I feel like everything I apply these things to sends me up a much messier and long winded route to a useable result, when compared to just doing it myself from the jump. Even the things they're ostensibly good at like sorting data comes out so messy it's practically net zero by the time you're done with quality control.
it can be useful for some automation... but its also dangerously dumb for that.
They might very well go away. There is definitely an AI bubble, and it remains to be seen whether it deflates gradually or pops spectacularly. Geoeconomics might destroy them by constraining their access to hardware. The capabilities are real, but whether those capabilities are realised is a different matter.
I think that once companies are more realistic about token demand they can start making a profit
OpenAI and Anthropic still sells tokens under cost.
My experience with AI/LLMs summed up. The baseline expectation got higher. I didn't get any time back. My life didn't become easier.
To paraphrase Marx, "And so, the equivalent amount of labour required to produce the goods needed to sustain a worker for a day is, say, 4 hours. But that doesn't mean the selfsame worker can work for no longer that 4 hours! He can be forced to work six, or eight, or twelve hours a day, and whatever additional goods he produces — that's the surplus product, which in this case goes straight to line up the factory owner's pockets".
We had plenty of think pieces about making people obsolete, about destruction, generally in celebratory tone. I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch was always "higher unemployment".
Those who make it work from here are those who've changed their work completely to resemble something more like a hands-off tech lead. There will of course be the lucky few who've made it work as artisans without direct commercial pressures to conform to the new "right way to do it". But the careers many of us have had is not a path available for others to follow anymore.
The irony of automating away "inefficiencies", "drudgery" and the "labour intensive" parts of other professions stings all the more when the sharp end of that shtick is pointed back in our direction.
The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated shit. I pushed back, it apologised, and then generated more crap that had nothing to do with reality, I pushed back, we looped again, still just total fiction: “the drums don’t come in until bar 16” on a song that opens with a drum loop, that kind of crap.
We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.
I’m guessing it’s that humans don’t have capacity to deal with this kind of scenario - it’s like having a junior staff member who is utterly incredible 90% of the time - completely convincing in their certainty and skill level, and then 10% of the time you catch them doing a shit in their desk drawer because they couldn’t be arsed to walk to the toilet. AI’s are basically sociopaths.
The political question is why despite productivity in economic terms (which i know is flawed) growing many times over, do we still have to work as much, get paid so little, and have so many unemployed people looking for a job?
Looks like without a parasitic capitalist class, we could share resources and work and have people live better lives and work less.
I can echo that. If/when I am replaced with an LLM, I plan on switching to a hands-on profession - welder, electrician, machinist. I am also not planning on ever going back to software... errr... prompt "engineering".
Otherwise have a look here:
So I walk, program, sit, get coffee, read a bit, come back and review the code. Most of the time it's fine, sometimes I had forgotten to mention something, and have to correct it, but this step doesn't take more than ~15 mins.
I then have a feature that would've taken me multiple days. Not because I need multiple days, but because I do not have the 8 hours of continuous time to work on it.
People have forgotten that when you start your programming day, you have to get up to speed which takes me longer than others. Let's say this takes ~15 mins. That means that if you spend 2 hours programming, ~12% of that was just getting back into the groove. LLMs do this instantly, it reads context, you can ask it questions, and you're up to speed again in less than a minute.
The point here is not that LLMs provide high quality code, but they do save you a bit of time and energy, which is worth a lot in my opinion.
A lot of inventions haven't been that ground-breaking; only there to save time. You can wash the dishes by hand, but you can also have a machine do it while you go watch TV.
That is a wrong assumption, however. An agent is an entirely new tool in your toolbox, with no similarity to any of those you already have. You will need to learn how to wield it, like a new programming language or technology you’re unfamiliar with. You will need to do some small side projects to learn. You will need to develop a feeling for how it reacts to your inputs, when to reset the session, pass it links to documentation or interrupt it.
None of this comes intuitively. It takes time and effort, and if you’re not ready to consciously invest that, coding agents are not going to work efficiently for you. That doesn’t take away from their utility though.
But yes, many developers I know haven't coded manually in months and that includes me. That doesn't mean I drink coffee and take walks while the agent codes however. I'm now in the driving seat instead of wrangling syntax and waiting for my hands to type something.
I manage the rules, the intent, the structure. If I don't like what it does, I update the coding standard, the docs, the specs, you name it. If I want a different architecture I can actually get it done in 10min instead of a week - if at all. It's more effort than coding for me, because coding is slow and methodical and incentivizes pedantry, but for me it's a massive improvement. I have been bored out of my mind for a decade now, but I'm relatively good at what I do so I just stuck with it. I'm one of those "middle management types stuck in developer role"-type of guys so I guess my personality and proclivities have something to do with it. I also know quite a few grumpy old-school types that don't get anything done with LLMs. They can't communicate, they don't understand psychology, they don't understand architecture and have a debilitating case of missing the forest for the trees. The spread, in my experience, is massive.
I remember many people even on this very site claiming AI would help humanity. I think the most ridiculous the most ridiculous claim was helping fight climate change, but helping produce more leisure time by automating work was definitely what some people thought, or at least what they wanted us to think while pushing their crap.
tags2k•1h ago
"My first instinct is to laugh and shake my head. One need not look very far to find indignant software developers absolutely certain that their jobs cannot possibly be automated away by the very tools their industry contemporaries are creating to replace them. I suspect you’d also not have to look far into their posting histories to find those same people comparing cabbies to buggy whip makers."
What a rude and callous comment. I'm one of those developers, I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails. Laugh at me as I defend my lifelong career, why don't you? I'm also one who decries such things as the removal of local services, taxi and otherwise, for those in the cloud. Screw you, man.
vasco•1h ago
throwaway27448•1h ago
wiseowise•31m ago
fsdsdffsd•18m ago
throwaway27448•3m ago
ramon156•51m ago
leethomas•49m ago
> I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails
If you don't mind could you please elaborate on what tasks or knowledge your job requires that you feel an LLM isn't even _fractionally_ capable of? I understand if you said that out of emotion and frustration, but if you're serious I'm intensely and genuinely curious because nowadays it seems like the frontier models are capable of more programming tasks than not with the proper harness and engineer. When was the last time you tried?
I just want to emphasize that this is not a further provocation, just potentially in awe of what you do at your job and would like to know more.
wiseowise•34m ago
RugnirViking•19m ago
Do these hypothetical laid off software engineers with no empathy for buggy drivers exist outside the imagination of people who hate software engineers? I know in my education we had a bunch of mandatory courses about automation and the effects on workers, how to consult with workers on how to lift them up rather than be antagonistic, and consider different stakeholders (where "the business" or "product" was but one of many) etc.