[HN Gopher] Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my caree...
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Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
https://web.archive.org/web/20260608100644/https://human-in-...
Author : omblivion
Score : 142 points
Date : 2026-06-08 09:52 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev)
| omblivion wrote:
| I strongly agree with the author replies. I cannot grasp the
| reasonment of those who underestimate the power of these tools
| and their growing potential. We should remember that the outside
| world care about things that work, not about how good they are
| inside sadly.
| graemep wrote:
| > We should remember that the outside world care about things
| that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.
|
| Until they go wrong because they are not good inside.
| an0malous wrote:
| I don't know, I don't think anyone really cares. I can't
| unmute videos on Twitter/X on iOS, it's been like that for
| over a year. I get a new disclosure that my data was leaked
| about every month. Palantir and possible Claude targeted a
| girl's school for missile strikes. I still have to tell
| Claude what day or time it is right now sometimes, or it'll
| give me medical advice for my dog and the dosing or some
| important number is 2-5x off. At my last job, at a YC
| company, I was explicitly told to stop working on
| vulnerabilities that let you do things like arbitrarily
| change a user's email address through unprotected admin
| endpoints. Ten years ago I would've gotten a raise for this.
|
| We're in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a
| grift and nobody really cares anymore.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| > We're in some weird stage of capitalism where everything
| is a grift and nobody really cares anymore.
|
| I've felt this way for a long time now. There's no
| substance to anything anymore. The US economy feels like a
| more advanced Nigerian scam, where very few things that the
| US makes provides anything of actual value and substance.
| Americans just can't afford quality anymore. We decided
| we'd like to have significant amounts of garbage rather
| than fewer quality things. This change was likely due to
| revving the economy toward quarterly profit goals and GDP
| growth over everything else. Theoretically, prioritizing
| investments should have "trickled down" where companies
| could have more capital to invest in workers, R&Dand
| quality...but instead it all just got soaked up into
| executive pay and the stock market.
| graemep wrote:
| Its short termism. its the same throughout the west and
| beyond. The markets want returns on a one or two year
| period, not long term investment. Executive pay is almost
| always tied to short term profits and share prices.
| Chu4eeno wrote:
| Yeah, it's the perversion of capitalism known as publicly
| traded companies.
|
| Once you start noticing private companies (like some
| restaurant chains) manage to both treat their employees
| better and serve their customers better than the publicly
| traded ones, it seems like a very consistent trend.
|
| Having pursuit of endless growth to appease otherwise
| uninvolved shareholders might not be the best way to do
| "capitalism".
| graemep wrote:
| Someone who is trying to build a business they can sell
| when they retire, or that they might leave to their kids,
| thinks on a completely different time scale. Smaller
| businesses are also run more by personal judgement and
| relationships than by rules and procedures.
| jazz9k wrote:
| This is true. I have artist friends that are boycotting any
| company using AI art for their flyers/ads.
|
| I looked at some examples and couldn't tell the difference.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I think you can't tell the difference until the "art" shows
| details of something you know well -- a place you've been,
| out a hobby or sport you do.
|
| I'm thinking of this awful slop "art" I saw on Wayfair
| yesterday. As a surfer, it's hilarious. That's not how you
| stand on a board. It's not even a board. And the wave is
| terrible-- nobody wants to surf shorebreak like that!
| https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/design-
| art-4-hawai...
|
| I guess it could be a useful signal-- if you meet someone and
| they have it up in their home, you know they don't surf.
|
| More generally, I think anything AI produces that's dense
| with factual details is inherently trash.
| pc86 wrote:
| I was just reading comments the other day where people who
| dragging a company because they apparently used AI for some
| low level copywriting stuff. No art assets, no code (so far
| as anyone knows), not actually writing copy but more like "is
| everything spelled right, does the copy structure flow, have
| all these points been addressed, etc." Not only that but the
| only reason anyone even knew is because the company was
| completely up front and transparent about what they used AI
| for and what they didn't.
|
| There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI
| that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.
| watwut wrote:
| > There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward
| AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.
|
| Really? Have you seen how the CEOs marketed it and talked
| about people in that community? Artists hate it, because
| they listened to what AI community and leadership were
| openly saying.
|
| The weirdest thing on this all is how people find the hate
| puzzling considering initial rhetoric coming from the
| industry itself. And current rhetoric for that matter.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Right? AI evangelists never seem to miss an opportunity
| to be clueless about this
|
| "Why do you guys hate AI so much? All I did was tell you
| it's so great that it makes your skills worthless and how
| glad I am that I won't need people like you around in the
| future to make art and designs. What's wrong with that?"
| watwut wrote:
| What I noticed was that it was not just about money. It
| is not like people could live out of art last decades
| anyway. Artists actually know it better then anyone. But
| the disdain toward things artistic people value and like
| was noticeable. Even when one has bad economic news,
| surely it should be possible to say then without being
| gleeful arrogant jerk. Which is exactly what the message
| was.
|
| It is just ... we insulted those people, told them they
| are worthless, when they want to talk about things they
| like doing we tell them they should use AI and then we
| act all puzzled they hate us. How could that happen.
|
| And you can see it again and again.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| That's certainly a big part of it for me too
|
| There's a large amount of voices, both online and off,
| that are sneering. Between crabs in a bucket happy that
| software devs are being clawed down, and people happy
| thinking they no longer need us
|
| I'm worn down by a cacophony of voices telling me I'm no
| longer wanted or needed. I'm very tired.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Have you seen the arrogance of artists? They acted as
| though they were above replacement, above automation.
| They acted as though they were _superior_.
|
| We're all facing very hard times ahead of us, but I would
| be lying if I said it wasn't at least a little cathartic
| to watch this unfold. Programmers, too, were just as
| arrogant until only a few years ago. As were doctors,
| lawyers... The list goes on. How the mighty have fallen.
|
| Now we just gotta allow AIs to replace all these lavishly
| compensated CEOs too. Now that'd be epic.
| daveshistory wrote:
| I would imagine it is like transcribing, an industry I was
| in for a little bit when I was younger. I saw the same
| transition there and imagine it will be elsewhere. First
| it's a bunch of people saying "AI can't take our jobs, our
| jobs are thinking jobs." Then it's "Sure, you could use AI,
| but there's no real advantage to it because it makes so
| many mistakes."
|
| But pretty soon after that it's "Why am I paying a
| transcriptionist $3/minute when I can just have the machine
| auto-transcribe it and then my admin assistant can just
| scan it for mistakes."
|
| Even if there still IS a quality difference between great
| writers and AI product, "good enough" is good enough for
| most customers, especially if you have to pay professional
| rates to get better.
| rfgplk wrote:
| Exactly, time amortized LLMs are already unbeatable at
| this point.
| vrganj wrote:
| The outside world itself will stop working if we replace labor
| with LLMs.
|
| Mass unemployment equals riots equals an end to the status quo.
| pc86 wrote:
| This doesn't seem at all related to the above comment - or
| anything, for that matter. Nobody is suggesting we "replace
| labor" with LLMs.
| vrganj wrote:
| > Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs.
|
| I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at
| the AI labs have been saying?
|
| Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure
| how you could've missed that?
| pc86 wrote:
| You could replace every software engineer on the planet
| with a perfect LLM tomorrow and it would not lead to mass
| unemployment-triggered riots. If you're talking about
| software engineering specifically, you're not correct. If
| you're talking about all labor, you're talking about
| something unrelated to the article.
