5 ms·

I am a freelancer recovering from severe burnout so the answer is a sort of irrelevant no. I'm trying to rebuild my life so I am in an experimenting and learni

by dofm 4mo ago

I am a freelancer recovering from severe burnout so the answer is a sort of irrelevant no. I'm trying to rebuild my life so I am in an experimenting and learning phase rather than a massive coding phase, and most of my code work is maintenance of things I have built. That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. But I would say to you that if you personally don't write code now but you do have a dependency on one of two presumably unprofitable cloud AI providers, aren't you in trouble? How is this not a three-alarm fire for you?

andai 4mo ago
Worst case scenario you just switch to a free model, which are 2025-ish in quality.
- dofm 4mo ago
  The open weights models I am interested in, and testing, learning, experimenting with etc.; I am confused and cynical, not insane. I am not convinced it isn't vulnerable to the same problems but the whole tenor of the community around open source/open weights models just doesn't have the same YOLO madness to it.
estearum 4mo ago
> That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiveness. The platform risk is a valid concern but alleviated by China's theft and redistribution of open models.
- dofm 4mo ago
  I'm not talking about impressing people. We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore? Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.
  - estearum 4mo ago
    "Code quality" encompasses a lot of dimensions, one of which is impressing your colleagues, and many of which there's virtually no reason to care about now.
    - Arainach 4mo ago
      On the contrary, it's more important than ever. With ever more code being generated, it's essential that the code be understandable and maintainable - by human and machine.
      - michaelchisari 4mo ago
        And quality is the new differentiator when everyone can generate slop.
  - pydry 4mo ago
    Nobody cares about code quality /s They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.
    - estearum 4mo ago
      Right, and to the extent that your coding practices contribute to reliability and speed of development, they are "of quality." Now do the same exercise for "impressiveness" and "crassness." Here, I'll do it for you: > Nobody cares about code quality /s > They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like impressiveness and lack of crassness. Sounds silly doesn't it?
- slopinthebag 4mo ago
  It doesn’t matter what materials or techniques you use to build a house. 99.99% of construction exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot more than using the right materials or techniques. Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques. The materials and techniques don’t matter, just the outcome.
  - estearum 4mo ago
    No the materials and techniques matter a lot. This is why we need to build houses with sticks and jute cord, just like we always have. It's vital also that we paint our special symbols above the door to ward off the spirits. It's insane to me that you're implying we could build houses with pre-fabricated materials or pneumatic nail guns and still somehow "have houses?" No sticks/jute cord and special symbols, then no house.
    - slopinthebag 4mo ago
      The argument isn’t to not use better materials or techniques, it’s that inferior materials and techniques are fine because they don’t impact the end result, which is so obviously false when it comes to pretty much anything, but supposedly true when it comes to software.
      - estearum 4mo ago
        I'm not sure who you saw arguing for inferior materials and techniques, but let me know when you find them. What you saw in this thread was someone arguing against the dimensions of "impressiveness" and "crassness" as valid things to care about when it comes to code. It's your mistake to assume that those are related to any meaningful concept of actual quality.
        dofm 4mo ago
- techpression 4mo ago
  I’ve worked at many companies where this idea of velocity was claimed to matter, and it never did. The only thing it mattered for was to make it look like middle managers were worth anything, but the success was always in the foundational idea/concept.
vidarh 4mo ago
Personally I use 5 different model families, 3 of which are open weights with 3rd party inference providers (GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi), so if the frontier labs were to shut down it'd be a nuisance, nothing more.
jenniferhooley 4mo ago
Programmers can use smaller models like deepseek v4 flash for 98% of the same productivity as SOTA models and cost (true cost) around $10-$30 a month. So I doubt most people who heavily use them are too concerned. It's only vibe/hobby coders who really need SOTA and they probably don't think about it much.
- dofm 4mo ago
  To what extent does that ameliorate the problem? Are you not, by developing this way, making yourself more interchangeable, less indispensable, than ever before?
  - jenniferhooley 4mo ago
    No. Anyone who doesn't code with AI - while retaining a deep knowledge and understanding of the problem domain - is falling behind. I hate to say this tbh, I loved hand-writing code. I made a great living for 20 years, and I absolutely loved it and was quite good at it. Hand-typing code is just slower now; there’s no two-ways about it. You are either going to be slow and a bad hire for businesses, or you figure out how to adopt AI into your workflow to speed up. One thing I think people don't realize is that deep knowledge of programming, performance, architectural, and domain specific trade-offs makes a skilled engineer about 1000X faster than someone without those skills -with AI. But yes, now unskilled people can actually make apps/software. They just tend to be slow, and their products are full of bugs, security flaws, and abysmal performance. So we went from: Skills = can or cannot ship any software at all. Now we are at: Skills = can ship better software much faster than unskilled people. I was actually faced with this recently. I decided to learn Rust and port one of my side projects to it. Initially, I moved extremely slowly, and the AI made truly horrific architectural decisions because I didn't have the knowledge of how to direct it, especially compared to my primary languages. However, once I gained a firm grasp of Rust, I was better able to properly direct the AI to fix fundamental issues and architect things properly. My speed increase multiplier proved to be directly proportional to my growing knowledge of both the language and the domain. Skill and knowledge combined with AI, when used appropriately, absolutely multiply your speed and quality. I really think once you understand what AI can do, and how to utilize it to produce better code, faster than before, there truly is no going back. I'm finding a path forward that I actually enjoy now and don't really see losing my value (no telling how things will change in the future), I can have more time to focus on really quality/solid/performant and useful systems with less time just typing one character out at a time. You could have talked to me 3 months ago and I'd never imagine I'd say the above btw. I REALLY enjoyed code writing and earlier AI models without harnesses were pretty useless for anyone skilled at development. Now with stuff like deepseek Flash I feel like I have a happy medium of 100% directed/fast code turnaround, less typing, more deep focus on architecture, systems, and the actual end product.

