Then there's the depressing practical stuff. AI being forced down our throats. AI as an excuse lay people off. AI as an excuse for massive data hoarding. AI flooding the internet, making it harder to find good content.
do { resp = callAI(input); } while (!isOutputSane(resp) && attempts++ < MAX_RETRY)
And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start building trust. Sure assistants are nice but thats about it.
Its just too flawed now to be dependable and reliable, it feels like typical 80/20 or 90/10 situation where inexperienced juniors are all over their head how future is now, and seniors just meh and go and do some work.
The parallels with crypto are amazing.
> And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro...
Cue some dude chiming in on how they are 1000% more productive now and wrote 100 apps in a weekend with Claude, etc.
It is very tiresome indeed.
Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of hiring artists is quite common.
Oh it was very real during crypto hype cycle too. The crypto people were very annoying with it.
> Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of hiring artists is quite common.
I would imagine it is fine for some concept art, based on my experimentation with multiple models for Stable Diffusion.
For generating actual assets that are consistent? I am highly skeptical. Unless we are talking about bottom of the barrel indie games.
And not only indies, when taking voice actors into consideration.
https://www.ign.com/articles/horizon-actor-ashly-burch-says-...
Or some well known studios,
https://www.ign.com/articles/activision-finally-admits-it-us...
I am somehow unimpressed.
There are people being affected by those decisions, effectively losing their jobs, and source of income, as unimpressed as you may be.
FIFA (or whatever it is called nowadays) also sells plenty every year generating incredible revenue to EA, and every year is a poor quality game.
This is why I am unimpressed that Activision is using AI in its games. I expect them to be of poor quality.
Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call, write tests. With “the robot” once the framework was largely in place, you just paste API docs for the endpoint you need, and it’s done in a minute. With tests and everything.
Now, you could argue that this is not “senior level work”. Sure, maybe. But the thing is, you need to use it to learn how to use it effectively, and more importantly to get the intuition about what it can help with best.
So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.
I think AI is a game changer but not for things that can already be automated rigirously without AI.
This is the future to prepare, not AI generating a couple of files.
On IT industry specially, I think LLMs generating code are going to become as transformative as compilers were to Assembly developers.
Yes, currently they still go through "generate language XYZ" as intermediary step, however they eventually will improve to the point, that intermediary step will no longer be needed.
And like the Assembly developers that deemed to manually assess the machine code generated by compilers and scoffed at the generated output, eventually had to cope with optimising compilers turning their knowledge into a niche field, same will happen with common programming languages.
Yeah sure, there will be some Compiler Explorer kind of way to see how the AI maps its decisions to e.g. RISC-V Assembly, but only those in the know will bother looking into it, either by curiosity or need.
Some current examples ongoing trends, more specifically IT, in enterprise consulting, we have evolved to less coding, more plumbing, where existing SaaS products get integrated with each other, mostly via configuration, or integration scripts.
Well turns out, some of those common patterns can be used to teach AIs, and let them automate integrations, instead of manually write them by hand.
https://blog.hoyack.com/top-7-tools-for-effective-agent-orch...
Do they work as well as the sales pitch?
Not yet, those optimising compilers also took a couple of decades to get right, still miss some stuff like auto-vectorization, however the job of Assembly programmer is for all practical purposes gone.
That just points to an inefficiency. Could be tackled in other ways than involving an LLM to produce essentially what's being done elsewhere every day over and over again. A framework automating and hiding all this would be just as effective. Perhaps even cleaner than all that duplication that the LLM created for you.
In other words, that month of busywork that you just saved is inherently unnecessary to do. But progress is not linear in the number of lines of code that you produce. If you think hard about a good architecture and design, coming up with that after 2 weeks of hard thinking, that could be 90% of the work. The remaining 10% are writing all that down. That could take 3 more months, and it taking more than 10% of the time points to the existing inefficiency in tooling / framework / ... But making that more efficient isn't necessarily achieved the best by using an LLM and writing it all out. There are still huge redundancies, which is what made the LLM possible. Once you boil these down in some common frameworks or tools, the LLM will also just produce the same few lines that you'd need to produce to get those 10% done in then just 10% of the total time.
Work(ed) for a company super big on a force of agents. Brought them into my workflows early on, before the company even pivoted. Ran them at home on private hardware (that 3090 had to do something), at work when access was opened up. Provided valuable feedback on hallucinations (e.g., fabricating the existence of a MongoDB CLI module wholesale, documentation and all) and barriers to adoption. Pitched an integration of four disparate systems across ~20 data points to create tenancy in a core product line from scratch, with said AI at the center of it for customer service and workload creation, reducing engineers to approvals only for ~20 tickets a week averaging ~40hrs of work, freeing up said engineers for actually valuable work instead of handholding customers through routine tasks. Got great feedback and enthusiasm on it.
RIFed this year.
Doesn't matter whether you're bullish or bearish on it, the only thing that ever really matters is if scrubbing your line item from a spreadsheet will net someone higher up than you a bonus. That's what's driving this AI mania, and what needs to be addressed via policy before these employers gut themselves and the economy in the process.
Totally agree with you on the line-item point. My point there was that if a 50% RIF is in the works, the people who haven’t figured out how to become more efficient using AI would be more likely to be affected. Statistically.
But again, hope you’re doing well and everything has worked out for you!
Still optimistic that my generalist skillset and adaptability to new technologies (like AI) will make me an asset for IT teams who can’t afford multiple specialists in rough economic times like these.
> RIFed this year
Yeah that's why they are big on the force of agents, so they can justify trimming their workforce
Anyone who doesn't see this is kind of a sucker
I'm hoping that pays off for me someday. Thus far, it's just been a lot of burnout/layoff cycles.
> engineers to approvals only for ~20 tickets a week averaging ~40hrs of work, freeing up said engineers for actually valuable work instead of handholding customers through routine tasks
Not trying to be too judgy here but to me it sounds more like you are the one helping sink the ship than help everyone to life boats
Something to think about. Agreeing to bring AI into our workflows is actually digging out the foundation beneath our own feet (and our coworkers feet)
Ah well. At least seeing me get RIFed hopefully sent up signal flares with the rest of the team to GTFO while they can, and I had a lot of good accomplishments towards the end in particular. Take the good where I can find it, I suppose.
What does this even mean? AI is mostly forced in situations where it can't actually improve on the output, like at the top of a google search.
> So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.
If your job mostly consisted of writing api clients maybe, but that's a pretty odd job.
Do you wanna bet?
But that means that whatever rather impressive internal representation of knowledge it has encoded, that knowledge itself can’t be trusted on a “factual” basis.
This is where you have stopped, but you shouldn’t. Because you’re missing what it’s great at. And it’s great at “continuing” text in a longer context. So just use it with a longer context. Use the Search functionality in ChatGPT when asking it things such that you see where it got it from. Use it in a codebase context where you point it to the relevant parts. Give it examples it should follow, etc.
For every task I have I try using AI in some way and form first. Because the downside is limited - I waste 5-7 minutes figuring out that it’s not going to work, and this is something I definitely need to do myself. But the upside is unlimited - the task is done in minutes.
Why do you think the managers/business owners need an excuse to lay people off? If it's legal and economically beneficial to them, they'll fire people. Having AI won't help them as an excuse. In fact, I would say it sounds like a much worse excuse than "the economy is on a rough spot" or something like that
More importantly, if they can imagine some economic benefit. Very plausible an executive might think a chatbot is as capable as an engineer when they don't know how to evaluate either.