| vrganj wrote:
| To quote the article:
|
| > Take copywriting. It was a profession that took years
| to master and paid well. This changed slowly as more
| professionals joined the market, even after the demand
| spike driven by ecommerce and adtech. Now, LLMs have
| destroyed the job for the vast majority of professionals.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| The job of software engineering is more or less literally
| to automate every other job. If there are no software
| engineers it's because everything is or has been
| automated. If AI isn't capable of that then there's still
| software engineering to do and your argument collapses.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| The article very explicitly discusses the replacement of
| all knowledge workers. You sure you read it?
| rfgplk wrote:
| > Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not
| sure how you could've missed that?
|
| Even if code typing goes away, a new breed of engineering
| will take it's place.
| jason_oster wrote:
| Do you normally listen to quacks? You clearly don't
| believe them. Why are you even paying any attention to
| it?
| peterspath wrote:
| The next big revolution probably involves burning down
| datacenters.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| Sounds like a knowledge worker task description on figuring
| out how to stop the masses from burning down datacenters.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| riots lead to hiring more police, so loyalty, prostitution,
| and sponsored eunuchships will be future career list. Those
| who are lucky can become a rent-a-pal.
| avaer wrote:
| The outside world doesn't even care that things work, they care
| that it looks like it works long enough. Investors don't care
| that it's snake oil, as long as they're not left holding the
| bag.
|
| AI is really good at making things that look like they work.
|
| This is a steelman of your argument.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| Well yes. This has been the history of the web. Frontpage
| generated really crappy code but people still used it to
| create websites. They didn't care about code quality just how
| it looked.
| ldng wrote:
| Right.
|
| But where are Frontpage and Dreamweaver now ?
| jason_oster wrote:
| They were replaced by other WYSIWYG website editors like
| Wix and Squarespace. These replacements are evidence in
| favor of the original claim. The specific products are
| irrelevant.
| sarchertech wrote:
| My mom was generating web pages with dreamweaver 25 years
| ago. People used it sure, but people certainly did care
| about the quality because it produced unmaintainable code.
| If people truly didn't care about the quality people would
| have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around
| 2005.
| jason_oster wrote:
| > people would have stopped learning how to write html
| and CSS around 2005.
|
| They did. Now it's all JSX or htmx or some other favored
| template or DSL monstrosity. Most people do not write
| HTML or CSS, and haven't in decades. You're spot on.
|
| This says nothing about quality, however. Quality of
| HTML/CSS is purely subjective. A website's presentation
| layer cannot meet any technical standard metric for
| quality in engineering or manufacturing such as
| durability, reliability, efficiency, or safety.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I'm not going define away blocks of HTML inside of php
| scripts as not writing HTML by hand, but if you want to
| do that then sure most people were never writing HTML and
| CSS by hand.
| red75prime wrote:
| This is a sentiment a highly skilled framework knitter could
| have shared. Investors don't care if those newfangled steam-
| powered knitting machines produce inferior textiles as long
| as people buy it.
|
| Parallels to the industrial revolution are apparent. And this
| is disturbing.
| Younes86 wrote:
| fully agree with that and it's exactly the problem and it's
| getting worse with muti agent.
|
| it's look like clean and polished but its full of mess, and
| duplicate code, no conventions..
|
| we're generating code faster but at what price. but the real
| and deep project intelligence still a bottleneck.
| archagon wrote:
| Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade
| rage at how poorly software works these days. Slop code will
| only accelerate this trend.
|
| For the most part, people don't need a thousand new features;
| the investment class does. Nobody gets mad at Craigslist.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-
| grade rage at how poorly software works these days.
|
| The problem is... what can we _practically do_? When the
| village fish monger 200 years ago sold shoddy fish, you could
| go to him, give him a few whacks with his fish, and even if
| the fish monger didn 't improve the quality of the fish he
| sold in response, you at least got some kind of feeling you
| got justice.
|
| Nowadays? For most of the world, those responsible for the
| bad software aren't in the same village any more, for 95% of
| the world's population the USA is on an entirely different
| continent. Can't do anything to hold anyone accountable, with
| the exception of cancelling a 5$/month subscription LOL and
| yelling at some poor Filipino or Indian callcenter grunt. If
| you're among the lucky 5% that lives in the US, sure, you can
| file lawsuits if the problem is egregious enough, but that's
| expensive and consumer protection has been gutted. And doing
| a copy of a plumber's brother event? Might give you people
| treating you like jesus-come-to-earth but in the end you'll
| still face capital punishment for it, if you don't get taken
| out by the private security of the uber rich before you can
| even raise your gun.
|
| Whatever the eventual solution to the problem you raise will
| end up being, it is certain it will _not_ be pretty...
| bottled up rage is not good for any society.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > We should remember that the outside world care about things
| that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.
|
| How good something is inside is _directly responsible_ for how
| well it works. Your customers might not care about the former,
| but they will care when your cuts to the former impact the
| latter (and they always do impact it, in the end).
| genezeta wrote:
| I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the
| subject of _job security_ in the software industry through the
| years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just _age_ ,
| incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever.
|
| If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had
| in common it would be precisely this: I thought
| that having this knowledge would set me apart
|
| And it never does.
| lukan wrote:
| Some knowledge does set you apart - the ability to ship things,
| people pay for.
|
| Not producing holy code in the academic best language.
| catmanjan wrote:
| Ability can't really be compared to knowledge... e.g. you
| might lose the ability to play the piano, yet retain the
| knowledge about how to
| lukan wrote:
| I don't know (also english is not my first language), but
| to me it takes knowledge to know what is the right tool for
| the job. To know what is required to make the client happy.
| To know where great code matters and where quick and dirty
| or nowdays vibe code is sufficient. And that knowledge can
| be complex. It usually requires knowing how people think
| and act, who don't know how to open a terminal. Because
| those are the main people using software.
| lwhi wrote:
| I think in the future, those who succeed will be equivalent to
| wayfinders.
|
| People who _can_ see the wood for the trees, and are able to
| understand multiple (sometimes conflicting) requirements and
| work out a way through that solves the problems that arise, for
| all involved parties.
|
| An understanding of domain, the ability to communicate
| effectively and a mind that can think laterally, will all be
| vital.
| csomar wrote:
| In a perfect world, yes. However, the current tech world is
| akin to a flea market. Those who shout out more stand out
| more.
| lwhi wrote:
| Surely you can judge people by results though?
| RugnirViking wrote:
| measuring programmer productivity is notoriously
| difficult. Does james, who shipped 20 features without
| testing thoroughly provide more value? or does joe, who
| patched a security hole in that time and avoided
| disaster? what about jason, who facilitated communication
| between them, and kept the infra going so their changes
| could go into prod without issues?
| lwhi wrote:
| We won't be programmers in this scenario.
|
| The results will hopefully be a lot more tangible.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| This also was true for teams, and indeed, businesses.
| It's not a property of the code itself, its a property of
| products and outcomes. I don't think AI agents doing the
| day to day changes will affect this directly (but people
| may have more time to think about these higher level
| problems, and increased volume of changes may make the
| issue more important)
| lwhi wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I suppose, my best guess is that a team will be reduced
| to one or two people; the those that are left will be
| judged solely on outcomes.
|
| Two (human) brains are always useful; the benefit of a
| human in these scenarios is that we can be accountable,
| and that we have a very real incentive to do well and not
| be fired. The LLM obviously doesn't care in that regard!
| pirates wrote:
| It's clearly Jason in this scenario
| csomar wrote:
| How do you do that in practice though? You won't know the
| engineer is a con-man until after you have spent $$ and
| months into the process. Then you are in the position of
| trusting nobody.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I think in the future, those who succeed will be equivalent
| to wayfinders.
|
| In the future, those who succeed will be the owners of
| capital.
