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by raw_anon_1111 100 days ago
Would you say the general contractor for your home isn’t a builder because he didn’t install the toilets?
2 comments

I think this argument would be make more sense if you were talking about an architect, or the customer.

A contractor is still very much putting the house together.

The general contractor is not doing the actual building as much as he is coordinating all of the specialist, making sure things run smoothly and scheduling things based on dependencies and coordinating with the customer. I’ve had two houses built from the ground up
3 myself and I have yet to meet a "vibe" contractor.
And he is also not inspecting every screw, wire, etc. He delegates
Oh you're preaching to the choir. I think we are entering a punctuated equilibrium here w/r to the future of SW engineering. And the people who have the free time to go on to podcasts and insist AI coding agents can't do anything useful rather than learning their abilities and their limitations and especially how to wield them are going to go through some things. If you really want to trigger these sorts, ask them why they delegate code generation to compilers and interpreters without understanding each and every ISA at the instruction level. To that end, I am devoid of compassion after having gone through similar nonsense w/r to GPUs 20 years ago. Times change, people don't.
I haven’t stayed relevant and able to find jobs quickly for 30 years by being the old man shouting at the clouds.

I started my career in 1996 programming in C and Fortran on mainframes and got my first only and hopefully last job at BigTech at 46 7 jobs later.

I’m no longer there. Every project I’ve had in the last two years has had classic ML and then LLMs integrated into the implementation. I have very much jumped on the coding agent bandwagon.

I think that's precisely his thinking and don't let him know about all those fancy expensive unitasker tools they have that you probably don't that let them do it far more cost effectively and better than the typical homeowner. Won't you think of the jerbs(tm)? And to Captain dystopia, life expectencies were increasing monotonically until COVID. Wonder what changed?