tkiolp4

I think the whole post is AI generated. The author could have given a draft as input and perhaps edited the output in a few places.

Take this paragraph as example:

Go got generics in 1.18, and they’re useful, but the implementation has constraints (no methods with type parameters, GC shape stenciling, occasional surprising performance characteristics). Rust generics monomorphize, each instantiation produces specialized code with zero runtime cost. Combined with traits, this gives you real zero-cost abstractions.

Every sentence says something. Every sentence is important and holds its weight. I would expect that kind of writing from very specialized books or papers, not from a blog post. Also, it makes the post harder (and more boring) to read.

Don’t be naive. Anthropics (et al) mission is to make us unemployable. They need to sell their tools to companies so that they can finally discard 90% of their workforce. It’s a win win for companies and for anthropic (et al). Obviously we are the losers in the middle. And people around here on HN may think they cannot be affected, that they are the elite class of developers… they are gonna get hurt

You won’t be able to enjoy your free time playing with computers if anthropic et al make you jobless.

The “you” doesn’t necessarily refer to you. Im addressing 90% of the developers out there. We love playing around technology… but I doubt we will be thinking the same once we become unemployable. But here we are, having fun with the tools of companies that want to finish us. How ironic

Are you sure you will be able to spend time playing around that kind of stuff when anthropic/openai/google/etc make you jobless? (well, perhaps not YOU precisely, but 90% of devs, so there’s a high chance).

We always think it’s not gonna hit us… we may be wrong

It’s pure marketing. Don’t be naive

He is a puppet. Anthropic is making him a billionaire. No surprise no one here can notice the difference

How can you be so blind? This is all a marketing campaign by anthropic. No more no less. The developers doing the rewrite have no voice at all in this game.

The problem with security through obscurity (even if it’s just an “addon”) is that it pollutes your code base, system. It’s just not worth it.

Like moving ssh to a different port. If you are the only one working on it, sure fine, as long as you remember the port. If you re working with others, then everyone needs to know the new port, so it has to be documented somehow. It’s a pita

Agree to some extent. At some point though we jump the thin line between creative expression and… magic?

Like if at some point I can just say “Generate a song similar to Smooth Criminal, different enough to not trigger copyright claims” and it just works, and everyone loves it… well is that creative thinking?

Metrics: I increased retention 2x; I reduced latency from X ms to Y ms; increased slo to 99.999… those are all meaningless. It was in fashion to put such numbers in cvs maybe 5-10 years ago. Not anymore

Just cancel your subscription.

I think this is pretty obvious for many of us in the industry. Unfortunately, there is so much money on the table that the big players will shove whatever they want down our throats

That has never been true.

When I was younger I was sold in the idea of data driven decisions. Everything needs to be measured, otherwise you are just biased, and bias is bad. Nowadays I do still rely on data and measurements but I also have experience and taste to judge things. Answering your question, the latter.

I can't be the only one to think it is silly to interact with tools in this way. Honestly, I see skills, "hooks", and other monkey-patch efforts as things that will be short-lived investments, weird kludges from an era where you had to "hand-crank" your AI, more often. Something to go the same way as using HTML tables as bastardized CSS

Agree. It’s sad to see our field plagued by this monkey patch efforts. I reviewed the other day a skill MD file that stated “Don’t introduce bugs, please”. Like, wtf is that? Before LLMs we weren’t taken seriously as an engineering discipline, and I didn’t agree. But nowadays, I feel ashamed of every skill MD file that pollutes the repos I maintain. Junior engineers or fresh graduates that are told to master some AI/LLM tool (I think the nvidia ceo said that) are going to have absolute zero knowledge of how systems work and are going to rely on prompts/skills. How come thats not something to be worried about?

Just stick. Get the paycheck, do the minimum. Learn to not give a fuck about companies. Im in the same position

Im in EU. For me there’s no fucking way I can get 100K/year in any other work except software engineering. So I wanna buy a house, I just need to stick a few more years to get there. Just smile, get they paycheck and go home. That’s my plan. I have learned to be more resilient. Lifes short but it’s not like I’m in jail or something like that

Just use (the good parts of) Ansible

SAP, Salesforce, Booking.com… all awful products. We use them because monopolies.

Please don’t.

That sounds awful.

I got a promotion once for deleting 250K lines of code in less than a month. Now that sounds better

The whole gsd/agents folder is hilarious. Like a bunch of MD that never breaks. How do you is it minimally correct? Subjective prose. Sad to see this on the frontpage

It's just a new kind of tool for you to pick up, if you have the courage and heart to do so.

Soon it will be the only kind of tool your boss is going to pay for (if you still have a boss). And it is a tool owned by stakeholders. That sucks big time. You will never own the tool the same way you own a chainsaw. You’ll be perpetually paying for it.

I want to move on to the next phase of AI programming. All these SKILLS, agentic programming and what not reminds me of the time of servlets, rmi, flash… all of that is obsolete, we have better tools now. Hope we can soon reach the “json over http” version of AI: simple but powerful.

Like imagine if you could go back in time and servlets and applets are the big new thing. You wouldn’t like to spend your time learning about those technologies, but your boss would be constantly telling that it is the future. So boring

That’s not true. Even if we assume LLMs can generate the code needed to support the next Facebook, one still has to: buy/rent tons of hardware (virtual or baremetal), put tons of money in marketing, break the network effect, pay for 3rd party services for monitoring, alerting and what not. That’s money, and LLMs don’t help with that

Not entirely true. For instance if I use LLMs to build an ios app I still need to pay apple $100 to use my own app for an undetermined amount of time.

If I build a web app i still need to pay for a domain, for a server for egress.

We are just renting. Wouldn’t be surprised if in the future this gets even more depressing

Agree in general. I don’t see how making an agent create software is more wasteful than making dozens of engineers create the same thing. The latter seems more wasteful.

We have compilers creating binaries every single day. We don’t say thats wasteful.

Yeah, that can also work. But I don’t see the future of software is to keep building multimillion line of code systems in a semi manual way (with or without llms). I think we will reach a phase in which we’ll have to treat code as disposable. I don’t think we are there yet, though.

Huh? The user experience is basically ALL of the core product of a company.

Thats the case now, but I think it’s because there’s no other way around it nowadays. But if agents in the future provide a better or more natural ui/ux for many use cases, then companies core value will shift more into their inner core (which in software translates typically to the domain model)

If it's so easy for an AI to create ticket purchasing software that people can generate it themselves, then it's also true that the company can also use AI to generate that software for users who then don't need to generate it themselves.

I think the generation of software per se will be transparent to the user. Users won’t think in terms of software created but wishes their agents make true.

My point is: such apps wouldn’t need to exist if agents can provide in the future the same functionality for a fraction of the cost. Sure if ticketmaster is here to stay forever and keep their app up to date, we can keep using it. But what about new products? Would companies decide to build a single fixed app that all the users have to use, instead of, well, not building it? Sure the functionality would still need to be provided by the company (e.g., like offered in the form of an api), so they keep getting profit.

It’s like we usually say: companies should focus on their core value. And typically the ui/ux is not the core value of companies.

I use agents at work and yeah they read api keys and the like. If my employer doesn’t care, I care even less. At home I don’t use agents yet, but if I have to use them I’ll probably do what I do to run untrusted code at home: use a VM