| lwhi wrote:
| Well, yes .. but they're going to need people to do their
| evil bidding /s
| oompydoompy74 wrote:
| Past, Present, and Future. If you control the means of
| production you win. Knowledge, skill, and experience are
| largely irrelevant to the conversation. I've held this
| opinion for quite some time and would be interested to hear
| alternative perspectives.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Past, Present, and Future. If you control the means of
| production you win.
|
| Yeah, but we were talking about only success, not
| winning.
|
| In the past and the present, you could succeed purely on
| a combination of skill, talent and labour. This approach
| looks like it will not work much longer.
| lwhi wrote:
| I can see where you're coming from.
|
| We exchange our knowledge, time, and skill for money. If
| this exchange is no longer viable -- because similar
| value can be accessed via LLM agents -- we'll have no way
| of making money.
|
| I do think some (non-billionaire) people will survive the
| transition, but the question then becomes: what happens
| to everyone else?
| jerkstate wrote:
| How do you know those aren't the same thing?
| Fargren wrote:
| Because you can inherit capital.
|
| You can also inherit talent, but "the descendants of
| those worthy are worthy" is a belief humanity spilled a
| lot of blood to get away from.
| archagon wrote:
| Means of production, yadda yadda... I feel a great sense of
| deja vu.
| fasterik wrote:
| I don't think history bears this out. If you look at the
| most successful entrepreneurs of the computer age, none of
| them started out as owners of capital. Bill Gates, Jeff
| Bezos, Steve Jobs: yes, they had some level of privilege
| and opportunity, but they didn't start out as billionaires.
| Their success came from their ideas.
| Matl wrote:
| In the case of Gates at least, it definitely came in part
| from having access to the right people.
| Calavar wrote:
| Gates famously came from a rich family, but Bezos did too
| - he used hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments
| from his immediate family members to get Amazon off the
| ground. Maybe 1 to 2% of Americans would be able draw
| that much from their family members if they were to
| launch a startup. If we define "bootstrapped" wealth as
| starting from an economic background within one standard
| deviation of the national average, then he doesn't count.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The fact that you had to separate them into an age should
| tell you something.
|
| Something happened in the 80s, and it wasn't "the dawn of
| a new technology". It happened specifically in the US,
| and was done by their government.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Does it surprise you that wealth takes time to
| accumulate? None of those people had a get rich quick
| scheme that made them billionaires in their 20's.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Those were mostly the same billionaires 20 years ago.
| contingencies wrote:
| > In the future, those who succeed will be the owners of
| capital.
|
| No. In the future, those who succeed will be the children
| of the owners of capital.
|
| See _The Economist_ , February 2025:
| https://archive.is/PCoWl
| skybrian wrote:
| How does that work? Funding is useful, but we aren't seeing
| fully-automated startups, and often, founders don't need
| all that much funding.
| awesomeMilou wrote:
| By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce,
| therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete,
| therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lots of
| starvation, poverty and death.
|
| When billionaires say "think about the trillions of
| people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of
| living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about
| _their_ descendants, not yours.
| skybrian wrote:
| This is dystopian speculation. You don't have to believe
| every science fiction scenario someone famous talks
| about.
| dag100 wrote:
| It's hardly speculative when it is effectively what
| happened just after the Industrial Revolution, but with
| more power ceded to capital. In many ways, it's already
| happening.
| skybrian wrote:
| No, that was not "effectively what happened" in the
| Industrial Revolution. That was an enormous change, but
| it didn't "completely eliminate the need for a human
| workforce." That's just hype.
| _doctor_love wrote:
| Same as it ever was...
|
| Same as it ever was...
| RugnirViking wrote:
| does it never? seems to me that people pay me precisely for my
| knowledge, learned over many years. The knowledge translates
| into action, sure. But thats like the old parable about a
| plumber being paid EUR150 for a 5 minute consult that involves
| turning a single screw. "i could have turned that screw!" the
| customer cries, ignoring that yes, they could have. But they
| didn't know to.
|
| I think perhaps the problem is instead "I thought that having
| this knowledge would set me apart, _forever_ , without me
| having to learn anything else"
| esikich wrote:
| There's a good chance the apprentice plumber could've fixed
| it just as quickly. That's where we are now.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| right. Apprentices will always grow, and so too must you,
| if you want to keep being paid. Their job is to come with
| new tools and new ideas, and your job is to keep a wider
| view into what you're doing and why, maintaining trust (you
| need to build the authority to tell apprentices no when
| their ideas might flood the customer's house), and keep
| moving towards other parts of the business and solving
| harder problems (working with sales, hiring, etc to manage
| customers and apprentices). AI will not build authority for
| you.
|
| If your argument is that the customer themselves could use
| an AI or whatever to learn plumbing, that was always an
| option (libraries, google, youtube). They pay you so they
| don't have to worry about flooding their house (or at least
| have someone else to blame).
|
| They might be able to "one shot" simple fixes that you
| might previously have assigned to an apprentice, but
| believe me, AIs are not about to start doing complex things
| for the layman that actually required seniors previously in
| either programming or plumbing, because very few of those
| things were just "type better into a computer". (build
| trust, speak confidently, know what _doesn 't_ work, take
| responsibility, test without breaking systems, communicate
| and work together with other professionals, have opinions)
| ufocia wrote:
| Libraries, Google and YouTube were/are not nearly as
| efficient at conveying _targetted_ _actionable_ expertise
| as AI is.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I agree that it is easier than ever to start doing stuff,
| instead of reading. I don't think that means its easier
| to jump right to doing large projects. The problems to be
| solved there are often subtler, of a different class, and
| manifold, and a layman may not realise what has gone
| wrong until long afterwards or never (this also happened
| before, many people took on projects they weren't ready
| for and reinvented the wheel trying to solve issues they
| ran into)
|
| it's oft debated, but I do fall on the side of "you
| should still know maths even in the age of the
| calculator/matlab/llms". I have found productive
| employment, and indeed tickets to speak to the big boys
| in their gilded palaces many times because graphs and
| charts are their favorite toys and knowing maths got me
| there. They have always been able to make things with
| excel, with matlab etc. Often they actually can make
| charts themselves, but they don't care to become experts
| in what data is important and what isn't.
|
| The LLM isn't yet good enough to tell you what data
| matters. People act like LLMs are magical gods that do
| everything, but it is but another tool. It has
| limitations, just as it has strengths. It is not
| ultimately convincing, it is not infallible, and experts
| will keep finding edge cases all the damn time. Anyone
| working with them every day knows this, and you need to
| know it too.
| smcg wrote:
| targeted, expertise, fast... pick 2
| ValentineC wrote:
| On the flip side: it's trivial to search "how to fix that
| pipe" on YouTube, see a bunch of success videos, and
| trust them all.
|
| I'm not sure I can trust any single AI, or even multiple
| AI models, to not hallucinate overconfidence in certain
| real world domains.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| I think a more sane minded customer would not mind paying for
| the assurance and having someone to blame in case things go
| wrong, not necessarily because of their domain knowledge.
|
| I could theoretically learn everything about plumbing but
| would still rather call a professional for the peace of mind
| that it was done "correctly" and it the process goes wrong, I
| would have an instant fix instead of trying to go back and
| educating myself on plumbing more.
|
| Could you consider that as part of knowledge? Yeah and also
| no. Because the knowledge can be copied and put into a LLM
| but legally a LLM cannot sign off on things like NDAs or take
| accountability like a human has to in these roles.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I agree. I also think that deciding that LLMs encode all
| knowledge perfectly, either now or in an imagined future,
| is foolish. My experience is that they match the average
| general state of experts among the field. The sort of thing
| a junior might read to start to grasp the general ideas and
| issues in a field. They rarely have opinions, or good
| intuitions around more specific scenarios. This is why the
| current equilibrium of a senior piloting one works so well-
| theyre leaning on it to speed up, but pushing it away from
| the "average" where circumstances demand.
