting that you are unprofessional! It sounds like AI tools are not the best tool for the job, for you. But they are for me, at the moment.) If I'm doing a hobby or personal development in general, then I can use whatever tools I want for that. It's interesting though, for a long time I said that if I were going to do a personal programming project I was excited about, I would write all the code by hand, because I do really miss doing that, and I also worry about forgetting how to. But now I'm not so sure. I find my daydreaming about personal projects to be a lot more focused on the outcome than the process, lately. More like "wow, I could do so much in an hour or two a day now! think of the possibilities!" than an excitement about writing code and creating pleasant abstractions.

SiempreViernes 6mo ago

If it really does make your job easier that's great for you, but if it isn't making you more profitable then the company as a whole is wasting money and some people will have to go until your job is about as stressful as before.

sanderjd 6mo ago
I think if companies feel that AI usage turns out to be wasting money, with negative ROI, then certainly nobody has anything to worry about here! Companies will definitely turn off this spigot the moment they think it's a net negative to their bottom line. The revealed preference is very far in the opposite direction at the moment.