raw_anon_1111

Again this is not true with a real world recent example.

For context: for the project I’m about to describe, I did the 3 week discovery process where I iterated through the design. I designed the architecture from an empty AWS account with IAC and an empty git repo. I know every decision that was made and why.

An issue was reported while the client was testing - a duplicate message was displayed to the user.

I gave codex three pieces of information - the duplicate IDs and told it was duplicate.

Codex:

1. Created and ran a query in the Postgres database after finding the ARN to the credentials - you don’t have to pass credentials to the database in AWS, you pass the entry in Secrets Manager directly to the database as long as you have permission to both (Dev account). I didn’t tell it the database and queried where I was storing the event.

2. It found the lambda that stored the events in the database.

3. It looked at the CloudFormation template to figure out the Lambda was triggered by messages in an SQS queue

4. Looking at the same template it saw that the SQS message was described to an SNS topic

5. It found the code that sent the events - a 3000 line lambda

6. It was able to explain what the lambda did and find there wasn’t a bug in the logic

7. It saw that the flow was data driven and got the information from a DDB table defined by an environment variable.

8. It then looked at that CloudFormation template that deployed the Lambda

9. It ran a query on the DDB table after looking at that CloudFormation template to figure out the schema

It then told me that there was a duplicate entry in the database.

I knew the entire structure of the system - again I designed all of this myself. I wanted to see how codex would do.

Everything you are saying a modern LLM can do.

I won’t even go to how well it debugged a vibe coded internal website just by telling it to use Docker container with headless chromium and Playwright. It debugged it by taking screenshots while navigating and making changes.

Yes the security boundary is the AWS account.

It doesn’t make sense for a random employee who mistakenly uses a third party app to compromise all of its users it’s a poor security architecture.

It’s about as insecure as having one Apache Server serving multiple customer’s accounts. No one who is concerned about security should ever use Vercel.

Hell doing this with fixed price AWS Lightsale based services would be better.

Why does anyone running a third party tool have access to all of their clients’ accounts? I can’t imagine something this stupid happening with a real service provider.

I see Vercel is hosted on AWS? Are they hosting every one on a single AWS account with no tenant isolating? Something this dumb could never happen on a real AWS account. Yes I know the internal controls that AWS has (former employee).

Anyone who is hosting a real business on Vercel should have known better.

I have used v0 to build a few admin sites. But I downloaded the artifacts, put in a Docker container and hosted everything in Lambda myself where I controlled the tenant isolation via separate AWS accounts, secrets in Secret Manager and tightly scoped IAM roles, etc.

I had a friend in college who bought Computer Shopper just for the ads. He built and upgraded his PCs. Back then the price of everything would drop by the month and new processors could double your performance.

If you are a senior developer [1] responsible for delivering projects where you have to delegate to mid level ticket takers, you have to deal with developers who are also non deterministic and you can never trust their quality.

Hell my coding is non deterministic with different degrees of quality depending on what else I have going on.

But just like a developer, an LLM can also reason over intent based on clearly named functions, modularity, etc.

[1] if someone is pulling well defined tickets off the board. They are a mid level developer regardless of title.

You have to ask yourself - why? I’ve worked full time for consulting departments/companies (not staff aug) where I have been over projects for 6 years.

I get paid whether I’m on vacation, on the bench, full benefits, etc.

They take care of finding projects, chasing down payments, sales, marketing and I get paid…decently.

Every time I think about going independent - and I have a decent network and great credentials for my specialty - the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze. I get to focus on leading projects and not have to worry about the surrounding work.

Yes because with the first amendment, a president can’t sue news organizations for saying mean things and get them to pay him personally $15 million a piece (Paramount/CBS and Disney/ABC) and teachers can’t be fired for quoting racist comments of a dead podcaster.

https://cbs12.com/news/local/matthew-theobold-florida-martin...