|
| We can argue about imagined future progress, but I don't
| see that getting much better, given that the literature
| doesn't often do that, and how often experts in one
| scenario end up being poorly suited given another set of
| facts.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| This is the old China fallacy.
|
| "Oh, we'll just ship production to China, and do the design and
| marketing in US, this is where the real value is anyway, China
| will never be able to do design and marketing as well as we
| do".
|
| Literally same thing:
|
| "Oh, we'll just let LLMs code, and we'll just do Taste. LLMs
| will never be able to do Taste"
| pmg101 wrote:
| It certainly seems similar.
|
| Except China is just humans in a different location so it
| shouldn't be surprising they can do things humans in the US
| can do.
|
| LLMs are a totally distinct type of thing. It's possible
| they'll be able to do Taste but it's also quite possible
| they'll never be able to.
| kristjank wrote:
| Knowledge often does not produce competence, especially in the
| applicable market. I work on the system administration side of
| things, and I have encountered many output-competent developers
| that were immeasurably stupid, but very little incompetent ones
| with tons of cryptic knowledge and intuitive understanding of
| the systems they worked on.
|
| It seems to me that knowledge doesn't always imply competence,
| but the lack of knowledge often very well explains
| incompetence. And, since the LLM is replacing the competence
| part without imprinting any knowledge on the one that wields
| it, it generates a lot of competent imbeciles that pass
| interviews and appear as though they not only do things, but
| know things as well. And once you reach that critical mass,
| sheeeeesh
| kamaal wrote:
| >>I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart
|
| The whole leetcode movement was designed to sell this idea that
| knowing a solution that can be looked up in a matter of minutes
| on the internet some how puts you astronomically ahead of those
| who don't. Strangely enough go look at that site itself and
| thousands submit working solutions to those problems.
|
| Knowing a solution discovered by somebody the first time, is no
| test of capacity or ability to get work done. It would probably
| matter if you discovered solution to a novel problem by
| yourself. How does knowing the end result of a long process by
| _other people_ decide _your_ ability to do anything at all?
|
| During interviews I have seen companies go to absurd lengths to
| justify these tests. Including asking candidates to imagine
| they might not have internet and might need to know these
| solutions.
|
| The only skill that really matters in our line of work is today
| most popularly known as _high agency_ lifestyle. And delivery
| skills largely depend on _ownership_. In my decades of
| experience with software work, not knowing a thing isn 't even
| a correlating factor in getting things done.
| nlawalker wrote:
| My concern is less about _knowledge_ and more about _the
| ability to communicate and make good decisions_. I 'm not sure
| how well it holds up against technology that can sometimes make
| a good showing at it, but is most importantly automated, cheap
| and subservient.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Everyone but insane people like me want some kind of durable
| stability to their life
|
| they don't want to be forced to reinvent themselves every five
| years because the world is changing faster than it ever has
|
| While I understand where people are coming from to an extent
| that's just never been my lifestyle and so when I see people
| looking for some kind of long-term stability I just kind of
| baffled at what makes them think that that was ever possible.
|
| It's like the propaganda from the American 1950s nuclear family
| idealism really got locked in in a way that people believe that
| there was a real thing
|
| And while it was certainly true that American baby boomers got
| to ride the economic pax Americana that happened from 1949 to
| today, that period is over
|
| While it is still possible for you to have a career your career
| is most likely going to change every 5 to 10 years now and
| that's just a fact of the society that we have built
|
| we did not build society intentionally
|
| It was built via attrition and the current leaders are the ones
| who are fully committed to monetary based global domination
| Npovview wrote:
| Red Queen hypothesis is a hypothesis in evolutionary biology
| proposed in 1973, that species must constantly adapt, evolve,
| and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against
| ever-evolving opposing species.
|
| Why do we always assume environments and other agents will
| always remain static.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I think the people that survive don't assume environments
| stay the same
|
| All the people I know who have a bunch of kids are planning
| a century ahead
| yankee_dodge wrote:
| Knowledge depreciates, so it is clarifying to add time
| explicitly: I thought this knowledge would set me apart...
|
| Forever? That seems over-optimistic for all occupations in all
| eras.
|
| For the rest of my working career? This really hasn't been true
| in a long time either, especially in software, where technology
| changes on the order of years.
|
| For the duration of my mortgage? The fondest hope, but pretty
| much like the above.
|
| For the next 10 years? Here is the big change. Even for fields
| like medicine, where knowledge really did set you apart. The AI
| can adapt faster. AI is inside the human OODA loop.
| sifar wrote:
| May be for OO not yet for DA. Existential pressure drives
| better(fruitful) decisons and actions. AI has yet to
| incorporate that into training/inference.
| OJFord wrote:
| The good news I think is that you have to be really really
| specialist for the specialist knowledge to actually be the
| important bit; for most it's the _ability to obtain_
| specialist knowledge, and apply it.
|
| As long as we can adapt, move on to the next knowledge-needed
| area, we'll hopefully be alright.
|
| (I think there are many analogies here to things people have
| always said about undergraduate study - e.g. it's about
| teaching you _to learn_ , not teaching you the specific
| things you're taught, to be remembered and applied forever.)
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Agreed. The ability to learn new things, and what
| characteristics their ability to learn has -- that's one
| dimension that strongly differentiates people in nearly any
| domain.
|
| But there are other dimensions as well that differentiate
| people and determine their value to business, like the ability
| to be handed problems no one else can solve and stick with them
| through sheer stubbornness until solutions begin to emerge.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| If knowledge doesn't set us apart, then what does? How do we
| make it in this brave new world?
|
| Anomie is at an all time high. It feels like the world's
| unreadable right now. No idea what to do.
| rowbin wrote:
| I agree, his takes should not be dismissed lightly. I'm not sure
| about "demand is fixed" though. I feel like software demand has
| been declared saturated at least a few times.
| jameshart wrote:
| I have been making software professionally for 25 years and in
| all that time i have never run into the problem that _we have
| run out of things to do_.
| rglullis wrote:
| Do not use past events to predict the future, or you risk end
| up becoming a turkey:
| https://peteweishaupt.medium.com/talebs-tu-e406eb8859a8
| pixel_popping wrote:
| Exactly, if we look at what projects are on-going now, look
| at Startups, they are practically solving all the same thing
| and most of them will be dead soon, we need to finally reach
| the era where tools to "zeroshot" anything becomes widespread
| to create new problems, but even by then, we will have an
| oversupply of tech workers, many will have to convert to a
| different field, many will not want to be paid based on
| callcenter type of work which is prompt-as-much-as-you-can,
| understandably.
|
| It's quite hard to predict what will happen, but in a few
| years, I bet the unemployment rate of tech workers will be
| really high, we can just look at how many jobs are currently
| already replaceable but the owner of it is just lagging in
| the implementation of automation, it's probably already the
| large majority of tech jobs.
| leoncos wrote:
| Agreed. The limitations of human context window and
| communication bandwidth restrict the complexity of large-scale
| software.
|
| LLM will have an extremely large context window and extremely
| high communication bandwidth in the future. Therefore, even
| more complex large-scale software will emerge.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I feel like software demand has been declared saturated at
| least a few times.
|
| It's never been declared saturated, with one exception in the
| six months following the dot-com crash.
|
| I've been in the industry since the mid-90s. I have not seen
| automation with the potential to automate away _everything_ for
| the average office worker.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| "fixed" is definitely incorrect but there's probably a ceiling
| on how fast the demand can grow, just because other bottlenecks
| will take over at some point.
