bmurphy1976

I'm starting to think a lot of the problem people are having is just that they have unrealistic expectations.

I'm not having the same problem as you and I follow a very similar methodology. I'm producing code faster and at much higher quality with a significant reduction in strain on my wrists. I doubt I'm typing that much less, but what I am typing is prose which is much more compatible with a standard QWERTY keyboard.

I think part of it is that I'm not running forward as fast as I can and I keep scope constrained and focused. I'm using the AI as a tool to help me where it can, and using my brain and multiple decades of experience where it can't.

Maybe you're expecting too much and pushing it too hard/fast/prematurely?

I don't find the code that hard to read, but I'm also managing scope and working diligently on the plans to ensure it conforms to my goals and taste. A stream of small well defined and incremental changes is quite easy to evaluate. A stream of 10,000 line code dumps every day isn't.

I bet if you find that balance you will see value, but it might not be as fast as you want, just as fast as is viable which is likely still going to be faster than you doing it on your own.

There's always three:

   Google buys Anthropic.
   Microsoft buys Open AI (or vice versa depending on how things go).
   SpaceGrok buys Cursor, limps along in 3rd place.
   Meta is the last man standing, get's stuck with Oracle, dies.

And then hopefully some open source models save us from this nightmare before China commadatises everything.

Edit: I forgot Amazon. Who knows what they will do. They're the wildcard anyway.

What plan are you on? That's a really critical piece of info to be able to evaluate your experience.

You don't even need a bug bounty program. In my experience there's an army of individuals running low-quality security tools spamming every endpoint they can think (webmaster@ support@ contact@ gdpr@ etc.) with silly non-vulnerabilities asking for $100. They suck now but they will get more sophisticated over time.

Some of these bills are written in such a way that they would apply to CNC manufacturing, such that they could even make building your own machine from scratch illegal. They are terribly oppressive and short-sighted.

LM has a whole series of videos that touches on this (as well as some related topics): https://www.youtube.com/@LoyalMoses/videos

Louis Rossman also touched on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS-9ISzMhBM

I've seen more by others but can't recall them all. Without going too far down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, the momentum for this seems to be coming from a variety of sources:

    * New York being New York and trying to make thinking about guns a thought crime
    * There's European company (forget the name) that makes specialized software that can do this.  They're lobbying so they can inject themselves for some tasty rent seeking.
    * A variety of companies that see right-to-repair (and thus home 3D printers, CNC-milling, etc.) a threat to their bottom lines.
    * General ignorance by our law makers

Edit: And I personally think instead of doing stupid bullshit like this, we should be giving EVERY kid who wants one a free 3D Printer so they can learn to tinker, be creative, and build things. That's how we create that spark that leads to the next generation of makers. Without that our country will continue to be the country that can no longer build things.

It started long before tech. It started with manufacturing. Everything has been replaced with financial manipulation and rent-seeking.

Anthropic is going through major growing pains, both technical and organizational. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. It's chaos, things are changing too quickly, and us users are getting caught in the middle of it.

Think Twitter's fail-whale problems. Sometimes you are lucky, sometimes you aren't. Why? We won't know until Anthropic figures it out and from the outside it sure looks like they're struggling.

I still struggle with the design, but once that's locked in getting it to implement things is pretty straightforward. I do have to fight the AI a bit to make sure things are simple and clean, but it's pretty good at that with the right hand-holding.

The design is still a problem though, precisely because I am not a designer. I don't know what's actually good, I only know what's good enough for me. I can't tell the difference between "this is actually good" and "this is vibe-designed slop" but I have enough experience to at least make sure the implementation is robust.

There's also https://github.com/kahing/goofys, a Go equivalent. A bit of a dead project these days.

There's another piece of the puzzle. Dario has very clearly stated they are not taking the OpenAI approach of spending $trillion to scale right now and assume the money comes later. They are spending significantly less and working towards profitability sooner.

That means they are going to be far more constrained infrastructurally than some of the competition. I think this is some of the constraints that we are seeing.

I'm a director and one of our teams just spent 8 months doing just that and it was totally justified. They're finally coming up for air and the foundation is significantly improved.

There's nuance here. Every project/team/org is different.

You kind of missed my point but that's OK. You can agree with or disagree with the action OP took, I'm not making a judgement call on that.

What I'm responding to the the notion that "no action you can take matters." Specifically this:

>Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.

I just don't believe that. Small actions do matter and are necessary because they enable the big actions later. You have to start somewhere. Even if it feels insurmountable. No major change ever just happened in isolation, it always happens when enough people have had enough and fought back enough that the change was inevitable.