At the height of first phase of using Macs between 1992 and 1998 having an Mac LCII and later a PowerMac 6100/60, I had a 5 device SCSI chain including a Zip Drive and later a Jaz drive (1GB removable drive) along with two hard drives and CDROM drive.

I remember that the biggest problems with Zip drives was that most Windows PCs didn’t come with SCSI and that they had some Frankenstein parallel port version.

For context when I bought my Zip drive, my internal hard drive was only 80MB and part of that was used as an emulated hard drive for my Apple //e card.

Outsourced staff aug contractors have always been mediocre.

From the contracting side, I’ve worked as a staff Aug contractor for six weeks when I was between jobs in 2012 and it was so bad I just walked off with no job lined up within four weeks.

For context staff Aug vs consulting is about who owns the project

Consulting = the customer gives you high level requirements and statement of work and you control the project (or your company)

Staff Aug = the client controls the project and you are a warm disposable body.

All of the streaming devices except for the AppleTV are sold at or below cost subsidized by advertising. If you care about a good streaming devices with anything above bottom of the barrel hardware and you don’t want to buy an Apple device, get an Nvidia Shield.

Yes because video console makers haven’t been doing this since the 1980s…

That is still cheaper than the average cable bill even a decade ago

Or I can just use my cellular Apple Watch (like I do now) for my “side phone”…

I am a lead consultant and depending on the size of the project, I do have a team of less senior consultants who are dotted line reports. If I ever found one of my reports who missed deadlines because they refused to do something as simple as launch Claude (with our $5000 a month allowance a piece) and ask it to debug an issue, yes I would write them up.

There is a direct easy to measure line about the revenue that anyone below me makes the company. My revenue per hour isn’t as exact since I support pre-sales and follow on work.

Before AI, I didn’t know how each line of code worked for a project I was responsible for but the work was done by lower level developers. If I had a question about how they implemented something I would ask them to walk me through it and give feedback - just like my CTO did with me when I was responsible for leading major initiatives. It’s been over a decade (before AI) where my responsibilities were only what I personally coded.

I treat AI just like a mid level developer ticket taker.

To a first approximation, no one gets ahead in corporate America or BigTech (been there done that) because they “codez real gud” and pull tickets off of a Jira board.

In the last decade+, I’ve been a early technical hire to lead a major initiative by a new manager/director/CTO respectively and none of them were interested in asking me questions about my coding ability. We spoke like seasoned professionals.

Even at my job in BigTech in the cloud consulting department (full time, RSU earning blue badge employee specializing in cloud + app dev) it was behavioral where they wanted to determine if I “were smart and got things done” [1]. My job after that where I am now as a staff consultant (full time employee) leading projects the interview was concerned about getting work done on time, on budget, meets requirements and whether the customer was happy with my results. Absolutely no one in the value chain cares about hand crafted bespoke code as long as it meets functional and non functional (security, scalability, usability, etc) requirements.

No BigCorp would ever use a SaaS product that doesn’t have SSO federation. No IT department wants to keep track of individual logons.

Can’t speak for search engines specifically. But I recently had to do a project which required me to crawl the customer’s large site and index it into a vector search for RAG for a call center.

My first attempt was to use crawl it just by doing GET requests (ie same thing as using curl). That got me nowhere. I had to use headless Chrome and Playwright.

Do any modern websites work with just curl even if they don’t block it - ie without being able to run JS?

With his experience, I seriously doubt that he is trying to compete in the job market based on his ability to “codez real gud”. At his (and my) experience level he is more than likely going to get his next job based on a higher level of “scope” and “impact” (yes I’m using BigTech promo docs BS).

So the project I mentioned while I did write every single line of app code and IAC, made every architectural decision, etc., I did come on an off the project over the course of a year and I couldn’t even remember some of the decisions I made.

I also used Codex and asked questions about how the codebase worked to refresh my own memory. Why wouldn’t a junior developer do the same?