| pixel_popping wrote:
| I agree with all of it, and I think author did a really good job
| at actually saying what's true, it's almost like developers don't
| want to hear it.
|
| I feel that OP has reach that point _because_ he went out of the
| basic tooling like Claude Code (at least in its default state)
| and embrace multi-model, automatic reviewing, fuse, loops and so-
| on, when it 's done right, well, failure rate to solve issues is
| <1%, this is exactly why you arrive to that kind of depressing
| thoughts afterward and it's spot-on.
|
| Many people will disagree because they are still at the vibe
| coding stage, not "as much as I can prompt will be automatically
| done stage". Claude Code imo is deliberately not implementing the
| best ways for users to work, they have recently implemented
| Workflows but that's almost a year late, many companies are doing
| this since always and that's just part of basic tooling nowadays.
|
| People talk about models and benchmarks score while genuinely I'm
| baffled because they seem to ignore that that same benchmark can
| reach 99% by levering tooling intelligently, we don't really need
| better models (at least for coding), we just need adoption of
| proper methods. The day developers will discover that they are
| already able to solve 300 issues in a single day with ZERO
| supervision in complex Rust codebases, I'm sure they'll change
| their mind.
|
| Our bottleneck in our team is currently just having the mental
| bandwidth to type as much as possible, it's kinda sad, it is
| becoming all absurd.
|
| If you are still watching the output of the model for coding
| tasks, I bet you haven't challenged your own methodologies,
| _yet_.
| sixtram wrote:
| Just 300 a day? That's only one ticket every 1.5 minutes. I
| hope in a year we can fix an issue under 30 seconds with ZERO
| supervision.
| pixel_popping wrote:
| We will, most work can be parallelized, the same way as
| developers are able to work _together_ on large codebases,
| tools can as well.
| canadiantim wrote:
| May I ask what are some of methods you're using for this level
| of productivity?
| thunspa wrote:
| Also interested.
| grebc wrote:
| Your argument boils down to: it's different this time.
| pc86 wrote:
| Isn't that a perfectly fair argument if you can articulate why?
| grebc wrote:
| There's not much articulation except some personal snippets
| about someone caught in the hype cycle of a product, that the
| hive mind is buzzing about deafeningly.
|
| Tools/improvements have rarely been negative in such a
| massive way except rare instances, and even then society
| moved on and past those tools to bigger & better things.
|
| How many people today seriously consider agriculture as a
| career prospect but almost all humans who lived in the last
| 2000 years worked as peasant labor on a farm. We are thriving
| in comparison to that period of time.
| red75prime wrote:
| This is the technology that aims to replicate all of the
| human functionality. So, the aim is unprecedented. You
| might not be convinced that this aim is achievable (despite
| having the human brain that achieves it, unlike, say,
| superluminal travel), but, at least, you might be inclined
| to recognize that something potentially unprecedented is
| going on.
| grebc wrote:
| Cool. You best worry and stress yourself out about a
| situation you cannot control then.
| red75prime wrote:
| The usual political means (writing to your senator or
| something appropriate for your country of residency)
| still work.
| grebc wrote:
| Have you done this since you're concerned?
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Just because a generation or two down the line is better
| off does't mean a lot of lives aren't effected negatively
| when industries are destroyed or moved.
| grebc wrote:
| I guess my point is it's rarely the transformational
| technology people talk it up to be.
|
| 5 years ago absolutely everyone was talking about how
| blockchains & ledgers were going to solve all the
| problems of the world, and executives needed blockchain &
| ledgers in their products. Now, no one cares.
|
| Not saying that happens in this case, but don't believe
| the hype so easy. Even job losses in the context of a
| radically different policies by the current
| administration doesn't get a second thought, nor does the
| fact we're no longer in a low interest rate environment.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Sure don't be gullible, of course. I was never sold on
| blockchain, and there was major skepticism across the
| industry.
|
| I only know one person who works on crypto projects, and
| no one who uses crypto for purchases. Yet everyone I know
| in engineering and non-engineers use AI for work and
| personal tasks. This is a different ballgame.
|
| It could be the innovation curve stops here and we only
| have to adapt to Claude 4 level AI. I'm sure there will
| be headwinds like with driverless cars. But it's very
| reasonable to guess where this is going.
| grebc wrote:
| I don't think it's reasonable at all, but live your life
| as you see fit.
|
| It's easy in retrospect to be say "sure, we were
| sceptical of crypto". It certainly was not easy then to
| voice that, nor is it easy now to be sceptical of AI -
| without being labelled a Luddite or just negative.
|
| Money is a huge factor in all this, people love to
| discuss the current in thing and what's more in than some
| tech that's IPO'ing? Investors were making stupid money
| with crypto. Investors again are about to make stupid
| money with AI.
| petesergeant wrote:
| ok, so?
| grebc wrote:
| It rarely is.
| contrast wrote:
| Did you read it?
|
| The argument boils down to: this is exactly the same as other
| times. And provides multiple examples.
| watwut wrote:
| He literally did not provided multiple examples of such a
| thing.
| noodletheworld wrote:
| Yes; that is literally the opposite of what this article
| does.
| raincole wrote:
| The article: it's different this time because X and Y.
|
| You: you're saying "it's different this time."
|
| I don't know. It looks like AI really rots people's brains. As
| if that they just shut down their minds when they see an
| anything AI-related. Imagine if this article were about
| _anything else_ , like:
|
| Article: the stock bubble is going to burst because...
|
| Comment: your argument boils down to "the stock bubble is going
| to burst."
|
| It'd be so stupid. But somehow when it comes to AI this kind of
| weird comment is tolerated even celebrated.
| jappgar wrote:
| Some food is mass-produced in factories.
|
| It tastes bad, and poisons you slowly.
|
| Some (less) food is produced on farms and kitchens.
|
| It tastes good, and keeps you healthy.
|
| I don't really care who/what wrote the code. I don't even really
| care about the code at all. What I care about is the end product.
|
| The problem is not "code quality" the problem is that billionaire
| sociopaths have removed human judgement (and human morality) from
| the dev loop. This started long before AI.
|
| Coders are hyperfocused on style and missing the substance. We
| are entering a world where rich bastards can produce evil
| software without any checks whatsoever.
|
| At least when humans were required to write the code, they had to
| find and retain unscrupulous humans. Now they're completely
| unfettered, and we're soon going to learn the precise shape of
| the digital prisons they're constructing.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Every freelancer that switched to AI feels exactly what happened
| even if they can't name it.
|
| We became for AI what our clients were for us. Some hate it, some
| love it.
|
| To feel safe in life our clients needed to have an actual
| business. Now when we are the clients of our AI we are scared,
| because now we need to have an actual viable business. Economic
| machine that works. Because the old model of just selling our
| time and effort to a client no longer works, when we are the
| clients.
| noodletheworld wrote:
| I don't entirely disagree, but as with many other posts on this
| topic...
|
| > They will come for finance, biology, law, marketing, all
| knowledge work. That's their stated goal and they're already
| teasing it with "ChatGPT for Health" and similar launches.
| They're working on "harnesses" for other fields, it's just a
| matter of time before we have "Claude Finance Analyst" or
| something.
|
| ...
|
| > Beg to disagree. The models will learn good engineering
| principles at some point.
|
| ...
|
| > Stop and think, don't try to predict the future using (bad)
| past examples.
|
| Don't try to prediction the future based on the past.
|
| Also, here is my doomsday prediction.
|
| Thats kind of ironic.
|
| Heres a more thoughtful take: everything is an s curve.
|
| Things start out fast, then they slow down.
|
| It happens in learning, in tech, in _literally everything_.
|
| The question (unanswered) is where we are in that curve.
|
| Will they get better? Yes.
|
| A lot better? A bit better? /shrug
| danieltanfh95 wrote:
| > The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit.
|
| No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.
| red75prime wrote:
| And when the required complexity of software to do the task
| gets high enough, you assign an agent to do the task instead.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Entropy makes sure that you can't scale systems into infinite
| completely.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| We have thought that a few times with earlier technologies -
| a smaller chip requires less local reduction of entropy than
| a room sized computer. This may keep going for a long time
| yet.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Exactly and this is true of many things. Much of the world is
| not zero sum, otherwise we'd have fallen into the "malthusian
| trap" several productivity booms ago.
| lelanthran wrote:
| >> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit.
|
| > No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.
|
| There's an upper limit on everything. Maybe there's no ceiling
| on incidental complexity for s/ware development, but there sure
| as shit a ceiling on the essential complexity.
| naveen99 wrote:
| s/complexity/entropy
|
| No ceiling.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| but, as the layoffs demonstrate, there is a ceiling for
| employed software engineers...
