tags2k

If you want to be in awe of basic support tasks then sure! I frequently need to assist with support tickets, communicate between departments to solve customer queries and sometimes manually fix slop that AI has put in there. No LLM rig can do that for me, nor does anyone want it to.

Article literally says their first instinct was to laugh. I'm not a tech bro, just a guy with a job (for now) and I made it clear from my comment that I have never laughed at tech taking the jobs of others, or made it happen myself. Try reading again.

I tend to do the main structural parts myself and tell it to fill in the gaps and add tests, which sort of works 70% of the time. It may not be worth what my company is being charged.

I was with the article - especially the bit about the 10% an LLM loses and how that loss can be de-amplified across eventual meaning, but then...

"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.

You are definitely going to have to. I see these massive skills as soon-to-be artefacts of the past, they will be unwieldy in the non-subsidised world. I won't pretend to know what replaces them.

I'm with you there. I can't stand the CLI that wants to take you away from the mostly bad code it writes. Give me the structure, let me finesse it - to do that I need to actually see it no matter how much Anthropic pretends that it's perfect.

I'm no physics professor but this aligns with the way I use the tools in my "senior engineer" space. I bring the fundamentals to sanity-check the trigger-happy agent and try to imbue other humans with those fundamentals so they can move towards doing the same. It feels like the only way this whole thing will work (besides eventually moving to local models that do less but companies can afford).

It's a Brave new world.

This straw-mans ORMs by listing out what crappy ones do. I mean, accidental writes? You've either got a terrible ORM, no tests, or both.

It seems that poor tech leadership are fearing that they won't be able to move onto their next job if they don't put "implemented AI efficiencies" on their CV now. It's up to us grunts to work out how to actually make it not suck.

That's a very thorough takedown of something the guy you're replying to never said. The end of their comment was "yet look at most of the replies here".

One way I've found is to break the problem down, and think about each step in reverse. So for example, what does the final stage want to do in order to achieve the result in a simple way? It might be that to get the final result it needs to sum numbers, but also needs to know their matching index in another array, plus some other identifier you got from an as-yet-unwritten previous step. This means your final stage needs a bunch of records that are (number, idx, sourceId), which means the step before needs to construct them - what information does it need to transform into that?

Write the simple code you want to write, and think about what makes the prior step possible in the easiest way and build your structures from there, filling in the gaps.

Indeed - stick me in my pod and inject those experience chemicals into me, what's the difference? But also, what would be the point? What's the point anyway?

In one scenario every atom's trajectory was destined from the creation of time and we're just sitting in the passenger seat watching. In another, if we do have free will then we control the "real world" underneath - the quantum and particle realms - as if through a UI. In the pod scenario, we are just blobs experiencing chemical reactions through some kind of translation device - but aren't we the same in the other scenarios too?