I mentioned that I had Codex describe in detail how it debugged it. It walked through each query it did, the lines of code it looked at and the IAC. It jogged my memory about code I wrote a year ago and after being on other projects

And if I were your boss you would immediately be fired if you spent weeks trying to debug an issue a junior developer solved just by launching Claude and telling it the symptoms of the issue because you refused to use an LLM.

Why? I’m as old timer as old timer can get - started programming as a hobby in 1986 in assembly on an Apple //e in 65C02 assembly language.

But just today a bug was reported by a customer (we are still in testing not a production bug). I implemented this project myself from an empty git repo and an empty AWS account including 3 weeks of pre implementation discovery.

I reproduced the issue and through the problem at Claude with nothing but two pieces of information - the ID of the event showing the bug and the description.

It worked backwards looking at the event stream in the database, looking at the code that stored the event stream, looking at the code that generated the event stream (separate Lambda), looking at the actual config table and found the root cause in 3 minutes.

After looking at the code locally, it even looked at the cached artifacts of my build and verified that what was deployed was the same thing that I had locally (same lambda deployment version in AWS as my artifacts). I had it document the debug steps it took in an md file.

Why make life harder on myself? Even if it were something I was doing as a hobby, I have a wife who I want to spend time with, I’m a gym rat and I’m learning Spanish. Why would I waste 6 hours doing something that a computer could do for me in 5 minutes?

Assuming he has a day job and gets off at 6, he would be spending all of his off time chasing down a bug that he could be using doing something else.

Don’t dismiss the fact that you didn’t start trying to find a problem to start a business without knowing the vertical. You knew the industry not just from talking to customers - you were the first best customer of your own product. You had an “unfair advantage”.

I just can’t fathom how anyone thinks about starting a software business especially these days without first thinking about what their unfair advantage is when writing software is so easy with AI.

It’s not reflexive criticism. Why would anyone work for sn organization where the CEO continuously criticizes its workers and treats them badly. Would you work for Twitter?

I don’t know enough about the current NASA administration so it isn’t a criticism toward them. But it roles up to the top.

Just like if I were in the medical field - why would I work for the CDC now?

I work for a consulting company, we know exactly how much each billable person makes the company and whether the ROI is worth it.

We don’t have to measure “productivity gains”.

I personally don’t come close to that and neither do I suspect most of us. Between using my $20 a month ChatGPT subscription with Codex and the amount of time I spend on Zoom calls “adding on to what Becky said” and “looking at things from the 1000 foot view”

On another note, the grunt work I use to delegate to a junior consultant, I now can get Claude to do in a fraction of the the time. They were making a lot more than the worse case of $72K a year fully allocated. But honestly most of that work is done with my $240 a year ChatGPT subscription + maybe $600 in Claude at the current prices/limits

For power maybe. But the expected lifetime of GPU hardware is 3 years before they fail completely

And nor are they trying to. If you are spending $200 a month, you are a mere tolerated nuisance. The company I work for gives every developer a $5000 a month allowance to Claude and I think there are around 500-600 people eligible for it.

The whole “you can make a lot of money programming in COBOL” is one of those myths that needs to die.

Even the briefest of Google searches show they make around the same as any other enterprise dev if not slightly less.

At any tech company with leveling guidelines that I have seen, promotions above mid level have never been based on “I codez real gud”. It’s always been based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity. It’s stated differently in different companies.

No one has ever differentiated themselves based on how good of a ticket taker they are. Coding especially on the enterprise dev side where most developers work has been being commoditized since 2016 at least and compensation has stagnated since then and hasn’t come near keeping up with inflation.

In 2016, a good solid full stack, mobile or web developer working in the enterprise could make $135K working in a second tier city. That’s $185K inflation adjusted today. Those same companies aren’t paying $185K for the same position.

My one anecdote is that the same company I worked for back then making $125K and some of my coworkers were making $135K just posted a position on LinkedIn with the same requirements (SQL Server + C#) offering $145K fully remote.

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