kweingar

Antitrust is the zeitgeist, but it seems that among tech companies, OpenAI is the least interested in competing on the merits.

First they said it was in everyone's interest for them to be released from their nonprofit obligations. Then they argued that AI needed to be regulated—just enough to deter new competition, but not so much that it could affect OAI's plans in any way. Now they want to be released from the Microsoft deal.

Usually with anticompetitive practices you think about abuse of market power. But OpenAI's mindset seems to be that any impediment to them dominating AI is a societal problem that the government needs to fix for them. It's remarkable.

And yet the systems built at these places far exceed what an indie dev can do

I was wondering if there was something particular about AI, but that's just the standard reason people give to use JS for anything.

Why is JS particularly good for agents?

Many of the curious ones will be adversely affected.

When you're a college student, the stakes feel so high. You have to pass this class or else you'll have to delay graduation and spend thousands of dollars. You have to get this grade or else you lose your grant or scholarship. You want to absorb knowledge from this project (honestly! you really do) but you really need to spend that time studying for a different class's exam.

"I'm not lazy, I'm just overwhelmed!" says the student, and they're not wrong. But it's very easy for "I'm gonna slog through this project" to become "I'm gonna give it a try, then use AI to check my answer" and then "I'm gonna automate the tedious bits that aren't that valuable anyway" and then "Well I'll ask ChatGPT and then read its answer thoroughly and make sure I understand it" and then "I'll copy/paste the output but I get the general idea of what it's doing."

Is it natural, or have we just adapted to it? Maybe if we had always had 10-day weeks, we'd get sick if we switched to 7.

I was being sarcastic there, a bad habit of mine. There are some advantages to being an early adopter (you get to reap some of the benefits now), but it doesn't give you a permanent advantage, and the people who aren't closely following and adopting weeks-old tools aren't doomed to irrelevance.

The iPhone was an equalizer. Existing mobile devs did get a genuine head start on mobile app design, but their advantage was fleeting.

(I deleted a less productive comment.)

I do use these tools though! I spent some time with AI. I have coworkers who are more heads-down working on their projects and not tinkering with agents, and they're doing fine. I have coworkers who are on the absolute bleeding edge of AI tools, and they're doing fine. When the tooling matures and the churn lessens and the temperature of the discourse is lowered, I'm confident that we will all be doing great things. I just think that the "anybody not using and optimizing Codex or Claude Code today is not gonna make it" attitude is misguided. I could probably wring out some more utility from these tools if I spent more time with them, but I'd rather spend most of my professional development time working on subject matter expertise. I want to deeply understand my domain, and I trust that AI use will (mostly) become relatively easier to pick up and less of a differentiator as time goes on

This is why devs who started with J2ME are the holy grail of app developers, since they started making apps years before iPhone devs

If the "meta" changes so quickly, then that sets an upper bound as to how far behind you are, no? Unless you are doing low-autonomy, non-specialized work or are applying to fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants startup jobs, no hiring manager is going to care if you have three months less experience with Codex than the other candidate.[1]

> so much of using LLM right now is context management

That is because the tooling is incredibly immature. Even if raw LLM capabilities end up plateauing, new and more effective tools are going to proliferate. You won't have to obsess over managing context, just like we don't have to do 2023-level tricks like "you are an expert" or "please explain your thought process" anymore. All of the context management tricks will be obsolete very soon... because AI tooling companies are extremely incentivized to solve it.

I find it implausible that the tech is in a state where full-time prompters are gaining a durable advantage over everyone else. J2ME devs probably thought they were building a snowballing advantage over devs who dismissed mobile development. Then the iPhone came out and totally reset the playing field.

[1] Most employers don't distinguish between three months and nine months of experience with JS framework du jour, no matter what it says on the job listing

Edited to add: Claude Code brought the agentic coding trend to the mainstream. It came out three months ago. You talk about how much you're laughing at the naivete of people here, but are you telling me with a straight face that three months is enough to put a talented engineer "behind"? At risk of being unemployable? The engineers who spent the last three months ping-ponging between Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc. can have their experience distilled into like a week of explaining to a newcomer, and I predict that will be true six months from now, or a year from now.

You're making at least a year's worth of pre-LLM progress in 5 weeks?

You expect to achieve more than a decade of pre-LLM accomplishments between now and June 2026?

If progress continues at the rate that AI boosters expect, then soon you won't have to use them smartly to get value (all existing workflows will churn and be replaced by newer, smarter workflows within months), and everybody who is behind will immediately catch up the moment they start to use the tool.

I can't think of many engineering disciplines that do things this way. "This seems to work, I don't know how or why it works, I don't even know if it's possible to know how or why it works, but I will just apply this moving forward, crossing my fingers that in future situations it will work by analogy."

If the act of discovery and iterative refinement makes prompting an engineering discipline, then is raising a baby also an engineering discipline?

I think we agree. Interacting with employees is not an engineering discipline, and neither is prompting.

I'm not objecting to the incantations or the vibes per se. I'm happy to use AI and try different methods to get the results I want. I just don't understand the claims that prompting is a type of engineering. If it were, then you would need benchmarks.