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Clearly there isn't infinite money to spend on infinite
| complexity.
| vanuatu wrote:
| it is subject to market forces, but there's no clear ceiling
| you can draw like copywriting, or textiles, or horses and
| cars
|
| with abstractions and complexity there's essentially infinite
| demand for software
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| I don't understand. What do you mean by complexity? Feature
| requests or something else.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> There is no ceiling for complexity._
|
| There are perhaps limits to _useful_ complexity.
|
| There are certainly limits to complexity people are willing to
| pay for. So if you are looking to make a living in development
| the fact that anyone will soon be able to do the basics and
| customise it for themselves is going to be a problem for you.
| Not directly, but because you'll be competing for fewer and
| fewer more interesting jobs that pay less and less over time
| (as development increasingly becomes a commodity task like
| waiting tables and stacking shelves), with the rest of us
| (maybe not me, I've already been unhappy in tech for years as
| remote work isn't good for my mental health, so I might bail
| early and beat the rush for those cushy table waiting jobs!).
| rfgplk wrote:
| You're assuming the current ensemble of commonly used
| software stacks is the most optimal there is. This assumption
| is simply wrong. Even looking at something simple like the
| office suite you can probably find countless areas where
| improvements can be made.
| star-glider wrote:
| 100% software doesn't take up space; there's always something
| more that can be automated or improved:
| https://loadhigh.jtylergriffin.com/devs-are-fine/
| ryanackley wrote:
| AI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not
| a given
|
| * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace
|
| * AI companies will have the capital continue to expand
| infrastructure
|
| * there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge
| workers are replaced
|
| There are strong headwinds to all three of these.
|
| Hey it may come to pass but it's very speculative at this point.
| I see a lot of tech people simply overlaying the progress curve
| of previous tech booms which is reductive.
| hyperpape wrote:
| > The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace
|
| I guess this is trivially true if you say "maximalism" (hell,
| the maximalists think it will speed up as the AI becomes a
| super-AI-researcher), but as long as the rate of change is
| positive and not miniscule, it's hard to predict what 2035
| looks like in software development.
|
| These things are very hard to quantify, but making the progress
| that happened from Jan 2025-December 2025 repeat twice in 10
| years would be enough for me to say I couldn't predict the day-
| to-day of a software engineer in 2035.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current
| pace
|
| Frontier AI is already good enough to be _very_ useful for
| engineering. It 's too costly for many places where it _could_
| be useful today.
|
| The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at
| least 10x over the next 18-24 months.
|
| And likely again in the following 18-24 months.
|
| At the same time, the cost per watt is going to down ~25%, and
| at the same time speed will increase (also valuable since time
| is money).
| coffeefirst wrote:
| > The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at
| least 10x over the next 18-24 months.
|
| How do you know that?
|
| In 2026 the prices have been spiking. It now costs orders of
| magnitude more than it did in November.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > How do you know that?
|
| Historic trends, every 18 months, performance for the same
| level of quality has gone down 90%.
|
| See: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1gpr2p4/l
| lms_co...
|
| And Chart 13 here: https://www.rdworldonline.com/ais-great-
| compression-20-chart...
|
| And here: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-
| price-trends
|
| The technology already exists now on the algorithmic front
| for the next 10x drop between everyone adopting DeepSeek's
| MLA, MoE (mostly already done), Medusa (a better version of
| Google's speculative decoding), Kimi's Attn Residuals, and
| Mimo's Sliding Window Attn, and (possibly) Microsoft's
| 1.58b (this may be a nothing burger).
|
| Historically, algorithmic gains are only ~30% of the pie,
| but there's enough out there to get to 10x, with just
| what's available already. The other ~70% of the pie is
| better training data (often synthetic) and distilling
| frontier knowledge. There's no sign we are tapped out on
| that front.
|
| > In 2026 the prices have been spiking.
|
| That's not for the _SAME_ level of output...
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| MoE isn't the magical improvement you think it is.
| Logprobs of MoE models are always worse in quality than
| the dense equivalent and they struggler harder at very
| long context quality than equivalent dense models. This
| is why Chinese companies like qwen are releasing dense
| and MoE versions of their models at near equivalent
| sizes. I always use/prefer the dense one.
|
| Speculative decoding usually only improves decode and
| sometimes actually harm prefill and for agentic coding
| prefill matters more.
|
| You're right about the rest but I need to set the record
| straight on these details.
| Ukv wrote:
| Price of the current frontier may vary, but price for a
| given level of capability tends to drop pretty fast.
|
| April of last year you'd get 1431 ELO[0] from o3-2025-04-16
| for $8.00 per million output tokens. April of this year you
| can get 1436 ELO from deepseek-v4-flash for $0.2 per
| million output tokens.
|
| [0]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/arena-
| leaderboard
| saxenaabhi wrote:
| Sure, but i don't think it's reasonable to hold given
| level of capability constant in a landscape where a give
| consumer of AI also has competitive pressures.
|
| I can't use last year's SOTA model when my competitors
| can use the current SOTA model.
|
| This is also baked in the eye watering valuations of
| model companies.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > I can't use last year's SOTA model when my competitors
| can use the current SOTA model.
|
| You can use open source models of equivalent or better
| capabilities for ~90% less cost...
|
| If you kick and scream hard enough, you can always find a
| data point to make sure you're correct.
|
| No one is saying that the Opus model last year costs 90%
| less now than it does this year.
|
| That's not how it works.
|
| There are better, more efficient models with equivalent
| capabilities that are 90% cheaper (see DeepSeek v4 Pro).
| margalabargala wrote:
| > I can't use last year's SOTA model when my competitors
| can use the current SOTA model.
|
| Lots of people can. Tools don't need to be top of the
| line to be useful. Snap-on may exist, but they don't put
| Harbor Freight out of business.
|
| Advanced IDEs exist but complex projects were still built
| in vim.
|
| The more capable the budget models get, the lower the
| marginal gains from using the frontier models, even if
| the frontier models always stay 6 months ahead.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| AI/LLMs have been dramatically improving for 7+ years. There's
| now a lot more funding to support continued improvement. You're
| correct this is an "assumption", but continued improvement at
| the same pace (or faster) for the next 3+ years is just
| extrapolating a trend. Believing we've hit the top today is
| based on nothing at all. Continued improvement is much more
| likely.
| cloche wrote:
| You can only tell which part of the S-Curve you're on in
| retrospect. It's not something you can tell while you're
| experiencing it. Both scenarios of AI maxing out or
| continuing to improve are both likely.
| somebodythere wrote:
| That is not true. You can tell you are on the latter part
| of the S-Curve you are on, if the rate of change of
| capabilities has decreased compared to before. That is not
| what we are seeing right now. The rate of change is
| increasing, or is at best, stable.
