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As someone who is searching for a new programming contract right now, reading all of the incredible abilities here is pretty intimidating. Especially since I ge

• neversupervised 2mo ago
  Im sorry to hear about your situation. Have you blogged about it? I’m curious about how the volume of your type of work has been changing over the past 2-3 years.
  • jasongill 2mo ago
    > Im sorry to hear about your situation. Have you blogged about it? I don't know why but this made me laugh out loud. I know you're trying to help but just a funny jump
  • ilaksh 2mo ago
    I stopped blogging years ago when I realized that only bots were reading the posts. I think the volume for custom agents is probably higher than ever but so is the competition for that work.
  • crossroadsguy 2mo ago
    That working is as not common as college dropouts becoming successful entrepreneurs. But both become stereotypes. But I know you might also just want to read about it. PS. Not everyone (in fact the rare few) write as if no one is reading. For most, literally no one ever reads :D
• gtirloni 2mo ago
  > Anyway the point is these models are just about capable of doing the entire job of analyzing a small business and building out all the agents and iterating on them with the business owner. If you search for LLM benchmarks focused on real-world tasks, you'll quickly learn this ain't the case. No point in telling business owners about that though, they need to see/learn by themselves.
  • jychang 2mo ago
    If only LLM benchmarks could benchmark it in the first day! Still no Artificial Analysis benchmark yet. Or benchmark for Laguna S 2.1 or Meituan models or lots of other models.
    • eli 2mo ago
      According to a few tasks from my little personal coding benchmark it's very good at coding and kinda bad at web design. (Also excellent at "draw me a picture" one-shot prompts, for whatever that's worth) On a sneaky one that involved parsing MIME headers and dealing with character encodings it did better than Kimi K3 at Max and for 38% lower cost. Interestingly it seems noticeably better than the qwen3.8-max-preview model they offered just a few weeks ago.
  • mbrumlow 2mo ago
    What does the benchmark even mean when people are using AI to make real world things that solve real world problems? I see people, and my self making amazing things with AI and fixing old projects and having real world impact at the fraction of the cost it would take me to hire people, or hours spent on my own coding. I have built tools and systems with AI that have allowed me to build windows drivers, android apps, web apps, iOS apps, vm occultation, custom block drivers, custom file systems and more. To the point where entire products have been created. Not trying to be a doomsday, but yes. It seems as though with the right infrastructure we are at the point where businesses owners can go from idea to product very fast and not need or hire much external talent.
    • delusional 2mo ago
• benatkin 2mo ago
  To say that you're building agents, is based on a way of viewing things that isn't at all pervasive. Some might say you're building a customer support chatbot. To talk of building agents as a common activity makes sense if you use LangChain I guess, where its title is "Open Source AI Agent Framework | Build Agents Faster". But for instance, YC just released qm, and in its README it talks about customizing the agent, which is quite a bit different from just casually dropping the phrase "I'm building an agent". https://github.com/yc-software/qm https://github.com/yc-software/qm
  • ilaksh 2mo ago
    Not sure what you are trying to say but thanks for reminding me about qm, it has some cool features. My MindRoot framework had some of qm's main features awhile ago though. I do try to use it to build solutions by customizing rather than from scratch when possible. But a lot of clients or potential clients don't like that idea even though it's MIT. They want some that has clearly been invented by them as a new programming project. I actually turned down a project last year from someone who wanted me to start over in LangGraph -- he had already decided on it before he knew about my thing. The most recent project I have been using MindRoot and building up the voice capabilities so I can now handle voice agents end to end including SIP. But on that website now I try not to emphasize my framework at all for most proposals. You don't have leverage on Upwork. And also with code generation it isn't a critical point necessarily.
    • dgellow 2mo ago
      Why are you looking for projects on upwork if you know they don’t pay well and that you don’t have leverage? That sounds like a pretty bad place where to find contracting projects
      • ilaksh 2mo ago
        Please recommend somewhere else. I have started on LinkedIn but especially without much time and having so much experience being shortish Upwork contracts it's a hard sell without lying on my resume and so I am having to be careful where I spend my time. The biggest advantage of Upwork is I have a track record there and there are tons of RFPs. Other places usually don't have RFPs and are going to look down on the Upwork record. But I appreciate any ideas for places or people to look for work. My email is in my profile. I am not sure about funding for rent if I don't pick something up this week.
• tomjen3 2mo ago
  As someone else who is an IT consultant. You need to run away from any client who thinks your primary purpose is to write code. You must run away from the business if YOU think your primary purpose is to write code. You should be able to write code and do it well, But the AIs, and I'm not even talking about the ones on the frontier, have been able to write code faster than I have for quite some time. What you need to explain to your customers is all the things around writing code: software architecture, performance, and so on. Also make sure you have some understanding of the customers business, so you can suggest additional ways to make their lives better/make more money. Software developers have a chance. Code monkeys? None.
  • nearbuy 2mo ago
    The problem is Claude Fable is now better than most programmers I know at software architecture and performance optimization as well.
