[pipes]

The battling ai bit you mentioned. This is my life right. Ai is both amazing and shit. I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives. Meanwhile I am going insane with stress because I've burnt so much time trying to wrangle it on a team I've just joined. My productivity has not been good. I half feel like I am being gas lit by YouTubers and half feel "no I'm just doing it wrong"

[swiftcoder]

> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code

If they are, they aren't producing anything useful with it. Just look around - do you see a sudden increase in actually useful software alongside the AI boom?

What they are mostly doing is a snake-eating-it-own-tail million lines of code LLM harness to burn tokens faster to write more code... to write a 10 million lines of code LLM harness. Or endlessly bikeshedding the perfect LLM-powered bespoke personal knowledge base.

In normal software engineering jobs, we're debugging problems a bit quicker, we're writing boilerplate faster, we have a lot of questionable new test suites... but the game is more or less the same as it was before

[43fg]

My strong feeling is that the firms who get too deep into this and have lost the ability to engage deeply with their minds (necessary requirement for imagination) are long term fooked and will get destroyed by those who preserved the ability to imagine and create and recognise the subtleties, nuances etc of product development.

[sillyfluke]

The AI cartel's hope is that the market will stay irrational longer than the naysayers can stay solvent both financially and intellectually.

Putting it a different way, it won't matter if the firms who went too deep at the very beginning are fucked if the rational are forced to succumb to the market pressures created by the irrational and thus are reluctantly pushed to adopt AI-first workflows for appearance's sake in order to survive anyway. Because then everybody will be likewise fucked and completely dependent on AI, despite it being a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness of the systems under development. History has taught us that it is adoption dynamics not capability that determines the winning paradigm or technology (Betamax vs VHS is one historical example. Javascript vs everything else is another one).

(We know it's a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness because the entire coding agent paradigm turns the most knowledgeable programmer into a person "who doesn't know what they don't know" because development speed far exceeds their ability to reason about the codebase and the underlying SOTA models that they depend on to fix the bugs that the model itself has introduced are at best unreliable narrators with no objective evidence of correctness or deterministic behavior.)

[ssfrr]

Don't compare your inside to other people's outside.

[chrisweekly]

great advice

[pjc50]

I am not convinced that the "dark factory" / "gas town" people are actually shipping anything that isn't also part of the AI ecosystem. At least the noise/ship ratio is incredibly high.

[dude250711]

What about shipping tweets and blog posts? Also team demos "how to use AI for basic imaginary hello-world scenarios".

[ilaksh]

The leading edge models are pretty good but we are still at the "rain man" stage so it's "jagged" intelligence.

It may be three years or so before the new compute-in-memory devices fully make it out of the lab and increase efficiency by about 100 times, allowing us to deploy models with human level complexity (100T vs current 10T SOTA) at scale.

[rootusrootus]

> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives

That is when I realize I'm spending too much time on HN. Because it is really only here that this vibe is so strong. My impression is that there is a lot of motivated reasoning in the folks that frequent HN.

It may also be that I work a boring job. If I turned up our code output by 10x it would not improve anything about our product. People who are pumping out dramatically more code have to be in an entirely different world. Or, you know, they're full of shit.

[dlev_pika]

You are not crazy.

[mrinterweb]

I feel this so much. I woke up at 1am last night stressing about AI and my potential lack of productivity. 2am rolls around, and I could not get back to sleep so I worked till 4:30am. Slept fine till 7:00am. AI has been causing a lot of stress for me and many others lately. My biggest source of stress is what will AI transform the human work world into by the time my children need a job? Most of us live in a capitalist society so AI utopia is right off the table.