[NAHWheatCracker]

Yea. Watch a sci-fi film - nifty gadgets, robots taking care of chores, and widespread spaceflight. Real life is some unreliable chat bots.

Then there's the depressing practical stuff. AI being forced down our throats. AI as an excuse lay people off. AI as an excuse for massive data hoarding. AI flooding the internet, making it harder to find good content.

[therein]

I find it extra surprising that people are advocating for transitioning to using AI while their proof of concept looks like this:

do { resp = callAI(input); } while (!isOutputSane(resp) && attempts++ < MAX_RETRY)

[Scarblac]

It's actually `letSlightlyDifferentAIJudgeOutputSanity()` rather than `isOutputSane()`, I think.

[jajko]

Nobody sane and smart I know is advocating for AI now. All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. Our megacorp very effectively blocked all of this and we don't have anything internal yet, but we are in specific market.

And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start building trust. Sure assistants are nice but thats about it.

Its just too flawed now to be dependable and reliable, it feels like typical 80/20 or 90/10 situation where inexperienced juniors are all over their head how future is now, and seniors just meh and go and do some work.

[jgilias]

Advocate or not, it’s here to stay. And if you’re not adjusting to it, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call, write tests. With “the robot” once the framework was largely in place, you just paste API docs for the endpoint you need, and it’s done in a minute. With tests and everything.

Now, you could argue that this is not “senior level work”. Sure, maybe. But the thing is, you need to use it to learn how to use it effectively, and more importantly to get the intuition about what it can help with best.

So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.

[toogan]

> Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call, write tests. With “the robot” once the framework was largely in place, you just paste API docs for the endpoint you need, and it’s done in a minute. With tests and everything.

That just points to an inefficiency. Could be tackled in other ways than involving an LLM to produce essentially what's being done elsewhere every day over and over again. A framework automating and hiding all this would be just as effective. Perhaps even cleaner than all that duplication that the LLM created for you.

In other words, that month of busywork that you just saved is inherently unnecessary to do. But progress is not linear in the number of lines of code that you produce. If you think hard about a good architecture and design, coming up with that after 2 weeks of hard thinking, that could be 90% of the work. The remaining 10% are writing all that down. That could take 3 more months, and it taking more than 10% of the time points to the existing inefficiency in tooling / framework / ... But making that more efficient isn't necessarily achieved the best by using an LLM and writing it all out. There are still huge redundancies, which is what made the LLM possible. Once you boil these down in some common frameworks or tools, the LLM will also just produce the same few lines that you'd need to produce to get those 10% done in then just 10% of the total time.

[stego-tech]

> So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.

Work(ed) for a company super big on a force of agents. Brought them into my workflows early on, before the company even pivoted. Ran them at home on private hardware (that 3090 had to do something), at work when access was opened up. Provided valuable feedback on hallucinations (e.g., fabricating the existence of a MongoDB CLI module wholesale, documentation and all) and barriers to adoption. Pitched an integration of four disparate systems across ~20 data points to create tenancy in a core product line from scratch, with said AI at the center of it for customer service and workload creation, reducing engineers to approvals only for ~20 tickets a week averaging ~40hrs of work, freeing up said engineers for actually valuable work instead of handholding customers through routine tasks. Got great feedback and enthusiasm on it.

RIFed this year.

Doesn't matter whether you're bullish or bearish on it, the only thing that ever really matters is if scrubbing your line item from a spreadsheet will net someone higher up than you a bonus. That's what's driving this AI mania, and what needs to be addressed via policy before these employers gut themselves and the economy in the process.

[bluefirebrand]

> Work(ed) for a company super big on a force of agents.

> RIFed this year

Yeah that's why they are big on the force of agents, so they can justify trimming their workforce

Anyone who doesn't see this is kind of a sucker

[stego-tech]

Oh, 100%, and I knew that going in. Still, I'm the type of worker (sucker? sap?) that will go down with the ship if it helps the rest of the folks get into lifeboats. I know I can take care of myself when stuff hits the fan, and I'm never one to half-ass my output because of my own cynicism.

I'm hoping that pays off for me someday. Thus far, it's just been a lot of burnout/layoff cycles.

[jgilias]

Sure, but what choice do you have as an individual? Try and adjust to the new reality and maybe get RIFed anyway, or not adjust to it and get RIFed with 90% certainty. Power looms won.

[jgilias]

Man, that’s rough. I hope you’re doing well!

Totally agree with you on the line-item point. My point there was that if a 50% RIF is in the works, the people who haven’t figured out how to become more efficient using AI would be more likely to be affected. Statistically.

But again, hope you’re doing well and everything has worked out for you!

