elvis10ten

Good luck!

Even in the best case scenario, normies wouldn’t want to build everything themselves.

Aside: When did you start studying for nursing? And have you written about your experience so far?

I agree with you! And I’m not trying to romanticize the past! Humans/me wrote slop too.

I think we are over-indexing on speed of delivery. I think this is a mistake. The alpha is in speed and quality.

Currently, my experience is that human + AI can write software faster and with better quality than either party can do alone.

No where did I say we don’t do agentic dev!

Years of experience doesn’t mean much! I will challenge you on ideas. And the idea you are sharing is dangerous and unprofessional.

Especially at scale. e.g., we process more than 3.5 billion orders annually! This is serious business. Edge cases are common.

I work as a professional app developer. And I find this take to be naive.

Most of the time when I review code from AI, there is always something to improve.

It’s either a maintenance issue. e.g., Opus recommended and implemented a fix for a database corruption crash. This was ~400 lines of code with many moving parts. I reviewed, and found out Android Room library already handles this recovery case, and all I needed was a 10 liner PR that catches this exception and ignores it.

The maintenance is not only the burden on the human and LLM. With too many moving parts, it becomes harder and harder to build and verify the correctness of future features. Yes you can write test for this and that, but it didn’t need to exist in the first place.

The second problem is correctness issues. Especially the edge cases. You cannot just manually test out a race condition on a phone! Sometimes it happens! Sometimes it doesn’t! If it leads to a visible signal like a crash, then yes, you can try to reproduce it. But there are a lot of these that are “silent” and would just lead to bad experiences.

We already had a software quality crisis! And I think such views only exacerbate the situation! Quality matters!

And this is not an anti-AI stance. I vibe code personal projects where I don’t even look at the code. But when I use AI as a professional engineer, I act like a professional. Because these products do have an impact on people’s lives.

Were there cheaper and humane ways to get more employees to use AI? (yes). Did many people JUST burn tokens (goodbart law)? (Yes). Would people revert back to the mean? (I think yes). Do many professionals hate AI because of this push? (Yes). Was the org net productive?

I wish there was an independent body truly assessing the impact of big tech decisions and running counterfactuals. Instead of accepting nice stories like this as a given.

Using Claude, I recently tried to do something similar for the Covid hiring spree: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/21bba86a-ad5d-439c-861d-0...

> But do you know all the communication your laptop is doing? Do you really claim it is all for you, or all for your benefit? Or is it just something the laptop does that isn't really for anyone in particular?

Hmm, why would anyone add comms to a laptop if there wasn’t some benefactor in some way? The way I see it is that it’s either benefiting me or benefiting the company which ends up benefiting some individuals (and sometimes me again).

In your examples, I can still find the “for whom”, even if that is several layers deep. I’m trying to understand your position: are you saying the same will be true in the ongoing case, just that we don’t know the connections yet?

> Your own job, assuming you're in the software industry, is to automate and eliminate people's jobs. How many jobs do you think it has eliminated? Do you feel you are responsible for your products?

This is a common trope from the LLM crowd. Places I have worked for as a software engineer have created more jobs (gig economy) or improved the human condition (edtech in emerging markets) or helped people in refugee camps in Kenya stay connected.

Even in questionable companies, I focus on work that makes sure the technology is accessible to any and everyone. I became a programmer because I thought I could help make the world a better place.

> The hope is that it will be net plus for the society.

Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy.

From my experience using HN, this feels made up. HN sentiment on AI seems to have only gotten better: with more overly pro-AI or nuanced voices plus more AI topics.

The hype is in what AI delivers (at least so far). I would never create a PR without an AI review. I will ask an AI to write code for me from time to time.

But it still has huge gaps in quality. And from time to time, it shows me that it doesn’t really understand things. You might point out that how is that any different from your mediocre engineer. But for most people skilled enough, you can easily know the difference when someone doesn’t really know something.

With AI, you discover this after reading several pages being dumped on you by people being “more productive” with AI.

> with the exception of firing those that don't adopt the technology.

This is a crazy take. Even if said people are matching or exceeding the outcome of those using the technology?

I’m not in this group. But the closest analog to what you are saying is firing people for not using a specific IDE.

