What just came to my mind is that the current main selling point of AI, is coder productivity. Some anecdotal experiences from a small agile team:
We had 1 week sprints and our PO had sometimes trouble to prepare enough work for the next sprint. We had 4 week sprints and we often ended up pulling tickets from the next sprint. There was often a mismatch in pace. (Quite funny, the time we had found a balance, management ordered all teams to have the same sprint lengths. They couldn't deal with all the asynchronous, overlapping sprint starts/ends. They choose to forfeit our productivity for theirs.)
So productivity isn't all about coders, it's also about owners / managers / shareholders supplying work. This kind of work is much about communication with several involved parties and researching usecases and features in a very specific context. LLMs can help with parts of it, but at one point there will be a flood of excessive, unverified generic reports and LLMs that again condense them with all the inaccuracies, that managers/owners may drown in a fuzzy mess of LLM bureaucracy. Nuances and importance will get lost in excess.
We often had rather large stories that simply had a small set of bulletpoints, because we already communicated everything in person and they were just reminders for the most important stuff. The importance here is that this reflected the teams agency how we solve things. An LLM can probably not at all provide that currently, as they are always excessive and try to add "helpful" details. They simply cannot pick up social norms and agreements, and prompting them correctly is in my opinion very hard or too time consuming.
LLM assisted coding or vibe coding is all the hype. But I have the feeling that the big realization sets in once all supporting processes are convoluted with AI noise, the peers that used to collaborate are detached and social conflicts and misunderstandings escalate.
Why do people take this article serious? It's just a wall of gibberish trying to make the product look more "secure" then others. It's not. It adds shallow secure looking random junk without tackling the core issues. Which are not solvable obviously.
> Also, you may be forced to use language features you don't
This is quite important and often overlooked. An annoying fallacy is that people think some features are optional, but once they get heavily used, they aren't anymore. Often they quickly become an requirement and if you don't follow suit, your code is legacy or you are an idiot. But well, I guess I create legacy code upfront and the cargo cultists create modern code that turns into legacy next day.
Well I guess we could even take a step back and say "hustle culture" instead of crypto bubble. Those people act like they are they are hard working to create financial freedom, but in reality they take every opportunity to get there asap. You just have to tell them something will get them there. Instant religion for them, but actually a hype or scheme. LLMs are just another option for them to foster their delusion.
In a team environment, half of the job is communication.
That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news.
But to be honest, I usually don't care to write properly into an LLM prompt. An LLM will ignore grammar and form and just extract the essence. If I make an actual mistake I will notice quickly and fix it.
If I'd send slack messages like that to an peer, they'd either mock me or simply think I am dumb.
We also know the stories about people that use LLMs for any communication or anything they write. Probably for the exact reason that being lazy with writing is acceptable now. My call is that writing skill will decline, not improve. This could probably be the case for anything that people use LLMs as a proxy for.
Broadly agree, but one point I think is (sadly) relevant:
> That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news.
Even a decade after Word Lens had demonstrated augmented reality live translation through a smartphone camera, I was amazing people by showing them the same feature in Google Translate.
Similar anecdotes about Shakuntala Devi, even in 2018 I was seeing claims about her mental arithmetic beating a supercomputer (claims that ignored that this happened in 1977 and the computer was already obsolete at the time), even though my mid-2013 MacBook Air could not only beat her by a factor of 150 million, it could also train an AI to read handwritten numbers from scratch in 0.225 seconds, and then perform inference (read numbers) at just over 6,629 digits per second*.
You say "old news", I say this discussion will be on repeat even in the early 2030s. And possibly even the 2060s.
I assume you have absolutely no clue what it refers to.
Handmade Hero is a long running yt series by Casey Muratori. He builds a game engine from scratch, no cheats, no shortcuts, straight to the metal (from C-ish perspective). So you learn how to deal with computers to achieve things, fast and efficient, by understanding computers.
At some point Casey thought it was a failure and a waste of time. But to his surprise quite a fanbase evolved around it and it turned that it really helped people to go from zero to "hero". The handmade "movement" relates to this timeline and the aftermath of people thriving from it. My rough definition of "Handmade" dev mentality would be: Ignore the things that seem to make things "easy" (high level software) and learn the actual thing. So you learn what a framebuffer is instead of looking for a drawing api, applicable to different contexts.
That being said is that this foundation doesn't seem to be endorsed by Casey. Their mission goals seem quite shallow, if at all.
> no cheats, no shortcuts, straight to the metal (from C-ish perspective)
Not the person you replied to but even when I stumbled over this (the network, not the game) for the first time, I was left wondering where the line is drawn.
> You can learn how computers actually work, so you can unleash the full potential of modern systems. You can dig deep into the tech stack and learn what others take for granted.
Just.. no libraries? Are modern languages with batteries included ok? What makes a library for C worse than using Python? Is using Python too bloated already? Why is C ok and I don't have to bootstrap a compiler first? (E.g. building with Rust is a terrible experience from a performance perspective, the resulting software can be really nice and small)
I'm not even trying to be antagonistic, I simply don't understand. I'm just not willing to accept "you'll notice when you see it" as an example.
My former company had the brilliant idea to outsource native app development to india. This was mabye 2015 in germany and they tried to roll out the app for several years. There were severe communication and quality problems. Our company wasted massive time on it, until they finally added a single native app dev and we started making progress. We already had like 30 people in tech department and adding a single position was a fucking joke on the payroll.
Any manager that thinks he can beat the value of a single dev with a random ass sweatshop from india is delusional. The cultural difference is massive, quality and work ethics as well. It's a high friction job for a manager. Well at least if you expect a bit of quality and timeliness.
(Sorry for all indians that do a good job, it's just the sweatshop/agency remote software dev culture simply doesn't work. Even a european sweatshop usually delivers worse quality then inhouse devs.)
I’ve worked with great engineers from India/Pakistan. I didn’t hire them, so don’t know too much about the process of how to find them but they were definitely as good as anyone I’ve seen in Europe.
We had 1 week sprints and our PO had sometimes trouble to prepare enough work for the next sprint. We had 4 week sprints and we often ended up pulling tickets from the next sprint. There was often a mismatch in pace. (Quite funny, the time we had found a balance, management ordered all teams to have the same sprint lengths. They couldn't deal with all the asynchronous, overlapping sprint starts/ends. They choose to forfeit our productivity for theirs.)
So productivity isn't all about coders, it's also about owners / managers / shareholders supplying work. This kind of work is much about communication with several involved parties and researching usecases and features in a very specific context. LLMs can help with parts of it, but at one point there will be a flood of excessive, unverified generic reports and LLMs that again condense them with all the inaccuracies, that managers/owners may drown in a fuzzy mess of LLM bureaucracy. Nuances and importance will get lost in excess.
We often had rather large stories that simply had a small set of bulletpoints, because we already communicated everything in person and they were just reminders for the most important stuff. The importance here is that this reflected the teams agency how we solve things. An LLM can probably not at all provide that currently, as they are always excessive and try to add "helpful" details. They simply cannot pick up social norms and agreements, and prompting them correctly is in my opinion very hard or too time consuming.
LLM assisted coding or vibe coding is all the hype. But I have the feeling that the big realization sets in once all supporting processes are convoluted with AI noise, the peers that used to collaborate are detached and social conflicts and misunderstandings escalate.
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