lowsong

6 ms·

61.
by lowsong 7mo ago
It's not even as simple as "views as replaceable". It's pure economics. It's someone looking at a spreadsheet going "We spent a lot of money on SWE salaries, our financial results look better if we fire some of
62.
by lowsong 7mo ago
> you're admitting that businesses do see SWE as cogs in a wheel and seasonally try to replace them... Not quite. I agree that companies will try to do this, but every company that has tried to treat engineering staff as replaceab
63.
by lowsong 7mo ago
> From the company’s POV employees function as cogs in a larger system whose purpose is to generate value considering that businesses are structured to optimize outcomes i.e. Profit. If tech appears that can produce the same output more
64.
by lowsong 7mo ago
> Reviews are billed on token usage and generally average $15–25, scaling with PR size and complexity. You've got to be completely insane to use AI coding tools at this point. This is the subsidised cost to get users to use it, it c
65.
by lowsong 7mo ago
> At work, all that matters is that value is delivered to the business. Code needs to be maintainable so that new requirements can be met. Code follows design patterns, when appropriate, because they are known solutions to common problem
66.
by lowsong 7mo ago
Listen, If you truly want help you've made the first step by realising what's wrong, but you won't get help here. This community is obsessively pro-AI. Asking here is the equivalent of asking the guy who has sat at the slot m
67.
by lowsong 7mo ago
> AI is actually better getting those built as long as you clean it up afterwards I've never seen a quick PoC get cleaned up. Not once. I'm sure it happens sometimes, but it's very rare in the industry. The reality is that
68.
by lowsong 7mo ago
I've been in this game a long time and I've seen a lot, but this AI hype cycle is exhausting. Like no technology before it I've watched extremely smart and capable engineers fall into AI like it's a cult. I've had c
69.
by lowsong 7mo ago
> Software is being democratized. No. Software is being centralized. If the snake oil AI companies are selling about the coming agentic age were true, then the end result is not "anyone can produce software" it is "anyone
70.
by lowsong 7mo ago
> Coding agents are here to stay, and you’re a fool if you don’t use them. Why would they be here to stay? The crux of the author's argument is that using them is detrimental in the long term. The correct response to that is not a l
71.
by lowsong 8mo ago
> LLMs are clearly a massive productivity boost for software developers, and the value of humans manually translating intent into lines of code is rapidly depreciating. This take is so divorced from reality it's hard to take any of
72.
by lowsong 8mo ago
Parameterized queries have been a thing for decades, which mitigate SQL injection attacks.[1] This is true of the examples in the post too, they used this: query = """ SELECT * from tasks WHERE id
73.
by lowsong 8mo ago
Please don't anthropomorphise. These are statistical text prediction models, not people. An LLM cannot be "deceptive" because it has no intent. They're not intelligent or "smart", and we're not "teach
74.
by lowsong 8mo ago
Again, you're assuming it's inevitable. Think of all of the other public health changes over the years: CFCs, leaded gasolene, asbestos, etc. Apparent miracles of technology that looked unassailable in their ubiquity, and through
75.
by lowsong 8mo ago
The adoption of AI in society at large is not foregone conclusion. Acting as if it's unstoppable and washing your hands of the consequences is wilful ignorance. But, it doesn't have to be this way. You do have a choice to not use
76.
by lowsong 8mo ago
> It seems like the author hasn't really used the latest models The author addresses this point. > While I’m sure the technology and its costs will continue to improve, it’s hard to see how that would mitigate most of these harms
77.
by lowsong 8mo ago
You'd be out of your mind to trust an OpenAI built Slack competitor. Slack, for all of it's many faults, is two things: - Reliable, both in terms of "service uptime" and in terms of "Slack isn't going to rugpul
78.
by lowsong 8mo ago
> Layers upon layers of abstractions that abstract nothing meaningful, that solve problems we shouldn’t have had in the first place, that create ten new problems for every one they claim to fix. LLM generated code is the ultimate abstrac
79.
by lowsong 10mo ago
They've tried to play it both ways. Not AI enough for the AI fanboys, but want to keep a toe in there for everyone else. They'd be better placed rejecting AI entirely, and then when the bubble pops they'll be well positioned
80.
by lowsong 10mo ago
> They cite cherry picked announcements showing that LLM usage makes development slower or worse. They opened ChatGPT a couple times a few months ago, asked some questions, and then went “Aha! I knew it was bad!” when they encountered th
81.
by lowsong 10mo ago
I'm impressed that such a short post can be so categorically incorrect. > For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots > In 2025
82.
by lowsong 10mo ago
> A2UI lets agents send declarative component descriptions that clients render using their own native widgets. It's like having agents speak a universal UI language. Why the hell would anyone want this? Why on earth would you trust
83.
by lowsong 10mo ago
This article seems to suggest that businesses are going to swap domain-specific SaaS tools, written and tested by people knowledgable in the domain with specific SLAs for vibe coding everything. But your AI subscription is still a SaaS? All
84.
by lowsong 10mo ago
> Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. This is such a bad take. I'm convinced that engineers simply don't
85.
by lowsong 11mo ago
> With an LLM, you have to specifically setup a convoluted (and potentially financially and electrical power expensive) system in order to provide MANY MORE examples of how to improve via fine tuning or other training actions. The only w
86.
by lowsong 11mo ago
> We'll fix that, eventually. > Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are. You're not describing a system that exists. You're describing a system that might exist in some sci-fi fantasy f
87.
by lowsong 11mo ago
> Computing machines are instruments of creativity, companions in learning, and partners in thought. They should amplify human intention. An admirable goal. However putting that next to a bunch of AI slop artwork and this statement... &g
88.
by lowsong 1y ago
> I think we can all agree that LLMs can mimick consciousness to the point that it is hard for most people to discern them from humans. No, their output can mimic language patterns. > If they aren't, you need a really good argume
89.
by lowsong 1y ago
What is it about large language models that makes otherwise intelligent and curious people assign them these magical properties. There's no evidence, at all, that we're on the path to AGI. The very idea that non-biological conscio
90.
by lowsong 1y ago
I fully agree. People are going to be pointing to OpenAI as a warning of the dangers of the tech hype cycle for decades after its collapse.

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