6 ms·

How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? First being good developer an

• cautiouscat 4mo ago
  Haven’t you heard? If you don’t adapt now you’ll be left behind, never to be able to work again! Copilot? That’s so last year. Agentic engineering? You’re already late!
  • mrexroad 4mo ago
    Do you have a link to your paid content that will put me ahead of the curve so my career will be bulletproof? /s
  • skippyboxedhero 4mo ago
    jibecoding is the latest thing: you insult the LLM's bloodline providing it with greater motivation to complete the code you won't review without bugs.
    • cindyllm 4mo ago
      [dead]
• abhaynayar 4mo ago
  Several things can be true at once.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• xnx 4mo ago
  Overall I agree with this, though I do think that there will be a trend to hoard/keep-secret domain knowledge by professions. Like plumbers will try and make it a trade-secret or protected intellectual property how to change a pipe fitting.
  • Avicebron 4mo ago
    There is a difference between something being a hidden/gate kept trade secret and something being easier for person X to do than person Y through a combination of real world experience and practice.
  • nradov 4mo ago
    For basic residential plumbing work the moat is not knowledge. There are already books and YouTube videos that will teach you everything you need to know. Professional plumbers can't stop that. The real moat is that most people don't have time, don't want to buy tools, and don't want to get shit on their hands. For new construction and commercial work the moat is a contractor's license. They don't allow LLMs to take the licensing exam yet.
    • 2fff 4mo ago
      "Professional plumbers can't stop that. The real moat is that most people don't have time, don't want to buy tools, and don't want to get shit on their hands." "don't want to buy tools, and don't want to get shit on their hands" Thats closer to the truth. The rest of your post is fluff. Its pure economics, not rocket science.
    • spauldo 4mo ago
      Yep. I can do basic plumbing, but I haven't touched it since I started making enough money to pay a plumber to do it for me. Plumbers are worth every dollar they charge if it means I don't have to spend two hours under a sink cursing at rusty bolts.
    • trouve_search 4mo ago
      The moat is the difference between knowledge and know-how. You can read all the plumbing books, but you need to get your hands dirty a few times, mess it up and fix it, to get mentally comfortable and efficient with the work
• gerdesj 4mo ago
  LLMs are an additional tool to add to your arsenal. They are not omnipotent and need care, just like any other tool. My best effort, so far, at an analogy is a modern drill driver compared to a screw driver/brace and bit/etc: You can get some remarkable results in a very short time compared to the "old school" gear. You can get some "amazing" anecdotes eg "I screwed down an entire floor at 16" x 1" c/c within an hour instead of an entire day and I took loads of fag breaks" (I could have used a nail gun instead in half the time but I'll never raise that floor easily in the future, and probably done at twice the cost) I have several on prem LLMs and access to the rest and I'm pretty sure I'll be extending my analogy to ... brand, eventually. What I do not expect to be doing is looking for a new job. A drill driver is not a carpenter/site labourer/useful without a person!
  • maccard 4mo ago
    But a modern drill absolutely 100% removes the need for a brace and bit. An LLM doesn't replace any existing tools.
    • 2fff 4mo ago
      I think we will see very limited human displacement - it'll be in narrow places where it makes sense. Much of it will just be augmentation.
    • ryan_n 4mo ago
      From what I've heard for many devs it replaced an IDE... I still use one myself, but I've a lot of people don't anymore.
      • jaggederest 4mo ago
        Basically IDE free since May 2025. I actually reinstalled vscode when setting up a new machine and I think I've launched it twice? cc -> local automated testing -> github -> PR -> heavy integration tests -> review (github ui, +/-) -> manual test locally -> merge -> deploy -> manual test remotely -> synthetic user testing -> repeat
• throw1234567891 4mo ago
  All of those things matter. One needs to be able to judge the solution in order to make a judgement if it is fine, or not. Why yes, and why no. No matter who you export the typing process to. LLMs are just tools speeding up the typing process.
• not_kurt_godel 4mo ago
  I write software that makes money and AI helps me write software that makes more money.
  • QuantumFunnel 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • not_kurt_godel 4mo ago
      My comment was in response to: > How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? I explained the idea of what I do with AI on an individual level. Hope that helps.
    • toastmaster11 4mo ago
      Concurred
      • not_kurt_godel 4mo ago
        Thank you for this addition to the conversation. Perhaps you wish to also contribute your own response to the question posed by GP.
        • toastmaster11 4mo ago
          I am GP, reading comprehension and such.
          • not_kurt_godel 4mo ago
            Thank you for your topical pontification in response to my input.
  • sodafountan 4mo ago
    That's a rare niche; the vast majority of software makes no money whatsoever. What type of software do you produce?
