ryandvm

Worse, is there really anything more indicative of "loser thinking" then adopting the exact same strategy as EVERY SINGLE POST on LinkedIn?

What a coincidence that all these fucking "thought leaders" have exactly the same thoughts.

Yes, I am tired; but worse, I am unhappy.

I understand that a lot of people really enjoy managing teams of agents and are far more productive now. I am happy for them, I really am. Apparently they never actually enjoyed coding, they will show up in droves in these comments to tell you that what they really enjoyed was the end result.

I am more productive too, but I'm going to be honest - I wasn't really looking for more productivity. I am at a point in my life where boosting my productivity is absolutely not one of my personal objectives.

Using Claude Code all day is like being a STEM kid that was gifted a Lego-building-robot. What a miracle! Now you don't have to deal with all the hassle of assembling Legos - you just tell it you want a castle and boom! What a time to be alive!

Yeah, I got into this field because I enjoyed solving deep technical problems mostly on my own.

Now instead I don't get to code anymore and I'm the manager of a half-dozen mid-level engineers with unflappable confidence and very, very poor long term memory.

My experience as a senior software engineer is that generative AI is an incredible productivity boost for engineers that know what they need to implement. If I need to write a new service, I'm going to be able to do that extremely quickly with Claude Code or some other agentic tooling as long as I know what I want.

However, generative AI should be banned for leadership or product owners or anyone on the requirements specification end of the Jira ticket. I'm fine with them using LLMs to read documents and learn, but generative AI specifically in the hands of these folks seems to be a net productivity drag on organizations.

I am so tired of 1,500 word Jira tickets that are over-specified to death with requirements that nobody is actually interested in and I have to spend exorbitant amounts of times just trying to distill out the functionality that the requestor is actually looking for. And these logorrheic nightmare tickets end up spawning all kinds of other unnecessary downstream work.

Can't believe Apple has finally invented touchscreens on laptops.

I think it's only "one specific craft" that's being heavily affected right now because software engineers are lazy (in a good way) and as they've been developing generative AI, automating away their own work was the natural choice.

And it has rolled out to the rest of the software engineering industry rapidly because a) it was adjacent to AI development, and b) software engineers are very expensive workers. Graphical design is also being hit due to its proximity to software engineering.

Other information workers are going to start feeling the hurt soon enough, but their respective industry timeline will be correlated with how much money it's going to save to replace them.

Paralegals, customer support, copywriters, data analysts, and any other fields that are purely informational are all going to feel the squeeze.

Well, at least he won't have to apologize to his wife for throwing her under the bus.

Yeah, I always wonder about this when I hear about people that resign from an organization in protest. Sure, they get to sleep at night now, but now they've just opened up a job for an unscrupulous person.

I mean, if you really think your organization is a net negative, perhaps your best civic effort is to just sort of linger as organizational dead weight or, better yet, as some sort of bureaucratic tar baby.

The lie is that a) it will never actually be produced for sale; and b) there seems to be evidence that it didn't have a full battery - which makes sense given, well, physics.

That people defend these antics is wild. It takes a special kind of sycophant to be lied to and to appreciate it; or I don't know, maybe it's just the regular kind.

This. I hate that Claude Code is taking the fun part of my job, but the reality is that Claude Code Opus 5 can one-shot a script in 15 seconds that would have taken me 45 minutes to write.

I don't begrudge the business for making the prudent choice of making me use AI, I just sort of lament that what I spent years enjoying and getting good at was so utterly derivative that it was perfect for the LLMs. It would be insulting if it weren't just a fact.

I don't know that anyone suggested it wasn't OK to enjoy programming.

My problem with AI is that it now excels at the part of the job that was my favorite (writing code) and it leaves me to do the part that I suck at (being a manager). In 18 months or so my job satisfaction has gone from pretty high to abysmal.

Must have worked.

My favorite part about gushing about the new age of AI development is how oblivious the authors always seem to be about the next phase.

It's always some variation of: the LLMs are incredible and gaining logical and reasoning ability at an astounding rate, but fortunately they will always need me to sit here to hit the "Enter" key.

I envy their optimism.