Eh, it has an impact. It's not always obvious but it adds up over time. Use your analogy of choice: slowly building up pressure until it boils over or a small pebble starting an avalanche or whatever works for you.

I don't necessarily agree with the OPs approach. He could have filed a complaint or done any number of things that may have been better. But in the heat of the moment nobody is making perfectly rational decisions.

Regardless, we need to fight back against abusive systems on the big and on the small. We won't always get it right but the act of fighting is what matters.

Hell, the tech savvy senior lawyers are already using LLMs to do the work that army's of juniors and other assistants did for them. Just like what is happening with software engineers. Anybody who thinks this isn't going to have some kind of impact is mental.

I worked briefly with an idvidual who had this extreme bureaucratic mentality. I just can't even imagine how you can talk to another person and have no empathy at all for their situation and only care about the process. I also know processes exist for a reason, people will abuse things, and these processes are designed to prevent abuse.

I don't have an answer. I just know that my empathy is too strong. I could never be so rigid and would not thrive in a career requiring that level of disconnect.

For now. They're about to get hit by the AI wave as bad as us software devs. Who knows what's on the other side of this.

I've forced myself to git gud with FreeCAD. It's better. Way better than it used to be. It's also still a very complex and user unfriendly application with a long road ahead of it.

You can make it work. You can also save yourself a lot of headache by using other CAD tools. Personally I value "Freedom" so I will continue to use it despite the difficulties but that may not be the right path for others.

Can't upvote you enough. This is the way. You aren't vibe coding slop you have built an engineering process that works even if the tools aren't always reliable. This is the same way you build out a functioning and highly effective team of humans.

The only obvious bit you didn't cover was extensive documentation including historical records of various investigations, debug sessions and technical decisions.

Which is fine and all but repos with such sparse README's are not doing themselves any favors.

Agreed but that's also a documentation problem. Every time I have to make a tricky decision that I know will trip me up later or some kind of compromise, I now ask the AI to document it and the reasons why. That information has definitely come in handy later and serves as a form of long-term memory.

Best part, it's good for people too.

See my other comment. Logs are just one small symptom of a larger problem of poorly integrated very complex services where the complexity is pushed onto the users and not properly managed by Amazon. Which sounds very much like the problems with Azure.

That's great but that's not really the problem. The real problem is Amazon likes to release services that depend on other services, but leave the integration work to us.

I'm convinced Amazon has many teams crapping out new features but they don't have the political clout (or manpower) to create a comprehensive product. They are mandated by management to use existing services, and thus we the users suffer because we have to manage all this extra crap and noise just to enable basic functionality.

It's maddening. And then also it's maddening to see another service from a different team that was able to throw off these shackles and actually make a product that is self contained. You get a taste of how good things could be, and then you're thrown right back into the IAM/SQS/Cloudwatch/Cloudformation/Policy/everything else under the sun soup.

How is this different than Amazon? Same problem there. Oh, you're using this new service? Need to view the logs? Want a nice friendly UI to do that? Fuck you here's Cloudwatch. Good luck.

Just to be clear, I'm responding to the parent comment not the article.

That's kind of the point. These things don't just happen, people start talking about it at a high level (this doc, conversations like this) and then dig in and solve the problems over time.

Sigh. Nobody is ever going to be happy. Would saying it came from a rando Reddit user be better?

They at least put the effort into having the retreat and putting this together. Would other consultancies (who we know little about) have of done the same?

@dang this is a very interesting and relevant doc. I think it needs another chance at making it to the front page.

This is a fairly easy to read doc discussing some of the challenges with using AI tooling in a forward thinking and disciplined way. Coming from Thoughtworks it also gives a bit of gravitas and legitimacy.

There's good stuff in here. It would be a shame for the larger HN community to miss out on this conversation.

This. I only ask LLMs to summarize non-critical stuff, i.e. just give me a general summary of all the work done over the past week.

If I were in need of hard analytics you can be damn sure I'd have it build a tool with a solid suite of tests following a rigorous process to ensure the outputs are sound. That's the difference between engineering and vibing.

Well, things are changing so fast those studies are going to be out of date. And I have no doubt some people are experiencing a net loss while others are not. We need to pry apart why some people are having success with it and others aren't, and build on top of what's working.

> Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day.

That's a big red flag if I ever saw one. Corporate should be empowering the engineering team to use AI tooling to improve their own process organically. Is this true or exaggeration? If it's true I'd start looking for a more balanced position at more disciplined org.