by dofm 4mo ago

andai 4mo ago

Worst case scenario you just switch to a free model, which are 2025-ish in quality.

dofm 4mo ago
The open weights models I am interested in, and testing, learning, experimenting with etc.; I am confused and cynical, not insane. I am not convinced it isn't vulnerable to the same problems but the whole tenor of the community around open source/open weights models just doesn't have the same YOLO madness to it.

estearum 4mo ago

> That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiveness. The platform risk is a valid concern but alleviated by China's theft and redistribution of open models.

dofm 4mo ago
I'm not talking about impressing people. We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore? Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.
- estearum 4mo ago
  "Code quality" encompasses a lot of dimensions, one of which is impressing your colleagues, and many of which there's virtually no reason to care about now.
  - Arainach 4mo ago
    On the contrary, it's more important than ever. With ever more code being generated, it's essential that the code be understandable and maintainable - by human and machine.
    - michaelchisari 4mo ago
      And quality is the new differentiator when everyone can generate slop.
- pydry 4mo ago
  Nobody cares about code quality /s They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.
  - estearum 4mo ago
    Right, and to the extent that your coding practices contribute to reliability and speed of development, they are "of quality." Now do the same exercise for "impressiveness" and "crassness." Here, I'll do it for you: > Nobody cares about code quality /s > They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like impressiveness and lack of crassness. Sounds silly doesn't it?
slopinthebag 4mo ago
It doesn’t matter what materials or techniques you use to build a house. 99.99% of construction exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot more than using the right materials or techniques. Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques. The materials and techniques don’t matter, just the outcome.
- estearum 4mo ago
  No the materials and techniques matter a lot. This is why we need to build houses with sticks and jute cord, just like we always have. It's vital also that we paint our special symbols above the door to ward off the spirits. It's insane to me that you're implying we could build houses with pre-fabricated materials or pneumatic nail guns and still somehow "have houses?" No sticks/jute cord and special symbols, then no house.
  - slopinthebag 4mo ago
    The argument isn’t to not use better materials or techniques, it’s that inferior materials and techniques are fine because they don’t impact the end result, which is so obviously false when it comes to pretty much anything, but supposedly true when it comes to software.
    - estearum 4mo ago
      I'm not sure who you saw arguing for inferior materials and techniques, but let me know when you find them. What you saw in this thread was someone arguing against the dimensions of "impressiveness" and "crassness" as valid things to care about when it comes to code. It's your mistake to assume that those are related to any meaningful concept of actual quality.
      - dofm 4mo ago
techpression 4mo ago
I’ve worked at many companies where this idea of velocity was claimed to matter, and it never did. The only thing it mattered for was to make it look like middle managers were worth anything, but the success was always in the foundational idea/concept.

vidarh 4mo ago

Personally I use 5 different model families, 3 of which are open weights with 3rd party inference providers (GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi), so if the frontier labs were to shut down it'd be a nuisance, nothing more.

jenniferhooley 4mo ago

Programmers can use smaller models like deepseek v4 flash for 98% of the same productivity as SOTA models and cost (true cost) around $10-$30 a month. So I doubt most people who heavily use them are too concerned. It's only vibe/hobby coders who really need SOTA and they probably don't think about it much.

dofm 4mo ago
To what extent does that ameliorate the problem? Are you not, by developing this way, making yourself more interchangeable, less indispensable, than ever before?
- jenniferhooley 4mo ago
  No. Anyone who doesn't code with AI - while retaining a deep knowledge and understanding of the problem domain - is falling behind. I hate to say this tbh, I loved hand-writing code. I made a great living for 20 years, and I absolutely loved it and was quite good at it. Hand-typing code is just slower now; there’s no two-ways about it. You are either going to be slow and a bad hire for businesses, or you figure out how to adopt AI into your workflow to speed up. One thing I think people don't realize is that deep knowledge of programming, performance, architectural, and domain specific trade-offs makes a skilled engineer about 1000X faster than someone without those skills -with AI. But yes, now unskilled people can actually make apps/software. They just tend to be slow, and their products are full of bugs, security flaws, and abysmal performance. So we went from: Skills = can or cannot ship any software at all. Now we are at: Skills = can ship better software much faster than unskilled people. I was actually faced with this recently. I decided to learn Rust and port one of my side projects to it. Initially, I moved extremely slowly, and the AI made truly horrific architectural decisions because I didn't have the knowledge of how to direct it, especially compared to my primary languages. However, once I gained a firm grasp of Rust, I was better able to properly direct the AI to fix fundamental issues and architect things properly. My speed increase multiplier proved to be directly proportional to my growing knowledge of both the language and the domain. Skill and knowledge combined with AI, when used appropriately, absolutely multiply your speed and quality. I really think once you understand what AI can do, and how to utilize it to produce better code, faster than before, there truly is no going back. I'm finding a path forward that I actually enjoy now and don't really see losing my value (no telling how things will change in the future), I can have more time to focus on really quality/solid/performant and useful systems with less time just typing one character out at a time. You could have talked to me 3 months ago and I'd never imagine I'd say the above btw. I REALLY enjoyed code writing and earlier AI models without harnesses were pretty useless for anyone skilled at development. Now with stuff like deepseek Flash I feel like I have a happy medium of 100% directed/fast code turnaround, less typing, more deep focus on architecture, systems, and the actual end product.