[stego-tech]

I’m a month in, and it’s rough as hell. But I at least have a runway for the first time in my career, so I’m profoundly grateful for that.

Still optimistic that my generalist skillset and adaptability to new technologies (like AI) will make me an asset for IT teams who can’t afford multiple specialists in rough economic times like these.

[Scarblac]

But a solution that takes an OpenAPI spec and generates all of those things from templates would be much more reliably correct than letting an AI do it, and has already existed for years.

I think AI is a game changer but not for things that can already be automated rigirously without AI.

[jgilias]

There was no OpenAPI spec. And it wasn’t all it made faster to do.

[pjmlp]

Eventually only the arquitect will be required, no need for seniors, the offshoring team is the cloud instead of some folks on the other side of the planet.

This is the future to prepare, not AI generating a couple of files.

[jgilias]

Maybe. But that future is definitely not yet here. Generating a couple of files though is here. And that compounds. So people who’re still typing those files by hand… yeah.

[pjmlp]

For some things not yet yes, for others it is already here.

[patrick451]

You have to balance this time savings with all the times the LLM is just making shit up. I can't the number of times I ask "how do I do X?", and says "call function Y" or "Use command line argument Z". Turns out Y doesn't exist and CLI doesn't take argument "Z". The frustration from that lying is immense. I'd rather take a little longer on some tasks and never deal with this lying.

[jgilias]

I see what you mean. The way I approach this is that I think of it as a very (very, very) elaborate auto-complete. Something that takes some text, and continues with the most likely continuation. Which is what it basically is, right?

But that means that whatever rather impressive internal representation of knowledge it has encoded, that knowledge itself can’t be trusted on a “factual” basis.

This is where you have stopped, but you shouldn’t. Because you’re missing what it’s great at. And it’s great at “continuing” text in a longer context. So just use it with a longer context. Use the Search functionality in ChatGPT when asking it things such that you see where it got it from. Use it in a codebase context where you point it to the relevant parts. Give it examples it should follow, etc.

For every task I have I try using AI in some way and form first. Because the downside is limited - I waste 5-7 minutes figuring out that it’s not going to work, and this is something I definitely need to do myself. But the upside is unlimited - the task is done in minutes.

[patrick451]

If I waste 5-7 minutes multiple times every day, that quickly adds up. It's easy to waste an hour or more fiddle farting with these unreliable tools. It's easier to just do it myself.

[nukem222]

> And if you’re not adjusting to it, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

What does this even mean? AI is mostly forced in situations where it can't actually improve on the output, like at the top of a google search.

> So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.

If your job mostly consisted of writing api clients maybe, but that's a pretty odd job.

[regularjack]

> So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.

Do you wanna bet?

[jgilias]

We’re all already betting one way or another.

[surgical_fire]

> All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc.

The parallels with crypto are amazing.

> And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro...

Cue some dude chiming in on how they are 1000% more productive now and wrote 100 apps in a weekend with Claude, etc.

It is very tiresome indeed.

[pjmlp]

Except this time is quite real for some jobs, maybe programming will take a few more years, but for artistic fields, it is already here.

Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of hiring artists is quite common.

[surgical_fire]

> Except this time is quite real

Oh it was very real during crypto hype cycle too. The crypto people were very annoying with it.

> Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of hiring artists is quite common.

I would imagine it is fine for some concept art, based on my experimentation with multiple models for Stable Diffusion.

For generating actual assets that are consistent? I am highly skeptical. Unless we are talking about bottom of the barrel indie games.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I was very involved in the crypto scene, and really the only real utility was monero for buying the funny chemicals.

[pjmlp]

Consistent enough for it to be an issue.

And not only indies, when taking voice actors into consideration.

https://www.ign.com/articles/horizon-actor-ashly-burch-says-...

Or some well known studios,

https://www.ign.com/articles/activision-finally-admits-it-us...

[wolfcola]

but layoffs are happening _now_, purely based on what people who stand to benefit directly claim AI will do.

[fjdjshsh]

>AI as an excuse lay people off.

Why do you think the managers/business owners need an excuse to lay people off? If it's legal and economically beneficial to them, they'll fire people. Having AI won't help them as an excuse. In fact, I would say it sounds like a much worse excuse than "the economy is on a rough spot" or something like that

[nukem222]

> If it's legal and economically beneficial to them, they'll fire people.

More importantly, if they can imagine some economic benefit. Very plausible an executive might think a chatbot is as capable as an engineer when they don't know how to evaluate either.

[falkensmaize]

Are you serious? The obvious benefit is they get to lay a bunch of people off and pretend it’s because they’re forward thinking innovators instead of poor managers that are having difficulty growing their business. There’s a huge incentive to present this fiction to stockholders, which is the only opinion they care about.