| hodgehog11 wrote:
| Others have commented on the rate of AI improvement. It doesn't
| need to be current rate for it to be an even more serious
| problem in the very near future. That's irrespective of prior
| booms.
|
| Regarding AI companies having capital to expand infrastructure;
| this is largely irrelevant. The cat is out of the bag, and you
| can already make serious gains by finetuning to local problems
| on a desktop machine. There is enough hardware out there to run
| these things en masse; it's more a question of power.
| Regardless, this stuff will always keep progressing, regardless
| of who is doing it.
|
| Regarding the economy, it may be largely irrelevant if we, the
| people, don't do something very soon. The wheel keeps spinning
| as long as there are productive workers; it's just that those
| workers are being replaced by machines. The last year has
| increasingly demonstrated that you don't need normal people to
| buy your stuff to remain afloat. You can just keep selling
| amongst your rich friends while the masses starve, as long as
| _something_ is still producing what the wealthy want, and
| enough systems are in place to protect them.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| This is probably one of the more level headed takes in the
| comment thread. There's been a concerted marketing push to
| frame AI maximalism as an inevitability. More or less a "it's
| going happen anyways so let's go all in".
|
| It's hardly an inevitability though (nothing is... and
| analogues to the industrial revolution are iffy at best, we
| haven't ever had an attempted replacement for intelligence
| itself before).
|
| Society is doing this at an unprecedented cost and it's clear a
| large portion of the population is uneasy with it. Whether
| society in the US, Europe, and Asia will continue to allow such
| investment at the expense of everything else remains to be
| seen.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| > Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply
| good engineering principles.
|
| This is a particularly ignorant thing to say.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| It's classic https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/physicists.png
|
| (Also, both might be out of reach of the current AI
| architectures)
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Software engineers have the same attitude, but are dumber.
| tedtimbrell wrote:
| To me the author was saying that the cross-domain knowledge
| needed to collaborate is easier to pick up not that other
| domains are easy
| keybored wrote:
| > > This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI
| industry. "Just give up,you can't beat the machine. Please go
| quietly, we want to take your place and it's easier for everybody
| if you don't resist because you believe it's pointless"
|
| > > So blog with single post hyping LLMs. Oh and the domain name
| "human-in-the-loop". Call me suspicious.
|
| > If after reading what I just said in the reply above you still
| think I'm an "AI shill" or "lab shill", there's nothing I can do
| for you.
|
| Yes there isn't. Because they look indistinguishable.
|
| Replacement Inevitability with a human face, along with all the
| human concern; "I am part of it and it scares me."
|
| > Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. I'm one of the engineers
| who's constantly committing to improve our agentic tooling, I use
| different models to do adversarial code reviews, I keep a
| toolbelt of skills and prompts, etc. I have effectively become
| the so-called "AI-native engineer" (gosh, I hate that term).
|
| Some CEO gloating about replacing all-knowledge-work gets
| skepticism, eye-rolls and resentment. Someone in the trenches
| having human feelings about it generates both sympathetic and
| ecocentric fear.
|
| ---
|
| And maybe autor intent does not matter? The original submission
| was massively "popular". It served its purpose.
| watwut wrote:
| > This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI
| industry.
|
| Literally today I got like 4 AI ads literally mocking "old
| people still using excel", trying shame and insecure people
| into some AI whatever product.
|
| This is literally the first technology that is trying to scare
| and mock me into using it. All it actually does is that I am
| growing to hate it, honestly along with tech industry itself.
| Which I used to like.
| recitedropper wrote:
| I am having a similar sentiment change about our industry as
| well. The more AI's marketing plays purely on fear and shame,
| the more I want to see it fail. If Anthropic, OpenAI, and the
| other power players continue in this direction, I hope the
| graduation speech boos are just the start.
| Altern4tiveAcc wrote:
| >Agents used to be bad at this kind of stuff in my workplace as
| well, but newer models + agent-friendly documentation + AGENT.md
| begging agents to read the fucking docs before coding changed
| this landscape for us here.
|
| Wouldn't that be true for humans as well? If you have
| documentation explaining a rule and you read it, you may not need
| to reach out to coworkers.
|
| Otherwise I think the author's concerns are 100% valid.
| ufocia wrote:
| "I'm finding LLMs also competent at explaining and giving advice
| on other domain stuff I'm totally new to, which I have cross-
| checked with Legal/Product Managers and is usually right."
|
| "Usually" is the keyword. Until it becomes "always"
| (counterintuitive for heuristic systems) or "almost always" some
| human experts will (/may?) be needed to babysit.
|
| P.S. "_are_ usually right" since they are "LLMs". Methinks
| running the response through an LLM could've made it more
| "right".
| daveshistory wrote:
| I think technically it's referring to the advice, which is in
| the singular.
|
| "These AIs are usually right about things I don't know anything
| about" sounds like the textbook example of risky thinking
| though.
| Delk wrote:
| Maybe it's the advice that's usually right.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > The models will learn good engineering principles at some
| point.
|
| This is just silly. It's fairly clear that the current design (by
| which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has
| its limits and that they just aren't that good. We're seeing lots
| of other AI and software engineering brought to bear, but there's
| nothing 'inevitable' that means this is close.
|
| "at some point" is so vague as to be irrelevant. Fusion might be
| the dominant source of electricity "at some point". Equally, AI
| knowing good principles could be 30 years away.
|
| Don't assume that hard intellectual challenges are solvable on
| faith. Look at what's currently possible.
|
| AI has always been a field where
| https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png applies heavily.
| Ukv wrote:
| > It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean
| the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits
|
| Maybe, but people have been saying deep learning is about to
| hit a wall since 2012, and many reasonable-sounding "machines
| fundamentally can't do X" have since fallen.
|
| Feels like we're standing on a roof with floodwater up to our
| ankles - maybe it stops rising now, but we didn't foresee it
| getting anywhere near this high in the first place.
|
| I do agree that progress will probably be more slow/gradual
| than others seem to predict, no "hard takeoff", but even being
| decades away is still relevant to someone starting a career in
| software development.
| incomingpain wrote:
| You are correct that your career is changing, but it's not like
| AI is going to go away.
|
| In the 1990s when crypto went to court. It was determined that
| really anything coming from AI is protected speech. Very few
| exceptions, AI cant export a few things.
|
| So you're never seeing AI go away, which means you need to
| transition/adapt.
| 6510 wrote:
| Tax I could do to some extend but I once (for laughs) had a go at
| scripting up Dutch work hour laws because no one could do it in
| their head. This was so terrifyingly complex that I'm convinced
| many laws should be rewritten to make it easier to code.
|
| The problem looks something like (not a real example): Type Z
| hours maximum A per day, B per week, C per month, D per year. E
| more hours than A is allowed every F weeks but no more than G per
| month and H per year. More than B is allowed... etc Minimum rest
| hours I per day, J per week, K per two weeks, L per month. More
| is allowed every 7.5 days unless it is full moon and maximum
| hours per day were exceeded at least 3 times in the last 82 days
| except from solar eclipses or if the Kings is married 12.5 years
| or if the employee gave birth in the last 472 hours.
|
| My employer has software to make the schedules. It cant tell
| where shifting around shifts is possible but you can try do it
| and it will tell you why it isn't possible.
|
| I was hoping to calculate if multiple shifts can be shifted
| around to facilitate someones day off. Sometimes it just cant be
| made to work but if people are willing and there is a hole you
| end up doing it anyway. (I've done a triple shift once because
| the coworker wanted to bring his wife to the hospital.) Employees
| earn undocumented days off... and then you end up with multiple
| schedules, the real one and the official one. Possibly extra
| copies depending on who knows what is really going on. This cant
| be the way...