Is this polarization or is this just people finally figuring out the grift after 10 years of "we'll be on Mars in 2 years"?

> It would be as if everyone had a cook but it could only put out bland, generic, but nutritionally complete, meals.

Bro, good engineering IS boring and it's supposed to be.

The whole reason that Software Engineering is not actually engineering is because the field is too young for there to be established, rigorous engineering codes that must be adhered to. Can you imagine if every bridge you went over or every elevator you rode in had been built with arbitrarily chosen technologies by uncertified "engineers" using the latest fad in engineering?

I think one of the outcomes of this great shift where most programming output is being produced by LLMs is that we're going to start seeing much more consistency across software implementations. It will be boring. And honestly that is probably going to be a good thing.

It's not whether we were blue collar, the question is were we ever really creative? And as a software engineer, it's been a little dumbfounding, but I think the answer is "no".

I mean, I guess I always knew the code I wrote was pretty derivative - a little Googling here, a little Stack Overflow there; but for it to only take 18 months or so for the machines to take 90% of my job was a real eye opener.

I feel like we're in an age where a very small team of devs armed with enterprise LLM subscriptions could absolutely build and maintain an open source, reverse engineered, self-hosted implementation of all of Amazon's most high profile AWS offerings (S3, SQS, Lambdas, IAM, EC2, DynamoDB, etc.). All as a single, cohesive open source project.

Just feed it the API docs and loop.

They're also good for extremely bursty loads. I use Lambdas extensively for a radar imagery API that delivers the images for an Android live wallpaper that shows weather radar.

That particular use case can go from hardly any traffic at all to a hurricane of traffic during something like, well, a hurricane.

For consistent processing loads, I think I could save money by just running on dedicated EC2 instances, but you cannot beat the instant scale of Lambdas.

Shameless plug: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.radarlove....

People started realizing that it was all an illusion and that, surprise, surprise, yet another billionaire egomaniac actually has the moral fortitude of a maggot.

Collective action problems are humanity's greatest weakness.

Some people are so rich all they have is money.

That's the only bright point about all this. Trump is kind of a 1000 year perfect storm of fame, corruption, and psychopathy; and he's fast approaching his expiration date.

I don't expect any of us will live long enough to see a similar skid-mark on the underwear of humanity.

"The purpose of a system is what it does" and all that.

But yes, if a system fails to prioritize its continued existence, it doesn't matter what else it accomplishes, it will cease to exist as that system.

Well... there's "nothing wrong" with being a car dealership either. "Wrong" is a funny way to look at it.

I don't know what you mean by "trusted", but how many times do folks have to go through the same loop?

   - Company has great initial product
   - Company gets popular
   - Shareholders demand infinite growth
   - Company becomes rent-seeker
   - GOTO 10

I'm with OP - a company that wants to insert itself in the middle of everybody's business is not being altruistic, they're playing the long game.

This is the most apropos comment about this moment that I have read in months.

> It's equally wild that a company building and selling a technology as actually useful as an LLM [...] can't begin to think about how to make money with one.

I think they can. I think every frontier LLM company in this industry knows exactly how to make money with an LLM and furthermore it's almost bulletproof - they just don't want to say it.

LLMs are going to be the most devastatingly effective ad delivery mechanism that we've ever seen once they start flipping the switches. They're going to load the context up with all your demographic information and preferences and advertising susceptibilities and then tell it to subtly suggest to you all kinds of shit you need to buy.

It's going to be nearly subliminal and so slick that you're not even going to know you're being advertised to. It will be like your best friend gently convincing you over a period of months to buy a new EV, or that you need to refinance your mortgage, or that you should move to Atlanta.

They know exactly how to make money with these things, they just can't be the first ones to say it.

What's funny is that nobody even believes the SpaceX/Tesla fever dream stuff - not even the fanboys. Data centers in space that violate the laws of logistics+thermodynamics? 30 trillion dollars worth of revenue?

No, they only believe that somebody else believes this shit. The entire valuation of Elon's companies is based on greater fool theory. But it notably is called greater fool, not infinite fool; we are going to run out of fools at some point...

Exact same philosophy they use for hiring.

Did anybody think this wasn't going to happen?

They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice.

They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit.

This future sucks.