mattgreenrocks

It really feels like it is more about the novelty than actually doing the work sometimes.

I take comfort in the fact that reality has a surprising amount of detail and even hundreds of billions of dollars of capital (be it the institution, LLMs, and/or people) cannot solve this fully.

Despair is a choice some people have made, and they want to drag others into it to justify their inaction. Take your best shot. Maybe it takes off, maybe it doesn't.

Either way, it's a hell of a lot better than being a replyguy.

He's not. That's how things will be from now on. Because there's plenty of hacks who think prompting will make them millions if they could just find that one idea, yet aren't willing to do the work to find, vet, build, and iterate.

The irony of a highly talented band that have been actually doing the work for over twenty years being pushed aside to make room for Meta's model that promises you won't have to actually do the work.

Muse puts on a killer live show. Don't miss them if they come to town.

Glad they found a home, but the press release doesn’t make it sound like a victory (or I’m pessimistic!).

Sad to see ui.sh go away, however. Is there something else like it out there? Especially the brand kit skill.

The industry has always found it strangely taboo to actually talk about the wide variance in developer skill.

I am super curious how you went about the port using LLMs. At $WORK we are looking to port code, preferably with LLMs, and it seems daunting, even with a test suite. Do you have an approach that works well for you?

The question I'm left with: in the past, the uproar over these types of changes seemed to make companies change their mind when considering very anti-consumer decisions. Now, they just go ahead anyway.

What's different? How do we get back to how it was before? I know the current political climate is one that enables this sort of thing. There are parallels with the current movement also WRT to the employer/employee relationship.

Beyond that, there's still more at play. In tech, and specifically on this site, I see a lot more complicity and fatigue when discussing these issues. I can't help but think that also contributes. I'm not saying everyone should always be mad at everything. But it does seem like there's a generational component to this where we haven't passed down an essential feature of a hacker, namely the anti-establishment bent.

I suppose that's collateral damage of a culture tolerating lots of people rushing in to grab their bag of cash and then get out.

I'd argue all of those are often issues of how we perceive circumstances vs what actually is going on. There are real situations that crowd out this sort of thing, but they don't apply to everyone (having people that need care comes to mind or crunches at work).

Jung has a great quote to the effect of, "we don't solve our problems, but rather outgrow them." Life is going to feel like mostly-imperfect circumstances for any venture, and your brain can be too good at rationalizing any [lack of] behavior.

Took the compilers class in 2012 and it was amazing. Loved the immersive format and the fact all the students wanted to be there.

Hope he finds something fulfilling in the days ahead.

You're not. This site was also bullish on using LLMs as therapists, which defeats the very point of them, and reflects a lack of knowledge on what exactly therapists do for people.

More on topic: if the article's author arrived at a definitively negative result would this have shown up on HN?

Thanks for writing this up. How did you figure out it was toxic white mold, or rather, what tests helped you get there?

They're also gaming the heuristic that if an OSS repo hasn't had any pushes in ~6mos many users consider it defunct.

Yep. There's also been a relentless push for the past two decades or so to standardize many aspects of software development:

* programming languages (JS)

* frameworks (React)

* open source libraries

* platforms (Web, mostly)

* design systems (shadcn for newer apps)

Guess what makes it easier for automation to come in?

Our need for it to be easy and standard contributed to the success of LLM use in software engineering. I suspect it would have done well without some of those factors, but it may have taken longer.

I read this paper as trying to be as serious as l the folk wisdom around the anthropomorphization of LLMs. Which is to say: not at all. :)

Just a small reminder that we aren't wanted ;)

Makes it much easier to use the Internet less. They're poisoning the ground water of the well, effectively.

I love how passive aggressive the page becomes: "You turned off recommendations...we won't show you anything else on here either!"

How I feel about programming is often a reflection of how I feel about my own internal world because it continues to be a part of my identity. Once I found a job that valued my desire to actually build things, things started to sort themselves out rather quickly.

Not saying that's what is going on here, but maybe it is helpful.

The only way many people learn that the stove is hot is by burning their hands on it.

Let them.

I am so over the presumptive blog post tone personally.

That clarifies it...thanks!

Maybe we can just not give it access to production databases ever?

Not picking on you, but AI maximalism has infected tech to the point where we talk about how to stop AI from deleting prod instead of seeing that giving AI access to prod is a foolish idea to begin with.

The most exasperating thing about the incident is how much of the media either tried to pin it on AI and/or Railway. The whole thing only took place because the guy FAFO’d by having AI work with prod directly.

Yet the narrative was mostly not about accountability for him. If I was a dumbass and deleted prod and wrote a post about it, nobody would care. Put an AI in there and all of the sudden it’s newsworthy. Ridiculous.

The takeaway here is to make this sort of scenario impossible in the future. It’s not hard to make that happen, but it might mean you need to manually interact with prod.

Anything else is just gambling.

Funny thing about internal work is that it cannot happen via changing one’s external circumstances. And it’s super tempting to numb it out with status symbols.

The evidence for this is rather plain to see at this point in history. ;)

It’s not surprising to me that the same crowd that cheers for the demise of software engineering skills invented its own notion of AI prompting skills.

Too bad they can veer sharply into cringe territory pretty fast: “as an accomplished Senior Principal Engineer at a FAANG with 22 years of experience, create a todo list app.” It’s like interactive fanfiction.

Odd, everyone was insisting this would "democratize" programming though.

Guess it democratizes it if you have money, huh?