|
| Better just have modern laws that make sense in code.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > If the models (and harnesses) keep getting better at the same
| pace for the foreseeable years, we are heading to a world where
| the profession is commoditized to the ground. There's this talk
| about Jevons Paradox but I disagree. The demand for software most
| certainly has an upper limit.
|
| This entire section is backwards to me.
|
| The current state of a lot of different domains I've been in is
| that they tend to center around 2-3 major, generic products that
| all get retrofitted to fit those smaller/medium-sized businesses.
| Now that the economics have shifted, it makes sense for those
| businesses to bring on software devs to build software tailored
| to their problem specifically.
|
| And you can't compare copyrighting. It's a totally different
| field, with different goals and different time tables.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Whenever someone complaints about LLMs eroding their career, I
| advise them to read The Profession by Isaac Asimov.
|
| TLDR: there will be less programmers and they will be better on
| average.
| an0malous wrote:
| Do you do this because you hate these people? If I recall the
| story correctly, it's basically confirming their worst fears
| queenkjuul wrote:
| I think people are far too dismissive of just how well-suited
| programming is to the exact form of LLMs.
|
| Extremely formal syntax, limited ambiguity, simple verifiable
| testing procedures, and colossal well-documented training sets.
|
| I don't yet buy that the successes of coding agents will apply
| nearly as well to other professions. "Correct more often than not
| when asked a random accounting question" really isn't any
| indication to me that they'll get there.
| stavarotti wrote:
| > On novel work:
|
| > Work that introduces new methods, highly creative ideas, or
| solutions that have not been used or experienced before. More
| generally, an approach that introduces an innovative strategy to
| solve a complex problem.
|
| Something that I've been thinking about for the past year or so
| is coming to grips with the fact that the vast majority
| (anecdote) of software engineering work is not novel (and maybe
| that's okay). Few opportunities lend themselves to doing truly
| novel work. Other than infrastructure work and highly specialized
| software, pause and ask yourself when you last encountered
| software were you said "how the hell did they do that?" or "damn,
| that's nice" (for me, the most recent was Ghostty). I think much
| of the angst that people have when they fear for their job is
| coming to the realization that LLMs can do most of the "standard"
| work that a lot of highly compensated individuals currently do.
| We've built livelihoods around this and the threat of that coming
| to an end is genuinely frightening.
| thunky wrote:
| > I think much of the angst that people have when they fear for
| their job is coming to the realization that LLMs can do most of
| the "standard" work that a lot of highly compensated
| individuals currently do.
|
| Amd do it better in most cases imo. Which is also hard to come
| to terms with, because there is a good bit of
| elitism/entitlement going around. The idea that a SWE is
| working at a higher level, which is beyond the reach of mere
| mortals, so therefore the high compensation is justified.
| Meanwhile everyone is, for the most part, doing some slight
| variation of the same thing as you suggested.
|
| After starting out working minimum wage jobs I've always
| thought that the work gets easier and easier from there.
| Compensation and hard work are negativity correlated.
| manoji wrote:
| This is spot on ! Most of the work we really do is pure
| boilerplate and should be automated. While there are instances
| of interesting work those are far and few in between . The most
| recent instance of "how the hell did they do that?" for me was
| duckdb.
| hackingonempty wrote:
| > pause and ask yourself when you last encountered software
| were you said "how the hell did they do that?"
|
| Like every month for the past 5 years? The progress in machine
| learning is dizzying. It is astonishing what can be done now
| with text, images, audio, video, code, etc...
|
| If you don't study it, however, you have no idea how it works
| or how to do it yourself.
|
| oblig. xkcd https://xkcd.com/1425/
| rfgplk wrote:
| > Something that I've been thinking about for the past year or
| so is coming to grips with the fact that the vast majority
| (anecdote) of software engineering work is not novel (and maybe
| that's okay)
|
| Correction, essentially 0% of software is novel. Git wasn't
| novel. Chromium wasn't novel. Linux wasn't novel. Even C when
| it came out wasn't novel. Likewise Unix. They're all
| permutations of either prior knowledge, or evolutions of
| already existing concepts. They only might _appear_ novel to
| people who lack the depth to see what technology really is.
| Effectively applied physics (which has been solved for... over
| a few centuries at this point?) which itself is applied
| mathematics. There is novely to be found in physics and math
| themselves, but it's far out of scope of practical engineering.
| casey2 wrote:
| All public school students in the US at least are taught how to
| do basic scientific research. They should be making novel
| discoveries every day. The only thing that stopping them now is
| their own laziness.
| jmpman wrote:
| In my social network, there are two people impacted by LLMs. One
| was a security operations manager whose company reduced headcount
| upon introduction of some new LLM powered security tools. The
| other was UX designer. Both have been unemployed for 6+ months,
| and neither are likely to land a job in their field. The
| government hasn't stepped in and provided them with Universal
| Basic Income, and I wonder what will happen when my career is
| similarly impacted? Luckily I'm on the verge of retirement and
| should be able to support myself. However I have other friends
| who tried to day trade their 401k instead of work, and although
| back in the workforce, no longer have a nest egg. What's going to
| happen to them when they're inevitably put to pasture by AI?
| waffletower wrote:
| "There's this talk about Jevons Paradox but I disagree."
|
| In my position, our team is clearly displaying "increased demand
| due to increased efficiency". I admit our position may be
| situational -- but my anecdote seems more substantive and
| speculative than "I disagree" from my vantage at least.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| A part of the puzzle that rarely gets discussed is something that
| predated LLMs entirely-- "software engineering" and "programming"
| have been conflated for a long time now and there's a huge gamut
| of roles out there.
|
| The practice of writing code, or programming, in recent years has
| really fallen into two buckets:
|
| The vast majority of folks are given a task, they write code to
| complete that task, and the task completion then counts towards
| some objective (eg; a new feature, product or fixing a bug).
| Perjoratively, they've been known as "ticket takers".
|
| A much smaller group have instead worked in the other direction--
| identifying where improvements can be made to a product, piece of
| infrastructure, or pain point and transformed that into tasks
| that can then be solved via code.
|
| How much of a role you play in that strategy and formulation has
| been the real differentiator. Not so much _what_ you know. While
| these are correlated, they 're very different.
|
| At a high level, it's been the difference between "developer" and
| "engineer" but the reality is the titles have become somewhat
| meaningless in recent years where many "engineers" are just doing
| the same CRUD tasks over and over.
|
| The reason this matters is that at some point, you can only
| abstract so far... the requirements for what to build have to
| come from somewhere. At the most extreme case, there's only the
| CEO and a company that's nothing but AI agents. In the least
| extreme case (today) each line worker could manage 1 or more
| LLMs/agents.
|
| It's not entirely clear to me or frankly a large portion of those
| in the industry that we're suddenly on pace for one outcome vs
| another. But I do think that software isn't particularly unique
| here other than it was an initial starting point for LLMs to
| deliver value. All white collar work is at risk including CEOs.
|
| And if that happens it would be outlandish to think a utopia
| emerges... the opposite is far more likely.
| lellow wrote:
| Just kudos to OP for coming back. One thing I almost "hate" is
| that nowadays everyone can put something out there... videos,
| articles, etc., but when confronted with questions, you never see
| the discussion continue. YT videos are an example... SO MANY
| VIDEOS... People genuinely asking some good questions... and
| radio silence.
| Havoc wrote:
| Im not (yet) in the firing line but much like OP I'm rather
| worried as to where this is all going on a societal level.
|
| Programmers may fall first but other knowledge work won't be far
| behind.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I'm quite worried too. I think we're all going to be screwed if
| we don't achieve the fabled post scarcity society.
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