• spkm 4mo ago
  Remember the OOP Hype 20 years ago? I'm still cleaning shit up from then in our codebase when everyone used patterns after skimming through the GoF book without even knowing why .... My prediction is in 20 years I will clean up the shit that was co-authored by Claude ... https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345...
  • awesome_dude 4mo ago
    OOP and GoF are not the same thing - conflating the two has been the biggest mistake everyone has made (detractors and proponents alike)
    • spkm 4mo ago
      I know, but they didn't.
    • mindcrime 4mo ago
      And there's nothing "wrong" with the GoF Patterns per-se. The issue was always people applying them blindly without understanding why (or more to the point, "if") they were needed. Once writing code filled with patterns became "the thing you do"... all bets were off. :-(
      • dominotw 4mo ago
        I remember putting stuff like this on my resume "developed X using visitor pattern" . ppl would ask "what is your favourite design pattern" in interviews. lmao.
        • whattheheckheck 4mo ago
          Lol the worst pattern
          • derwiki 4mo ago
            Strangler fig is one of the best, with one of the worst names
• awesome_dude 4mo ago
  So far AI has been a (genuinely) massive improvement for... Search It's reading my requests more clearly than (for example) Google's search input ever did, and it's got (some) understanding of how close the result (or fragments of results) are to what I want. I can ask it about things I know about, and it can answer with strategies I hadn't thought of. HOWEVER - I still need to understand the results AND AI can overreach - it can say (figuratively) "Oh you are searching for Event handling, therefore I will write a orchestration saga" - which, if I am not across, can get us both in trouble. Further, we KNOW that AI has no (real) understanding of the responses - it's just token adjacency - and it fails basic logic tests Current AI is just awesome natural language processing, but it's still got a ways to go to where I would say "It can replace people" Edit: LLMs demonstrate (almost perfectly) the difference between correlation and causality. LLMs identify correlative patterns, but the job still needs (us) to make the causative judgments.
  • spkm 4mo ago
    Thank you! That's exactly what it is. Instead of presenting you 1000 results (or 0) which you have to manually skim through, it generates 1 result as a summary. And even if there is no actual search result, it will hallucinate you 1 result (full of BS). But because the result sounds right (and in cases with good data it actually is) people tend to trust it. I do not dismiss the potential, but for me the line is crossed when you take the result for granted without verifying and while I'm sure many here think that is implied, I bet you, at large, it is not and will be even less so in the future. Brave New World!
  • bigballsbjorn 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • vector_spaces 4mo ago
    > It's reading my requests more clearly than (for example) Google's search input ever did I see this take a lot and it puzzles me. While I think LLMs provide some advantages over traditional search in some modestly nontrivial contexts, they tend to be inferior to traditional search at its peak. I attribute this attitude to two things: the broad progressive enshittification and productization of search, and the fact that (re)search is a skill that most people tend to be bad at. Without massaging, LLMs spit out the most utterly braindead boneheaded queries, which are fine in cases where the problem is very well understood with minimum uncertainty or critical nuance. If your problem has either, God help you. But perhaps those queries are at least as good as the average human generated query
• Swizec 4mo ago
  > Until AI is basically in a stable, predictable, state of improvement or stagnation, these takes will continue to be pointless and most likely completely wrong. Little thing to keep in mind about AI: a technology is only called AI while it doesn’t work yet. Once it works reliable, we give it a proper name and something else becomes AI.
  • simonw 4mo ago
    "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet" - Larry Tesler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
• slashdave 4mo ago
  > nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? I appreciate the frustration, but some of us are actually successfully using these tools.
  • dominotw 4mo ago
    you completely misread that statement
• gedy 4mo ago
  I think what matters is.... the person being intelligent. I do not mean this as an us vs them thing, but a LOT of companies have some not very smart people in and running them. It's never about exact skills or roles. My observation on AI is that some frankly less intelligent folks think they don't need smart people any more because AI makes them smarter. I disagree.
• simonw 4mo ago
  An idea that's beginning to solidify for me is that AI tools make software development harder. It's harder because they dramatically raise the bar for what's possible to do. An individual developer can take on significantly more challenging projects now, because the ultimate constraint has always been time and AI can help you get more done in the time available. But the stuff you can get done with that time is a whole lot harder. You have to understand lots more things, and get radically outside your pre-AI comfort zone. It used to be acceptable to spend several days refactoring a codebase, or figuring out how to ship a small feature because it's in a part of the system you hadn't worked in before or involved learning a new library in order to build it. Coding agents mean you can climb those curves a whole lot faster, but you still need to climb them - and the volume of information coming your way is much higher. If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job, the correct response is to be much better at building software than those vibe coders. That means you need more skill, more ambition, and more experience. It's hard!
