5 ms·
Cannibalism
- tags2k 4mo agoI was with the article - especially the bit about the 10% an LLM loses and how that loss can be de-amplified across eventual meaning, but then... "My first instinct is to laugh and shake my head. One need not look very far to find indignant software developers absolutely certain that their jobs cannot possibly be automated away by the very tools their industry contemporaries are creating to replace them. I suspect you’d also not have to look far into their posting histories to find those same people comparing cabbies to buggy whip makers." What a rude and callous comment. I'm one of those developers, I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails. Laugh at me as I defend my lifelong career, why don't you? I'm also one who decries such things as the removal of local services, taxi and otherwise, for those in the cloud. Screw you, man.
- vasco 4mo agoI think you wanted to be offended and didn't even understand the point. Maybe I'm also being rude.
- throwaway27448 4mo agoIs this sarcastic or do you just not see the irony?
- wiseowise 4mo agoThere’s no irony. Author made a straw man of some bad, bad developer laughing at poor cabbies and it all clicked once VCs came for the fellow professionals.
- fsdsdffsd 4mo agoIt's not easy being a developer right now. We went from being dorky and unpopular in school to being superstars (at work) and now the writing's on the wall. I can sympathize, but I'll concede that our recently developed attention for the state of nature and the fair distribution of capital is .. interesting.
- throwaway27448 4mo agoI don't disagree, but the absolute hubris to think that our job is particularly difficult is also ridiculous. One by one our responsibilities will be able to be shifted into highly leveragable software, whether it's years or decades away.
- ramon156 4mo agoThe point of this sentence is to show that there are Software Developers who are looking at this in a short-sighted way. There doesn't seem anything rude about it.
- leethomas 4mo agoNot the OP but this line really got my attention > I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails If you don't mind could you please elaborate on what tasks or knowledge your job requires that you feel an LLM isn't even _fractionally_ capable of? I understand if you said that out of emotion and frustration, but if you're serious I'm intensely and genuinely curious because nowadays it seems like the frontier models are capable of more programming tasks than not with the proper harness and engineer. When was the last time you tried? I just want to emphasize that this is not a further provocation, just potentially in awe of what you do at your job and would like to know more.
- tags2k 4mo agoIf you want to be in awe of basic support tasks then sure! I frequently need to assist with support tickets, communicate between departments to solve customer queries and sometimes manually fix slop that AI has put in there. No LLM rig can do that for me, nor does anyone want it to.
- miningape 4mo agoNot GP but honestly I don't even spend 10% of my time writing code - even if these tools were perfect code generators that could read my mind (instead of having to prompt) it wouldn't significantly impact my work.
- LearnYouALisp 4mo agoIf we're truthful, yes the LLM ("agent") can't do much by itself, but thanks to all the theft which no one was compensated for, they can do something based on what was done.
- wiseowise 4mo agoTech bro lamenting and berating developers how immoral and hypocritical they’re for “laughing” (has this ever happened?) at other professions, while doing the same. Story as old as time.
- tags2k 4mo agoArticle literally says their first instinct was to laugh. I'm not a tech bro, just a guy with a job (for now) and I made it clear from my comment that I have never laughed at tech taking the jobs of others, or made it happen myself. Try reading again.
- wiseowise 4mo agoI was talking about the article, though. I'm agreeing with your comment, in case it's not clear.
- RugnirViking 4mo agoclassic example of the goomba fallacy - "all software engineers are one single person-caricature I have in my head and are therefore a stupid walking contradiction whenever two of them express different opinions". Do these hypothetical laid off software engineers with no empathy for buggy drivers exist outside the imagination of people who hate software engineers? I know in my education we had a bunch of mandatory courses about automation and the effects on workers, how to consult with workers on how to lift them up rather than be antagonistic, and consider different stakeholders (where "the business" or "product" was but one of many) etc.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo agoAre people seriously getting use out of LLMs? Everything they produce is extermely sloppy in my experience, like actually mostly useless. I really dont understand the hype. Its very confusing.
- kombookcha 4mo agoI am convinced the people who swear by them either have very different work tasks from me, or they have very different ideas about what a job well done looks like. I feel like everything I apply these things to sends me up a much messier and long winded route to a useable result, when compared to just doing it myself from the jump. Even the things they're ostensibly good at like sorting data comes out so messy it's practically net zero by the time you're done with quality control.
- tags2k 4mo agoI tend to do the main structural parts myself and tell it to fill in the gaps and add tests, which sort of works 70% of the time. It may not be worth what my company is being charged.
- kombookcha 4mo agoThat's my approach as well. When I try to mentally compare the cost of the subscription to the performance, I think it's extremely dubious at best.
- senectus1 4mo agois a sometimes useful agent, and a sometimes useful slightly smarter search engine. it can be useful for some automation... but its also dangerously dumb for that.
- lukan 4mo agoJust out of curiosity, did you actually use claude? Otherwise have a look here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174
- cjs_ac 4mo ago> These tools are here. They’re not going away. They might very well go away. There is definitely an AI bubble, and it remains to be seen whether it deflates gradually or pops spectacularly. Geoeconomics might destroy them by constraining their access to hardware. The capabilities are real, but whether those capabilities are realised is a different matter.
- vatsachak 4mo agoDeepseek is realistic about this and is offering great prices. I think that once companies are more realistic about token demand they can start making a profit
- throwaway27448 4mo agoYup, and the marginal value of the boutique models is much lower than the marginal cost. Most workflows have no need for american models.
