Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xpct 7 days ago
> Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year.

From all the tech that we have, agents are really not that hard to learn on the job. They're also not a magical silver bullet.
1 comments
vibe_that_works 7 days ago
True, but please don't give job seekers false hope with this statement. I commonly see 60 - 180 applicants for one open position. Good luck finding a hiring manager who wants to take a bet instead of going with proven experience.

I think upskilling is the right move in this environment and it is dead simple: Invest a couple of days to show initiative, learn agents yourself and be able to speak from true experience.

link
moregrist 7 days ago
I love that we’re already talking about “proven experience” for a technology that’s essentially 15 months old, arguably only broke into the mainstream 3-6 months ago, has an unclear RoI for many companies, and seems to be changing quickly in both cost and “best practices.”

You’re more or less admitting that you’re playing trendy tech lottery. Which is fine, but maybe not generalizable to the whole industry.

link
ejpir 7 days ago
15 months, 15 months ago, is not the same 15 months now. You'd be ignorant to think this a trend that will just fade. If we look at that has happened the last 15 months, it'll keep getting bigger and better. Hopefully not more expensive though.
link
sdesol 7 days ago
> playing trendy tech lottery.

I don't know about that, and I am 100% biased so take what I say with a grain of salt. My position is very much this: you may not trust coding agents to make code changes, but if you're not willing to treat them as a research aid or have them work for you, you're pretty much saying they can't help you work more efficiently.

I'm working on a Show HN post that includes:

https://github.com/gitsense/smart-ripgrep

It's a fork of BurntSushi/ripgrep. What I hope to show with it is that you don't have to use coding agents to code. They can be used to surface knowledge that's buried in documents, issue comments, PR discussions, and other places.

Believing coding agents are trendy would be like saying search was trendy in 1998. They're not going to change the world the way Anthropic wants us to believe, but they will shape how humans develop software. And I think for the better, since AI is capable of processing information at scale to help you move forward.

link
moregrist 7 days ago
Regardless of how you think about LLMs (I do find them useful), there’s something really odd to think that you can select for “proven experience” in a young technology where current experience appears to have little to do with experience 15 months ago, and where the biggest boosters fully claim it will have nothing to do with experience in 15 months.

What you’re selecting for is enthusiasm, knowing the current shibboleths of the in-group, and possibly for who knows how to use them to make a good demo.

And, fair enough, if that's what you want. But it's not "proven experience" in my mind.

link