  • skydhash 4mo ago
    Not really. The primary stopper was never time or effort. It was need (and wisdom). If a project was important enough, you’d do it. If it’s not, it falls on the wayside. Now with LLM tools, what you got is a slew of projects their creators aren’t even interested in. It’s theater.
    • tptacek 4mo ago
      There's just no way this can be true. Every project I've committed to has been a bet made with incomplete information. Sometimes it pans out, sometimes it doesn't. Every time I've made one of those bets, I've had to shoulder the opportunity cost of 2-3 other 1/8th-finished but promising projects I could have driven to completion instead. Not having that opportunity cost anymore wildly changes the dynamics of what I build. This weekend I'm playing with a SwiftUI MusicKit player (everything I'm doing lately has been Swift/SwiftUI, itself a radical change from just a couple months ago when everything was a TUI, and then a few months back from that and all the way back to 1993, when everything was a CLI) with a Responses API hookup that turns the player into an agent, with tool calls to let the model see what I've been playing. "Keep a continuous queue of music playing while I'm working in the wood shop". Worked a treat. I'm genuinely interested in where I can take this. I have a real problem, one that's been annoying me since ~2000, which is that I "own" a lot of music but find myself stuck in an epicycle of the same 200 songs. Problem solved-ish. I never, ever, in a million years, would have built anything like this before. It's really hard to sell me on the idea that nothing profound has changed here in terms of the projects we now pick up. Go build an operating system. I'm serious! Claude will practically one-shot it. Mine has smoltcp hooked up to a Rust virtio-net driver Claude pulled out of its butt.
• faangguyindia 4mo ago
  It all feels to me similar to how spectators or laypeople judge pro sports. Don’t quote me on this, just trying to make a point: They’ll say you need perfect symmetry to do well in sports, which is highly correlated to development stability in the womb; higher symmetry = perfect development. Then after some years, news will come: Bruce Lee’s one leg is shorter than the other by a significant amount, and Usain Bolt has a similar asymmetrical development. Then they’ll flip-flop around their initial argument by claiming that they are outliers so the general rule need not apply. brother just build what you find interesting and it may work :)
  • nchmy 4mo ago
    It's well established that injuries occur at much higher rates when you have asymmetries/imbalances. Not even just physical "deformities" but just when your body is shifted or twisted in some way such that you don't move with balance.
• matchagaucho 4mo ago
  I'd like to believe that stable state ends in a pair-programming structure, with a systems thinker/engineer and a domain expert. Someone needs to spot when a linked list is better than a map. And the other needs to spot when clinical trial coding should happen before claims, audits, or patient outreach.
• fsckboy 4mo ago
  >How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? if nobody has any idea what to do, talking about it is the right approach
• Bockit 4mo ago
  I think it's more: AI assisted engineering is a new skill people are trying to develop and we're on this collective experimentation process, working out how to use AI for engineering with varying degrees of success. If that's true, any statements defining what is necessary to do should be ignored in that context. I'm still interested in hearing about what people tried, what results they think they saw, and then trying to apply those findings to my own processes. Which is to say I don't think the pontificating is pointless, but as statements of Real Truth, I agree they're likely wrong. We're too early in the game.
• lumost 4mo ago
  Taste, architecture, new innovations. These are all streams of tokens which are subject to the same scaling laws as code, language, and basic classification. We are going to see a new generation of models which effectively “solves” these problems for most businesses. Likely within the next two years- then we’ll talk about some other problems which limit adoption.
• kuboble 4mo ago
  Being a domain expert has been more valuable than being an excellent software developer before the ai. In 2018 I witnessed one guy with no prior coding experience who built a tool that after a month of coding was making very decent money (more than me), just because he was aware of a particular niche. He showed me parts of his code and it was as bad as my first program, but his was solving a real life problem.
• emodendroket 4mo ago
  [dead]
• m12k 4mo ago
  As software engineers we’ve now suddenly become a sort of “god of the gaps” - our existence is only justified in the (fewer and fewer) situations where the AI can’t do the job just as well on its own
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• dannersy 4mo ago
  Hype folks need to move those goal posts to justify all the money and time invested into something we are starting to realize is a liability.
• wiseowise 4mo ago
  Grifters are trying to get their 5 minutes of fame by posting some unhinged shower thought that they have. It's just that you're noticing it now, because it pops up in the feed. Previously they'd say some shit about Agile, OOP/Functional programming or some other bullshit, and it would be swept under the rug.
• burntsushi 4mo ago
  I have been thinking about this sort of progression too. One thing I wonder about is network effects. Are they even important? Now, for sure. Will they be so in a year? I don't know. I'm thinking about tooling centralizing on common primitives. Like, for my own situation, does it matter that everyone is using the same libraries? If AI becomes the interface, then we will a layer of abstraction above programming languages themselves. Which is kind of wild. (I don't pretend this is a novel idea. I'm just not that plugged into AI discourse.)