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Like six months ago we got a presentation from an AWS guy on the AI tooling available and how it fit with our particular use cases. At one point seemingly out
by MrCharismatist 5mo ago
Like six months ago we got a presentation from an AWS guy on the AI tooling available and how it fit with our particular use cases.
At one point seemingly out of nowhere he pointed out on his screen share "Look at how many tokens I've used this month. I run so much Opus." It was a number that was offensively large.
I remember thinking "That's a really odd flex, this crap is so expensive the fact that you use so much should be a red flag"
He demonstrated a number of Claude Code use cases he had to manage and tweak AWS infrastructure that made me, the old greybeard sysadmin older than the internet think "You've used AI to do something that was a single command."
So this story makes sense. They were being encouraged to just blast away at it six plus months ago.
- funimpoded 5mo agoI notice a lot of Cursor's suggestions are just stuff a linter should auto-fix. But if you hit "tab" it'll claim that as an AI-edited line, LOL. (A lot of the rest of it is stuff I could already have been doing just as fast if I'd ever bothered to learn to use multiple cursors, learned vim navigation, or set up some macros—I never did because my getting-code-on-the-screen speed without those has never been slow enough to hold anything up, in practice)
- jjice 5mo agoCursor absolutely tries to maximize what they claim is "AI-edited" and it's nonsense a lot of the time. If it writes a function and then I got in and edit that function, it claims my edits _and_ any net-new lines I add above or below the function.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoSo their diff mechanism is poorly labeled (or purposely?) then.
- pwillia7 5mo agoyou don't use vim/emacs for the productivity. It's a lifestyle decision
- throwway120385 5mo agoI think you'll find that a lot of big investment companies are buried to the hilt in a lot of tech companies and also OpenAI and Anthropic. So you can do the math on where the directive is coming from and why it's not particularly careful or measured.
- Our_Benefactors 5mo ago> You've used AI to do something that was a single command Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!
- malfist 5mo agoIs it? If the LLMs change broke something do you know enough to fix it?
- Our_Benefactors 5mo agoThe same question can be applied to work without AI, so this isn’t a meaningful criticism
- eikenberry 5mo agoIn one case you are using tools you understand, in the other you aren't. Seem different to me.
- miyoji 5mo agoIt's also several hundred times more expensive.
- Our_Benefactors 5mo agoFalse! Labor is the most expensive input in creating software, not joules of energy. Using AI is far far cheaper than expecting workers to synthesize all knowledge themselves.
- miyoji 5mo agoBoth workflows involve typing a very small number of characters and should take under 30 seconds. There's no difference in labor cost. However, the compute and energy costs of the tokens to solve the problem vs the tool call will be orders of magnitude in difference, even for trivial stuff like grepping. It gets worse as the problem gets more complicated and the tools more specialized.
- mrbungie 5mo agoI still don't know how to reconcile these reports with what other people say about GenAI-agentic assisted engineering being the only way of working nowadays, especially in startups. Probably there is no dichotomy going on and it depends on multiple factors, but it seems so weird to see reports that are so different between each other.
- wahnfrieden 5mo agoWage workers are evaluated on behaviors, founders are evaluated on growth and revenue. Of course usage patterns and outcomes will be different
- binary0010 5mo agoIt's not required for startups. But if you are building trashy, brittle products and your main metric is speed to market, and have the expectation of high failure chances (e.g. most yc startup batches) - then yes you have to do agentic eng. If you are making extremely specific, high quality products over a long time window and your founders are deeply experienced in that field of engineering, then no, you don't need agentic engineering and probably want very little llm code in general (outside of some boilerplate, internal toolings, etc).
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoI think GenAI-agentic assisted engineering is the only way of working nowadays, and it's the only way I personally have worked for months. I still think that an outright majority of presentations on AI tooling I've seen have been in the nonsensical "Look how many tokens I can burn" genre. Had to sit through one guy recently who explained why you need a complex agentic team with 6 different roles in order to ask Claude to investigate a bug, which you most definitely do not.
- dranudin 5mo agoA guy at my company (very old company, we need to maintain our software for 30+ years) gave a presentation about how they used opus 4.6 to onboard people, like giving new team members access rights etc. Then another guy (even higher in management) proposed using a team of agents for that.. It's getting pretty wild
- Henchman21 5mo ago> "You've used AI to do something that was a single command." As time passes and the layers of abstraction pile up, later generations won't understand the underlying layers of the abstraction. This is a huge weakness in our systems development -- and a huge potential attack surface for adversaries.