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Interesting that we’ve have such different experiences. I was working with both those models today and on several occasions it proposed some pretty poor solutions.

I also find I need to run an llm code review or two against any code it produces to even get to the point where’s it’s ready for human review.

In any case they served as an extremely valuable tool.

It’s not a solved problem at all. Your take is very libertarian, which I personally sympathize with, but if we’re being honest it doesn’t align with reality.

The truth is, there are a lot of bad parents that are, for various reasons, unable to perform these parental duties.

We’ve always restricted children from accessing certain things without relying solely on their parent’s abilities or discretion.

I’m strongly in favour in giving parents as much control as possible. That doesn’t negate the fact that the vast majority of children, for example, currently have completely unrestricted access to hardcore pornography.

Shrugging it off, proclaiming it’s a parental responsibility, doesn’t solve the real world problem.

Previous to the internet we didn’t allow free unrestricted distribution of pornography to children. We stepped in as a society and said, no actually if you’re selling that… fine, but you need to verify the age of the customer.

Writing robust, bug free, efficient, maintainable, and readable code has never been easy and still isn’t. It’s an extremely difficult skill.

Are we seriously pretending that it was always easy now that an LLM can spit out some mediocre code? This seems to me a coping mechanism in response to the industry shifting.

The truth is we’re just realizing nobody, even the SWE’s, care about the code much as long as an LLM can grind it out for free.

There’s going to be a lot more of this coping as more and more human thinking gets automated. I can hear it now: “gathering business requirements was always the easy part”.

Apps SDK 10 months ago

I don’t think natural language is efficient enough. Whether that be text or voice.

I imagine the Star Trek vision is pretty accurate. You occasionally talk to the computer when it makes sense, but more often than not you’re still interacting with a GUI of some kind.

The law has yet to catch up to the idea of vibe coded software. I see significant problems.

Example: the other day someone was promoting their saas. They proudly advertised that they knew nothing about technology, and that AI created everything.

Yet their saas had a detailed privacy policy describing how your data was used. Of course the problem is, they have no way of knowing that their privacy policy is at all accurate. After all they don’t even know how to read their product’s code.

This undoubtedly exposes them to legal issues. I can imagine software being more tightly regulated as this spirals out of control.

We’ll hit a point soon where there’s so much dangerous and untrustworthy AI slop software on the market, that people will actively seek out and pay a premium for software created by professionals at reputable companies.

Sure. From the employers perspective, I get the appeal of references.

As a candidate I find them to be a huge overstep and will almost never provide them.

No, I’m sorry. I’m not going to pester my friends and colleagues to “hop on a quick call” or fill out a 2 page survey every time I interview somewhere.

Quite frankly, I really don’t need or want my friends to be intimately involved in my job search.

This poor guy had to have all his references book a call, only for them to all be notified shortly after that they weren’t needed any more, because he flunked the interview.

The position is more extreme than that. It’s your SaaS without its UI is nothing more than a database.

The underlying SaaS platform is reduced to a “database” or “utility” that an agent can switch out if needed.

I agree that UI isn’t going away completely. Language is a slow and imprecise tool. A well developed UI can be much more efficient. I think it will be much more like the Star Trek universe, where we use a blend of the two.

In any case, if the AI agent can generate UI on the fly, it seems their point still stands?

To clarify. If everyone in the US is given an extra 5k a month do you believe that the price of goods and services remain the same as they are at present?

If my landlord is charging me 2k for rent, does she not increase it knowing I now have an extra 5k of UBI monthly?

Or, if there’s a bidding war on a home that might typically sell as high as 300k, does that still hold true now that everyone has an extra 5k, or does the house sell for more?

Will a plumber still charge $30 an hour when he has a guaranteed 5k on top of what he’s making? Or will he start to bump his price up to make it worth his while?

I really don’t see how prices don’t just climb and re-equalize so that we’re back at square one. And your response didn’t address that concern.

UBI is nonsensical. Give everyone 5k a month, and everyone is not 5k richer. All you’ve done is decrease the value of the dollar.

Would love to be proven wrong.

I firmly believe AI will become heavily taxed and regulated.

It would be foolish to ban it, but equally foolish to allow it to replace a large percentage of your country’s workforce. It would completely destabilize the economy and society as a whole.

AI can do a lot of great things for humanity. Putting vast amounts of people out of a job is not one of those things.

There needs to be more smart people talking about and studying what the future realistically looks like.

You have basically just circled back to what I said initially:

I don't foresee software engineers going extinct, but there will most definitely be a lot fewer of them.

Your bad attitude, calling most software engineers “ticket takers”, while envisioning yourself as being an un-replaceable genius is extremely common in these discussions. It’s clearly an emotional reaction.

And I understand. AI is going to decimate the industry (along with many others).

Even for those who are truly un-replaceable, for many their companies business model itself will easily collapse. I can look at the list of b2b sass software I use right now and literally all of them will have zero value soon when an AI agent can in house their service in a day.

At that level, that’s the role of a product manager. We aren’t going to see software engineers all transform in to project managers. Most don’t have the skills, but more importantly there’s no need for that many PM’s.

Out of the box sure. An agent set up specifically for this task with your code and internal docs is a whole different story.

And LLMs aren’t afraid to say “you’re wrong”, they’ve just been configured to be agreeable by default.

precisely, accurately, and consistently express their needs in a backwards compatible fashion that doesn't break existing customers.

A theoretical “AI dev” will be able to gather these requirements through conversation no problem. The same way a human dev would. In fact it will probably do a better job. I really don’t think this is some special skill that protects developers from automation.

The industry is about to change drastically. I don’t foresee software engineers going extinct, but there will most definitely be a lot fewer of them.

The milk seller doesn’t even need to consciously increase prices to match the raise in household income. It will happen organically.

For the sake of argument, imagine UBI provides everyone with a million dollars a year. That doesn’t make everyone a millionaire. It just makes everyone’s money less valuable.

It’s no different on a smaller scale.

New iMac with M4 2 years ago

Personally I wish they sold a version without the camera and speakers. I already have those. A ultra wide would be nice too. I can’t imagine using two of them side by side, especially because it seems incredibly wasteful to have a duplicate speaker / camera set up.

My security system (Abode) just sent me an email telling me they’ll be putting ads in the app unless I pony up for a yearly subscription to their premium services.

I’m curious to see the implementation. If there’s a break in do I have to sit through a 30sec ad before I can interact with the app to see what’s going on?