ryandvm

100%

We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong."

Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year.

This is all complicated by the fact that we're also losing our grasp on reality from the other direction because we have leadership air dropping AI generated manifestos on the product owners and product owners having to use AI to transmute all that shit into 1,500 word Jira tickets that are 10% necessary feature work and 90% LLM boilerplate.

So now you have software engineers whose job has changed radically to the point that the hardest part about being a software engineer is just filtering through AI generated artifacts from all directions just to try to get a feature out the door.

It seems like it would be well within the charter of the Library of Congress to archive a complete scan of every book published in the United States. At least then we wouldn't lose the information. They can figure out distribution and copyright later.

Don't count on the Democrats growing any... erhm... spine in the next 2 years.

Burnt myself on this in Google Maps just this week. I had an appointment in my calendar with the location set to "Dr Firstname Lastname, 123 Main St, 12345". I clicked through it into Google Maps and since it had the full address specified I just trusted it. Well, it turned out that the first result was actually an ad for a competing doctor 20 minutes in the wrong direction.

To Google's credit, they did drop the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago...

Mmmm - I don't do root cause analysis for free. Best I can do is correlation.

Flock can make all the promises it wants, but the reality is that once growth stalls out on camera installations, which it must, shareholders will immediately insist that they pivot into other monetization schemes. There aren't really any laws holding them back, just their already weasel-worded contracts that they could easily renegotiate once the police departments are putting pressure on the city/county/state/federal legislative bodies.

The possibilities are endless:

  - Is your employee visiting your competitors?
  - Where has your husband/wife/lover been?
  - What medical buildings has this person been to?
  - Does this person go to churches / gun ranges?

Man, that is a fuckin stage 4 internet brain worm infection you're dealing with if, when evaluating an LLM, your third criterion is what it thinks about trans people.

> * Do not provide assistance to users who are clearly trying to engage in criminal activity.

I don't know what we want to call this, but in my opinion, having to convince your tools is not computer science.

Kind of amusing that we made it as far as we did as a species not really being able to explain how the human brain does it's most amazing tricks and then we just replicated it while still not really understanding the emergent capabilities all that well.

I dunno. I'm just glad Congress can barely pass any legislation. What an Executive Order does, another Executive Order can just as easily undo.

My backlog is less empty than ever - it just happens to be overflowing with whispy Claude-written tickets for functionality that somebody else's Claude suggested after summarizing some other Claude-infused Slack chat.

Lord, this hits close to home.

It doesn't seem to be happening everywhere, but if you are unfortunate enough to work someplace with a "LinkedIn thought leader" high up on the engineering food chain, there's a really high likelihood that your organization is currently in the throes of an "everyone must be using AI for everything" fever dream.

And boy let me tell you, it is every bit as disastrous as the OP claims. Engineering managers are asking Claude to write up entire initiatives, then they hand off these nebulous AI slop manifestos to the teams where the requirements folks are having Claude shit out tons of superficially plausible Jira tickets. It finally lands on some poor engineer's plate and since these tickets are the technical equivalent of Finnegans Wake, they just end up asking Claude to read all this shit on `ultracode` and draft up a pull request. Which is then peer-reviewed by somebody using Claude.

I wish I were exaggerating.

Not sure about the others, but a Google Home device with Gemini enabled gives you basically short conversational LLM interactions. It can set timers and play music and all that, but you can also pretty much ask it any random question and it will give you an LLM answer.

It's far more useful than the previous Google Assistant answers which were always of the form, "According to petmd.com - [direct quote]".

Lol. Is this The Onion?

These frontier AI companies are labor market nuclear weapons. What kind of fucking mission statement is going to inspire people when they're responsible for 50% unemployment?

There's no downside for you.

You said it yourself - you have the knowledge and ability to know what to ignore and keep what makes sense, but that's because you spent years actually writing and understanding code.

