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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

No, he is correct. LLMs have much larger working memories for the kind of details you work with in programming tasks. You are at an objective cognitive deficit by not taking advantage of this. Everybody knows what he means by left behind. When you program, you do so with a goal in mind, and you will not be able to reach that goal as quickly without LLMs. You will be outcompeted by those who use them, and this means that opportunities to contribute professionally, in open source, etc. will be closed to you.

This is the future. Adapt or die.

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> This is the future. Adapt or die.

I'm curious about what adaptation you have in mind.

You use LLMs to write specific functions? The person who uses it in an agent loop will leave you behind to die.

You use LLMs in an agent loop? The person who uses LLMs to supervise loops will leave you behind to die.

You use LLMS to supervise agent loops? The person who uses LLMs to determine product offering and automatically start supervision on producing the product will leave you behind to die.

You use LLMs to determine product offering and kick off the supervision? The person who uses LLMs to clone your product without the initial product research will leave you behind to die.

You use LLMs to clone products gaining traction? The person who runs a cluster 100x the size of yours will leave you behind to die.

I am trying to understand where you think you fit in, in this Brave New World.

You obviously think that you're adapting, but if you're correct, anything you do now can be replaced by an LLM in the near future.

Just where were you going with "Adapt or die".

I use the 1M token opus claude for two days to build a dashboard and it forgets how to run the build script it wrote at the start of the project.

Man can it put together a react app lickety split, though

The Claude file, documentation, and memories you leave in the project are part of the harness. Most of Claude's forgetfulness can be eliminated with strategic placement of documentation. After you've got that figured out, you'll have to compact the session long before it forgets because it starts getting sloppy and slow at high context. With your guidance it will basically keep its own harness updated for you as the project progresses.

And it also helps to give it better tools than grep and find to explore, because it can waste lots of tokens and pollute the context with the defaults.

I'd suggest CLAUDE.md or README.md (and just write in CLAUDE.md that instructions are in README.md, if they're also supposed to be used by human devs) for scripts and other operative instructions.

Ideally also the PLAN MODE for any long form work within the same session, possibly with sub-agents or dynamic workflows to not pollute the main context too quickly.

It also has a memory mechanism but holy shit is it annoying when it saves meaningless stuff that quickly becomes outdated.

Exactly, it's pretty obvious, and definitely as you sail, not aggressive (someone melts a little too easily) The comment was naive to the point of denial.

This is the future. Adapt or die.

If it is the future, people will actually have plenty of time to wait and start using it only later. There is no hurry and no reason to be early adopter crash test dummy. They can wait and stary using it at own pace

The "or die" part betrays insecurity and weakness. You need to scare prople into using it rihht now, because of some perceived threat.

The reality is that everyone will be replaced by a cheaper alternative someday, with LLMs or not. If you depend on LLMs more and more to do your work and the costs of keeping your tokens increases, your 'left behind' co-workers will still be fine.

How many other technologies required death threats for adoption?

This one does not require any death threats. It's a statement of where the world is going. Maybe you disagree. Come back to this thread in 3 year and see which POV was more correct. The

* "LLMs suck, are stupid, I hate them, and I'm not using them"

* "LLMs are the future and if you don't adapt you'll left behind"

I'm confident it's this 2nd option. Care to wager?

People might be using hyperbole: "You'll be left behind" = "you'll be out of a job" or "you'll be unemployable" or "You'll die" but they all mean the same thing.

This whole you need to "adapt" to LLMs thing is bonkers to me, because there's practically no skill in using an LLM. It took me a weekend to learn how to use a coding harness, and the skill pretty much generalizes to all coding harnesses. The things that make me potentially good at using a coding harness are my preexisting engineering skills. I'm sorry, but I think if you believe that being on the cutting edge of knowing how to prompt is some sort of magical skill that's going to protect you from economic hardship, you're delusional.

Most of the "cutting edge" stuff I've seen is basically trying to scale the amount of parallel work that can be done, without any consideration to how much that costs, how much waste is generated, or if the output is even useful. Most of my coding time is spent thinking through problems. Which is exactly how I spent my time prior to LLMs.

> This whole you need to "adapt" to LLMs thing is bonkers to me, because there's practically no skill in using an LLM.

False. There was a person in this thread complaining about how the LLM forgot to run the build script it itself wrote. Yet people are effectively using LLMs to tackle highly complex, unusual work.

The existence of skill issues implies that skill is needed. This is THE skill that will separate the wheat from the chaff in a software engineering context. There's a reason why Steve Yegge said you're a bad engineer if you're writing code in an editor. It's because you've punted on developing the skillset that will make you vastly more effective.

Until the “adopter” themselves find them at the other end of the barrel.

People, generally, do not like to die. They will do various things to avoid doing so.

The Luddites were a small group; AI has the chance to turn a majority of society into loom-smashers, which will be very fun to watch.

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