- totetsu 4mo agoWhat is China subsidises its inference providers to provide like utility level "intelligence" at or below cost globally until all the knowledge jobs in the west go the way of the manufacturing ones..
- watwut 4mo agoProviding services below cost is how SV and American tech operated last 25 years. It was the same pattern again and again - sell bellow cost, competition cant compete, create quasi monopoly, enshittify and start earning. OpenAI and Anthropic still sells tokens under cost.
- swiftcoder 4mo agoEven if that were true, the smaller quants that can be run on a MacBook aren't going anywhere
- wewewedxfgdf 4mo agoMeh just another anti AI rant - this time with the cloak of legitimacy taken from a market downturn.
- nelsonfigueroa 4mo agoWhether you agree with it or not, the author makes some good points and it goes way beyond just a "rant".
- nelsonfigueroa 4mo ago"Fourth, we will not find ourselves working less. Rather, there will be a bimodal outcome: those unable to find a place in the new AI-powered industry will fall out of it entirely, while those that remain are worked harder and harder as they drive automated development systems. Five PRs a week? Hah! Try fifty. Or five hundred." My experience with AI/LLMs summed up. The baseline expectation got higher. I didn't get any time back. My life didn't become easier.
- wiseowise 4mo agoWhy would it? Who, with a half brain, thought that you’d ever work less?
- watwut 4mo agoLiterally no one, no one even claimed we would work less due to AI. It is one of many absurd claims about AI here. There was no period in which we would get think pieces predicting more leisure time. We had plenty of think pieces about making people obsolete, about destruction, generally in celebratory tone. I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch was always "higher unemployment".
- graemep 4mo ago> Literally no one, no one even claimed we would work less due to AI. It is one of many absurd claims about AI here. There was no period in which we would get think pieces predicting more leisure time. https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/business/ari-emanuels-3b-venture-aims-to-monetize-ai-induced-leisure-time/tldr https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/business/ari-emanuels-3b-v... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/11/ignore-the-doom-mongers-ai-will-give-us-more-leisure-time/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/11/ignore-the-d... https://time.com/6268804/artificial-intelligence-pissarides-productivity/ https://time.com/6268804/artificial-intelligence-pissarides-... > I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch was always "higher unemployment". Higher unemployment means people work less.
- notarobot123 4mo agoI think this is largely right. Software engineering as a stable, high-earning and in demand career is a thing of the past. Those who make it work from here are those who've changed their work completely to resemble something more like a hands-off tech lead. There will of course be the lucky few who've made it work as artisans without direct commercial pressures to conform to the new "right way to do it". But the careers many of us have had is not a path available for others to follow anymore. The irony of automating away "inefficiencies", "drudgery" and the "labour intensive" parts of other professions stings all the more when the sharp end of that shtick is pointed back in our direction.
- dmje 4mo agoGreat piece, well written and succinctly sums up my thoughts. The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated shit. I pushed back, it apologised, and then generated more crap that had nothing to do with reality, I pushed back, we looped again, still just total fiction: “the drums don’t come in until bar 16” on a song that opens with a drum loop, that kind of crap. We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre. I’m guessing it’s that humans don’t have capacity to deal with this kind of scenario - it’s like having a junior staff member who is utterly incredible 90% of the time - completely convincing in their certainty and skill level, and then 10% of the time you catch them doing a shit in their desk drawer because they couldn’t be arsed to walk to the toilet. AI’s are basically sociopaths.
- entropi 4mo ago> We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre. I think one more thing this whole LLM charade in the last few years has revealed is that no-one really cares. As long as it "looks" like it works, turns out, its all fine.
- po1nt 4mo agoFantastic article. However author never considered that I'm looking forward to my job being automated. That's like a whole point of programming.
- exitb 4mo agoTo what end? Can't you just quit and get the same result?
- selfhoster1312 4mo agoQuitting is an individual action with potential adverse consequences (misery). The political question is why despite productivity in economic terms (which i know is flawed) growing many times over, do we still have to work as much, get paid so little, and have so many unemployed people looking for a job? Looks like without a parasitic capitalist class, we could share resources and work and have people live better lives and work less.
- exitb 4mo agoYour job being automated to the point where you no longer proform it has the same adverse consequences. Whether this could work is some economic and societal setup is irrelevant, because that's not the world we live in.
- selfhoster1312 4mo ago> that's not the world we live in That's not a definitive conclusion. The world is constantly evolving, we just have to push it in the right direction.
- po1nt 4mo agoWhat are you talking about? The only reason we could work less is because we always gave way to innovation. We don't haul large blocks of ice because "evil capitalists" started making fridges. Or do you want to reinstate ice trade, just because it generated more jobs? Or ban tractors because farming by hand was made by way more people? "Sharing resources" doesn't work. We share way too much just to keep pensioners alive and can't have kids because of that. Confiscating all the billionaire's wealth wouldn't make a dent and would destroy much more. Not sorry for the rant
- phoronixrly 4mo ago> Third, once destroyed those industries will not meaningfully return. This is not a process that will result in a natural ebb and flow. Once the software development profession is disrupted, it will stay that way as talent pipelines dry up and expertise ages out I can echo that. If/when I am replaced with an LLM, I plan on switching to a hands-on profession - welder, electrician, machinist. I am also not planning on ever going back to software... errr... prompt "engineering". Maybe for twice my pre-LLM salary at a place with a no-LLM policy? More at a prompt-engineering place.