  • ilaksh 2mo ago
    That's a popular type of AI cope. First, I am aware they have been able to write code for some time. I made my first LLM coding agent experiment the day after ChatGPT first blew up in November 2022. I haven't been a "code monkey" in the last say 15 or 20 years of my programming. I would argue also that code money was never really a thing, it was just an excuse that pretentious overpaid developers used for the existence of underpaid exploited programmers. 95% of programmers have to do requirements analysis and design regardless of their pay grade. I learned a long time ago how important requirements analysis and good design is. And the jobs I am applying to largely specify architecture and requirements analysis in the description. Employers are aware of code generation tools. But also, the premise that writing the code is not the hard part is just nonsense. Sure requirements analysis is harder than people realize, good design is hard and so is understanding things about proper and closed iteration. But that stuff is not, in the aggregate, harder than the code. And also, frontier models can absolutely do requirements analysis and architecture. And the sheer speed of implementation means that there is a huge built-in advantage for iterating more effectively.
    • 2mo ago
• DANmode 2mo ago
  I thought this comment was going to be about leveraging agents in ways your existing clientele demographic cannot or will not (yet|ever), but then you totally jumped the shark!
  • ilaksh 2mo ago
    Can you give me a hint about wtf you are talking about?
    • DANmode 2mo ago
      Use AI to speed up your own existing workflows that were working. Advertise that you’re there to fix AI slop attempts (you can rebuild it from scratch if you have to). You may not have the juice to sell great shovels in a gold rush. You also may. Just…be sure.
      • ilaksh 2mo ago
        I've been using my agent harness to research and build AI services for many months. I'm honestly not that interested in cleanup work because most of what I see is not a genuine failure but just a vague request to "make it production ready" and half of them have the expectation that I will use little to no AI to do that and they think there is some magic set of best practices that will prevent any issues from popping up.. and they have quite low budgets. Which is the type of busywork that less capable engineers overcharge for. What they need is usually modest cleanup and then a strong iteration loop. Anyway, it's not that easy to find projects that make sense.
        • DANmode 2mo ago
          You need a sales funnel providing clients with more money to spend. Poaching clients that might be longer-term, or repeat engagements is a good way to use those platforms, but I wouldn’t rely on them solely. Primarily people trying to avoid spending on engineering!
• entrepy123 2mo ago
  Suppose I wanted you or someone else on Upwork or Fiverr to port a Rails 4 app to Rails 8 (or React or HTMX or anything up to date and maintainable). Assume the business logic and all edge cases work in the legacy app. The app is "done", just too old to work on or run on modern hosts. Hence the project. Would/could you use AI to deliver the project at 10x the speed? Or at 1/10 the price? Or charge the same amount as ever? I have a feeling the lowest-cost developers on freelance marketplaces are not very good at using the AI tools (and whatever related acumen) and need a lot of hand-holding, the same amount of effort almost as if I decided to guide AI to do it myself. IMO, there's value you can sell in being someone that (even developers) can hand off a project to, to do end to end, if it's fully specified. Even though the buyer could do it themselves, the developer would be taking on managing it and having AI do it until it's correct, and all the little things, few as they may be. AI should be giving contract developers superpowers. If it's not, then the limited set of contractors with the AI superpowers will be able to charge 10x as much for their time, and the actual cost of the project remains the same even if it's done 10x as fast/easily. Curious if you see/feel this, or if there's a marketplace for "please vibe code this for me, make sure it works and is what I want".
  • ilaksh 2mo ago
    There is still some use to having someone else supervise it and/or test it etc. But most of that gap could probably be closed by setting up your harness so that it can efficiently do the end to end testing including UI itself. Recent model releases seem to know how to set up playwright or whatever and test the live page on its own. But I still see some improvement to be made when I look at it myself. I would say 90% of outsourced developers are going to use AI just like someone making top US dollar. Actually for the majority of projects on Upwork, the need to generate with AI is much greater. And I think it's nonsense the idea that an overseas programmer can't figure out how to make adequate requests to a frontier model. The models are smart enough that someone could literally just say "convert to Rails 8 like you are real real good best Railsdev" and follow up with a few "now test and make the bestest code Base" and if they are repeating that maybe with a few different leading models.. will a real Rails dev be able to find some fault? Sure. Would they have also found issues with the work of another human Rails dev? Yes probably.I just don't think it takes as much actual skill at this point. And certainly there is no secret ability that people in San Francisco have but not in Bangladesh or only certain neighborhoods or whatever. One guy I was talking to said he was frustrated because his developer was not using AI enough. I came to the conclusion based on his requirements and relatively generous project timeline that that developer was deliberately avoiding using AI or admitting that he was using AI because he knew if he did then the main project phase would be finished in less than a month. It does help dealing with what previously were often impossible timelines. Recently my Upwork profile has focused on AI agents so I have not been seeing many of those typical line of business type jobs. But also more than half of those more typical business web apps are now starting with "I have already generated a prototype" and they want it to be made. "production ready" which I think contractors are taking advantage of how vague that is especially since the majority of these projects have pretty modest actual usage. I actually don't like that because it's much less concrete than delivering actual features.