lol if you feel that high competitive fields have less idiots on average. Regardless not a good take, world is not mathematics, there are many axis to people
I am not sure if I like your wording. "high competitive fields" Yes, becoming a professor at a decent university if highly competitive. But so is real estate. The problem: in real estate you have the idiots playing in the field.
There's people spending 5k a month on tokens, if you're work generates 7-8 figures per year, that's peanuts and companies will happily pay for that per engineer
> We are paid to solve business problems and make money.
> People who enjoy writing code can still do so, just not on a business context if there's a more optimal way
Do you mean optimal, or expedient?
I hate working with people who's ideas of solving problems is punting it down the road for the next person to deal with. While I do see people do this kinda thing often, I refuse to be someone who claims credit for "fixing" some problem knowing I'm only creating a worse, or different problem for the next guy. If you're working on problems that require collaboration, creating more problems for the next guy is unlikely to give you an optimal output; because soon no one will willingly work with you. It's possible to fix business problems, and maintain your ethics, it's just feels easier to abandon them.
This is true about everything you see advertised to you.
When I went to opensource conference (or whatever it was called) in San Diego ~8y ago, there were so many Kubernetes people. When you talked with them nobody was actually using k8s in production and were clearly devrel/paid people.
Now it seems to be everywhere... so be careful with what you ignore too
As a very silly example, my father in law has a school in Mexico and he is now using chatgtp to generate all of their visual materials that they used to pay someone to do in the past.
They also used to pay someone to take school pictures for the books to look professional, now they use AI to make it look good/professional.
My father in law has no knowledge in technology, he uses chatgtp daily to do professional work for his school. That's already 2 jobs gone.
People must be hiding under a rock if they don't think this will have big consequences to society
Except there's been way too much investment to trick the human brain into that consumption, so it is not a fair fight - that's true both for food and for tech. There are countless documentaries, books and articles on this. You're bringing a knife to a gunfight
You are free to sue Meta. If you can demonstrate harm, you will win. They may pay you off handsomely to avoid seeing the case go to trial. It's because we are free that the option exists. Is that not better than letting government decide which companies you can and cannot sue?
This assumes a perfect justice system, and that’s not the case.
Regardless, the judicial branch is a perfect example of the limits of freedom in practice, and the legislative does, in fact, decide who one can and cannot sue.
You'd have to have a real lock on it to get anybody but a shady lawyer to take it on. It's very unlikely that you'd be able to do that under almost any circumstance. Yes, the potential payout would be large, but the expenses the law firm would have to pay in the meantime, and carry for the many years it would take for the lawsuit to come to a conclusion, would also be very large.
It would be a huge gamble and reputable law firms would have to feel extremely confident that they wouldn't end up on the losing side. That's a big ask regardless of how good you case is. These tech companies have enormous warchests, can drag these things out essentially forever, and the odds they'll find a technicality that would blunt the lawsuit are very high.
This is not true. You can see people who are much older and built a lot of the "internet scale" equally excited about it, e.g: freebsd OG developers, Steve himself (who wrote gas town) etc.
In fact, I would say I've seen more people who are "OG Coders" excited (and in their >50s) then mid generation
I think you're shadow-boxing with a point I never made. I never said experienced devs are not or can not be excited about current AI capabilities.
Lots of experienced devs who work in more difficult domains are excited about AI. In fact, I am one of them (see one of my responses in this thread about gpt-oss being able to work on proprietary RF firmware in my company [1]).
But that in no way suggests that there isn't a gap in what impresses or surprises engineers across any set of domains. Antirez is probably one of the better, more reasoned examples of this.
lol same. I just wrote a bunch of diagrams with mermaid that would legit take me a week, also did a mock of an UI for a frontend engineer that would take me another week to do .. or some designers. All of that in between meetings...
Waiting for it to actually go well to see what else I can do !
Oh I've thought this for years. As an L7, basically my primary role is to serve as someone to bounce ideas off of, and to make recommendations based on experience. A chatbot, with its virtually infinite supply of experience, could ostensibly replace my role way sooner than it could a solid junior/mid-level coder. The main thing it needs is a consistent vision and direction that aligns with the needs of nearby teams, which frankly sounds not all that hard to write in code (I've been considering doing this).
Probably the biggest gap would be the ability to ignite, drive, and launch new initiatives. How does an AI agent "lead" an engineering team? That's not something you can code up in an agent runtime. It'd require a whole culture change that I have a hard time seeing in reality. But of course if there comes a point where AI takes all the junior and mid-level coding jobs, then at that point there's no culture to change, so staff/principal jobs would be just as at risk.
I dont think it's a replacement for that but it's definitely provides some of it. Whereas senior+ level people were required before.
I think that's sort of a theme with LLMs. It's not that it's better than "the real thing" (in this case a senior+ software engineer) or that its without flaws... but it's a fucking service. Having just a semblance of an advanced software engineer in your pocket is a game changer. It doesn't need to be perfect or better than the real thing to fundamentally change things.
I have the complete opposite impression w.r.t. architecture decisions. The LLMs can cargo cult an existing design, but they do not think through design consequences well at all. I use them as a rubber duck non-stop, but I think I respect less than one out of every six of their suggestions.
They've gotten pretty good IME so long as you guide it to think out of the box, give it the right level of background info, have it provide alternatives instead of recommendations, and do your best not to bias it in any particular direction.
That said, the thing it really struggles with is when the best approach is "do nothing". Which, given that a huge chunk of principal level work is in deciding what NOT to do, it may be a while before LLMs can viably take that role. A principal LLM based on current tech would approve every idea that comes across it, and moreover sell each of them as "the exact best thing needed by the organization right now!"
Knowing when to nudge it out of a rut (or say skip it) is probably the biggest current skill. This is why experienced people get generally much better results.
I’m not sure. I keep asking the LLMs whether I should rewrite project X in language Y and it just asks back, “what’s your problem?” And most of the times it shoots my problems down showing exactly why rewriting won’t fix that particular problem. Heck, it even quoted Joel Spolsky once!
Of course, I could just _tell_ it to rewrite, but that’s different.
I have been able to prototype way faster. I can explain how I want a prototype reworked and it's often successful. Doesn't always work, but super useful more often than not.
That's an amazing website, I just spent 30 minutes reading all of its content. Thank you for sharing ! I haven't been to a lan party in probably 20 years and made me jealous !
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