I just had a relevant experience. I asked Claude to add “trace(‘$FunctionName’) {}” to all Composable functions in my app. Claude spent some time doing something. In between, I was like shoot, I could just do a deterministic regex match and replace.

Even CRUD programming: you can’t get very good at it with just reading.

While intuition takes a while, I think it can be learned in less than a month or two.

This has been my experience. When something gets good enough, someone will create some really good resource on it. Allowing the dust to settle, to me is a more efficient strategy than constantly trying to “keep up”. Maybe also not waiting too long to do so.

This wouldn’t work of course if a person was trying to be some AI thought leader.

> LLMs make learning new material easier than ever. I use them a lot and I am learning new things at an insane pace in different domains.

With learning, aren’t you exposed to the same risks? Such that if there was a typical blind spot for the LLM, it would show up in the learning assistance and in the development assistance, thus canceling out (i.e unknown unknowns)?

Or am I thinking about it wrongly?

Is that fight and soccer? Cause I couldn’t find a sport called fight soccer.

Good luck. I plan on doing something similar once I get my permanent residence later this year.

Are you relocating permanently to Finland? Do you have a blog post of your experience there?

Personal opinion: I find funerals to be a waste of time and money.

Especially, coming from a culture where they are a big event. People spend enormous money on funerals —- money that they wouldn’t help you with while you are alive and struggling.

Maybe attending one in a less flamboyant culture will change my mind.

But I wish more people in general don’t wait for terminal events to do or say nice things.

As someone who has worked hard for years (at some point I had three con-concurrent jobs), I’m not sure working hard is the variable that causes burnout :thinking_face:

I will say tho, it gave me persistent back problems and RSI for two years :). But that again is not just “working hard”. It was bad posture, lack of stretching, breaks and exercise, I think.

Edit: Perhaps it’s the nature of the work or working hard unhealthily (physical and mental?) or the person’s characteristics.

Of course. However, the amount of time spent thinking consciously or subconsciously on a doomed project is minimized. The amount of time spent making decisions predicated on having the same job also. I can also savage any expensive holiday plans I made.

The keyword for me is the employer should let me know ASAP when something is doomed.

Again, this stress-free holiday with family is not a problem for me. I will rather be real about the situation than have my employer hide it for a month. They could give me an extra month of severance instead :).

Edit: I might be a minority on the earlier take.

I think the other argument that would affect other people is: these things always leak through gossip. When you hear of an imminent layoff and you don’t know if you will be included, it’s the worst type of stress.

I see. I guess different strokes for different folks.

For me, if my job or project is doomed, and my employer knows, I will rather they tell me immediately so I can start figuring out solutions ASAP.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the holidays. The last thing I will want is to come back from a holiday in Portugal, spirits high, year plans made, but only to be told I am fired.

But I can understand the other perspective.

> Time of the lay off also not too bad (firing people in November/December is really uncool).

I don’t understand this. Why is it uncool? And why is January better?

I guess it doesn’t let people enjoy their vacations. But on the flip side, isn’t that a good thing? You can curb expenses on the vacation/holidays.

I feel uncomfortable because of the words themselves. Whether it was made to a “regular” non-living thing wouldn’t change it.

I find it funny that you are discussing how to block YouTube ads —- when you can just get YouTube premium. Makes me ask the age old question: how can creators supposed to eat?

> Our culture needs to confront the fact that people are tired of their attention being diverted from their goals every day just so some dumb companies can remind us they exist.

This seems like an argument against non-targeted/contextual ads only? Because goals and ads can align.

I have had back pain and RSI for almost two years. My situation only got better after I started doing my physio exercises consistently.

I also learned things from physios on YouTube (e.g. Bob and Brad) that made a difference especially with the RSI in my hands.

My anecdotal experience doesn’t scaling with your claim. Of course, each pain is different and some just require good ol rest like you said. But that’s why you should spend the money to hire the professionals at the top of their game to tell you what is what.

Off: Did you stop martial arts? If no, How did you cope/manage?

Just curious.

Related video which I just remembered: https://youtu.be/CmZdGo6b5yA?si=k67_azS5gwUvQJuq

So it seems languages might not change how you think, but might be able to emphasize certain aspects of things like you allude to (I believe).