The magic wand of AI is absolutely wreaking havoc with juniors engineers' ability to understand complex code bases and software engineering fundamentals. How will the engineers of tomorrow know what to keep and what to reject if all they've ever known is "you are a principal engineer. read this Jira ticket and build a solution. ultrathink".

> When in the heck is Congress gonna get some backbone and hold this clown accountable.

Strategy. The GOP isn't even trying to hold him back any more because they know they're probably going to lose control of Congress at the mid-terms, at which point they know the Democrats will be licking their chops to impeach him. Then they can feign indignation, and possibly a few GOP votes if necessary, for a successful impeachment. After that, they'll have the President they want, JD Vance, with a potential 10 year term.

Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that.

The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appreciation now that the LLMs are taking over the fun part.

Not long until we have the first abortion capital punishment case when one of these death cult states tracks a lady across state lines...

Curious about the official YCombinator stance on this extremely unpopular YCombinator-backed startup (unpopular here at HN anyway).

Yeah, as Norm Macdonald put it:

> “It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”

Ugh. It hurts my brain to think about the Venn diagram of privacy advocates and YC sycophants that hang out on Hacker News.

This is the new normal now that computer science based SWEs are being replaced with "LLM whisperers". Being 10 times more productive with AI necessarily means you're going to have 1/10th of the understanding of the code you're producing. It physically couldn't be any other way.

Yeah, if I were him, I too would be thrilled with not having to review another AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure we've already passed some sort of fiscal singularity where economic and political interests are so intertwined that there can only be growth. If there ever isn't growth, then the legislators (who are elected via corporate sponsorship) will pull whatever levers necessary to make sure that there will always be asset growth.

It's some sort of tragic positive feedback loop that isn't going to stop until the whole thing comes crashing down for everyone and we're paying $37,000 for a loaf of bread.

Agreed. That said, when it does get grim, a few billion of net worth probably isn't as consoling as it used to be for the billionaires when the head of your security team has instated himself as chief warlord of your bunker and you're no longer allowed to make eye contact with your former wife and mistresses.

I still don't understand the economics of the full AI rollout.

Who the hell is buying anything if more than 50% of the workforce is unemployed? And among the post-AI employable, every job that isn't highly skilled is going to have the wages pushed to the floor due to rampant unemployment.

None of this shit works unless we figure out "Star Trek welfare"...

I feel the same way about "prompt engineering" as I feel regarding the term "parkour" - you know, running and jumping on stuff.

Are people really putting on their resumes that they are capable of reading and writing and appropriately defining and limiting context? That's all prompt engineering is - it's being able to communicate effectively and elucidate your objectives.

Congratulations to all you English majors out there, you're about to make $350K/year.

I don't know man. This reads like "yeah we stole your grain, but making bread is hard."

Boy I tell you, I am having an awful hard time summoning pity for the organizations that have themselves distilled all of humanity's knowledge into mysterious labor-market-masticating black boxes.

It's all bullshit. They have to ask because somebody is asking them how they're going to eke more productivity out of their underlings. It goes all the way to the top (the shareholders).

Just play along and talk about how you want to improve your mentoring skills or some other completely immeasurable platitude.

Ultimately this productivity-eking obsession is the organizational equivalent of free radical cellular damage. It's just a constant process of degradation to the integrity of whatever caused the business to be successful. Like death, it is unavoidable.

Sure, by "superficially superior code" I mean that LLMs, by design, produce code that has syntax and idioms that are perfectly in line with industry norms due to the vast training corpus that it comes from. It looks great at first glance.

Normally, this is a signal that the developer is at least informed about best practices in the language and is usually a pretty good indicator that they're thinking clearly about the work they're doing. That, along with reputation, takes a lot of cognitive burden off the reviewer.

However, with LLMs that is all it means. You can be sure the code is norm-compliant, but in my experience that is all you can be sure of. There's not really a guarantee that it has thought deeply about the problem space.

It's like a bridge that looks great.