joblemblem

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

It sounds like you already had 20+ years of human made tooling already built and you use the llm to orchestration and onboarding.(?)

I’m glad you found a solution that works for you.

I could see that use case.

When I did consulting work the initial onboarding of new clients to my tooling was a lot drudge work, but I definitely felt my job was more about the work after that phase of satisfying requests for additional features, and updating out of date methods and technologies.

I wonder what your plans are for when your tools fall out of date or fail to satisfy some new normal?

Hire ”seasonal” programmers again? Or have an llm try to build analogues to what your developers built those precious 20+ years?

(‘precious’ was a typo of ‘previous’ but I left it in because I thought it was funny)

Two recent examples.

Please link to your history when you get one of these things to build my example so I can see how you managed to do it.

First, a friend without technical knowledge wanted to query an API using SQL. (At a previous firm he learned how to write “SELECT * FROM … WHERE …” statements.)

He asked one of these llms to do this, that he paid a premium for, and it suggested installing VSCode and writing an extension to ingest an API and to query it with python.

I am unfamiliar with VSCode so I’m unsure if this is even feasible, but after 3 days of trying to get it to work, he asked me, and I set up a python environment for him, and wrote a 5 line script to allow him to query the data ingested from the API into SQLite.

For me, the last time I tried, I asked one to write me a container solution using Docker that allowed for live coding of a Clojure project. I wanted it to give me solutions for each: deps.edn and lein.

I wasted hours, because it always felt “just around the corner”, trying to get it to output anything of use for either paradigm then when I abandoned the llm I quickly found, via a web search, a blog post someone wrote that did exactly what I asked, for a lein project of their own, and I just changed it to work for my project, and then again for the deps.edn version on my own.

> or are you smarter than those results?

“Smarter than” are your words. I’ve just yet to get any real utility from them.

> When I read such comments I ask myself, do you even use stackoverflow

I find this a strange comparison.

I’ve yet to see people replacing employees with “stack overflow” or M$FT shoe horning “stack overflow” into their flagship product or former NSA members joining the board of “stack overflow” or billions in funding pouring into “stack overflow” or constant posts to HN asking “how do you use ‘stack overflow’ to improve productivity?”.

These services retain historical records of interactions.

Can you show me an example of successfully doing what you claim you do?

Thanks for the reply.

I would like to explore this more if you are willing.

Do you consider yourself a “developer”? What is your title at said company?

Do you write code for yourself or for this business?

Who determined and what criteria define who “cannot be a client facing consultant”?

What is an “in house builder”?

What were these “fulltime devs” that you said “you don’t need anymore” doing before these llms?

Do your customers know you swapped from human workers to llms? Are they comfortable with this transition?

How did this change result in “much higher profit margins”?

When you say “with less people” did you just give multiple peoples’ workloads to a single dev or did the devs you retained ask for more work?

What do you use an llm for in the ERP space?

Why would clients use you if they could just use the llm?

I’m exhausted by these types of posts.

I am a developer with >25 of professional experience.

I am unable to get these things to do anything useful.

I’ve tried: different models, limiting my scope, breaking it down to small tasks, prompt “engineering”; and am still getting less than useless results.

I say less than useless, because I will then additionally waste time debugging or slamming my head against the wall the llm built before I abandon it and go to the official docs and find out the llm is suggesting an API access paradigm that became deprecated in the last major version update.

People on this site love to talk about “muh productivity!”, but always stop short of saying what they got from this productivity boost: pay raise, less time working; or what they built, what level of employment they are, or who they work for.

Are all of these posts just astroturfed?! I ask that sincerely.

Do you all just make “todo SPAs” at your employers?

> because it's the shiny new thing

I wish it were that simple, but I feel for this to be true then consumers would need to want it.

In reality it gives them plausible deniability for increased surveillance, control, and extracting more value from customers without their consent.