I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting. If you think it's still just slop and errors when managed by experienced devs, you're already behind.
> I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting.
I am aware of a large company that everyone in the US has heard of, planning on laying off 30% of their devs shortly because they expect a 30% improvement in "productivity" from the remaining dev team.
Exciting indeed. Imagine all the divorces that will fall out of this! Hopefully the kids will be ok, daddy just had an accident, he won't be coming home.
If you think anything that is happening with the amount of money and bullshit enveloping this LLM disaster, you should put the keyboard down for a while.
It's not obvious because the multiplier effect of AI is being used to reduce head count more than to drastically increase net output of a team. Which yeah is scary, but my point is if you don't see any multiplier effect from using that latest AI tools, you are either doing a bad job of using them (or don't have the budget, can't blame anyone for that), or are maybe in some obscure niche coding world?
>the multiplier effect of AI is being used to reduce head count more than to drastically increase net output of a team
This simply isn’t how economics works. There is always additional demand, especially in the software space. Every other productivity-boosting technology has resulted in an increase in jobs, not a decrease.
It's kind of inexplicable though, unless AI being the reason for layoffs is a lie, because it's true that historically there has always been way more demand for software than people who can make it (hence the decades of rising salaries relative to other professions).
It seems like too much of a coincidence that the AI got good enough to replace humans at exactly the same time that humans in general don't need as much software made.
I try these things a couple times a month. They're always underwhelming. Earlier this week I had the thing work tells me to use (claude code sonnet 4? something like that) generate some unit tests for a new function I wrote. I had a number of objections about the utility of the test cases it chose to write, but the largest problem was that it assigned the expected value to a test case struct field and then... didn't actually validate the retrieved value against it. If you didn't review the code, you wouldn't know that the test it wrote did literally nothing of value.
Another time I asked it to rename a struct field across a the whole codebase. It missed 2 instances. A simple sed & grep command would've taken me 15 seconds to write and do the job correctly and cost $~0.00 compute, but I was curious to see if the AI could do it. Nope.
Trillions of dollars for this? Sigh... try again next week, I guess.
Twice now in this same story, different subthreads, I've seen AI dullards declaring that you, specifically, are holding it wrong. It's delightful, really.
I don't really care if other people want to be on or off the AI train (no hate to the gp poster), but if you are on the train and you read the above comment, it's hard not to think that this person might be holding it wrong.
Using sonnet 4 or even just not knowing which model they are using is a sign of someone not really taking this tech all that seriously. More or less anyone who is seriously trying to adopt this technology knows they are using Opus 4.6 and probably even knows when they stopped using Opus 4. Also, the idea that you wouldn't review the code it generated is, perhaps not uncommon, but I think a minority opinion among people who are using the tools effectively. Also a rename falls squarely in the realm of operations that will reliably work in my experience.
This is why these conversations are so fruitless online - someone describes their experience with an anecdote that is (IMO) a fairly inaccurate representation of what the technology can do today. If this is their experience, I think it's very possible they are holding it wrong.
Again, I don't mean any hate towards the original poster, everyone can have their own approach to AI.
Yeah, I'm definitely guilty of not being motivated to use these tools. I find them annoying and boring. But my company's screaming that we should be using them, so I have been trying to find ways to integrate it into my work. As I mentioned, it's mostly not been going very well. I'm just using the tool the company put in front of me and told me to use, I don't know or really care what it is.
How is that the point of AI. The point is that it can chug through things that would take humans hours in a matter of seconds. You still have to work with it. But it reduces huge tasks into very small ones
"Hey boss, I tried to replace my screwdriver with this thing you said I have to use? Milwaukee or something? When I used it, it rammed the screw in so tight that it cracked the wood."
^ If someone says that they are definitely "holding it wrong", yes. If they used it more they would understand that you use the clutch ring to the appropriate setting to avoid this. What you don't do, is keep using the screwdriver while the business that pays you needs 55 more townhouses built.
No need to be mean. It's not living up to the marketing (no surprise), but I am trying to find a way to use these things that doesn't suck. Not there yet, but I'll keep trying.
Eh, there's a new shiny thing every 2 months. I'm waiting for the tools to settle down rather than keep up with that treadmill. Or I'll just go find a new career that's more appealing.
I dunno. At some point the people who make these tools will have to turn a profit, and I suspect we'll find out that 98% of the AI industry is swimming naked.
Yeah I think it'll consolidate around one or two players. Mostly likely Xai, even though they're behind at the moment. No one can compete with the orbital infrastructure, if that works out. Big if. That's all a different topic.
But I feel you, part of me wants to quit too, but can't afford that yet.
Launch costs are at best like $1000 per pound to reach LEO.
Terrestrial data centers are becoming the size of small cities.
In what planet does the $1000/lb headwind ever make this work?
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The only logic to orbital servers is that it’s a libertarian dream to be government regulation free. It is objectively more expensive and difficult to build and maintain by orders of magnitude otherwise.
Fall behind what? Writing code is only one part of building a successful product and business. Speed of writing code is often not what bottlenecks success.
Yes, the execution part has become cheap, but planning and strategizing is not much easier. But devs and organizations that keep their head in the sand will fall behind on one leg of that stool.
Well 6 years experience here and I personally saved about 4 hours of work today using claude. My coworker also just solved a problem I had been looking into for a few days in about an hour with claude. So, I think maybe you are just a bit behind the curve.
I mean I think I stayed exactly on topic. Used by experience devs, its not slop, and if you arent usuing the people who are areprobably going to outpace you
