yodsanklai

> Might be true in your company, your culture, or in Big Tech.

For context, I work in a big tech company with virtually unlimited tokens on the best models, and a lot of tools integrated in our workflows. The culture makes it impossible to go against the wind. Even if you don't want to use AI as much as others, you won't be able to prevent them to do so.

Pretty ironic that part of this is due to Trump: reducing global trade with tariffs, blocking Ormuz...

I don't think this matters anymore. Software is becoming a black box and agents make it works, as long as you can provide some reasonable spec of what you want to do, and a bit of supervising and directions.

Right now, they're not great at following good software engineering principles. They do the job, with verbose code, lots of duplication, abstraction leaks, useless unit tests and so on.

Is it an issue? you could think that in the long term it'll be, that AI won't be able to handle the complexity it introduced, but I'm not really worried about it. Most software isn't that big, and agents are getting better by the day. And if you really care about design, it's not too hard to instruct your agent to follow your standards.

I wish it wasn't the case and that I could justify my experience and expertise for a few more years, but the facts are there.

You're very diplomatic (yet downvoted), C++ is an abomination of a language. It just puts too much accidental cognitive load on developers. I understand that

- it shines for some tasks where Rust isn't capable enough

- it's impossible to get rid of because of all the code so we may as well modernize it

- there's an active community of people who built a career of being C++ experts and have no interest to see the language disappears.

Even in the LLM era, I find it's difficult to code in C++. The language has so many corner cases that LLMs make mistakes. My experience 6 months ago was that the code written by my agent had tons of complex linter warning (exceptions, lambda leaking references, futures whatever... that I just can't avoid because the codebase mixes all of this). Whenever possible, it's probably time to either modernize it or port it to Rust, component by component, until the C++ part is small or inexistant.

Because an old car often costs more in maintenance. It's best to re-sale it before it gives you too much trouble. Basically, you can have a more reliable car with no extra cost. And some people like modern and new cars and upgrade every few years.

Thanks for the counterpoint. It's true that being sloppy and taking shortcuts isn't always a calculated business decision and it can be a lack of skills.

> We're a clown industry. We only made it this far because, usually, buggy code doesn't kill people and we can iterate and patch things quickly

I think you have things backwards. Devs aren't clowns who make it this far. But in industries where buggy code doesn't kill people, devs are expected to ship fast and iterate, because they can and more importantly, it serves the business.

Personally, I'm all about good software engineering principles, unfortunately I don't think you can last long in most companies if you're too opinionated about this and can't compromise (and it's getting even worse with AI, reading the code is no longer a requirement, go explain your teammate that there's an abstraction leak in their code...).

If your company is a big corporation, I don't think they need to worry about the file and rank SWEs. I know that I'm going to compete with Google, Meta or Microsoft. But stupid or not, that's what they're doing at the moment.

> AI is not replacing you or an education

I do learn every day thanks to AI, I agree with that part. But I'm increasingly convinced that AI is likely to replace either me or some of my teammates in the near future.

In the last year, half of my team has been laid off (or left) already and won't be replaced, and we don't see any drop in productivity and the tools are getting better by the day. We need experts to drive all this, but not as many people as before.

> Somehow I'm paying more tax

You're not rich enough: "The effective tax rate of U.S. billionaires (measured by the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers) fell from 30% in 2010–2017 to 23.8% (or roughly 24%) in 2018–2020"

https://www.nber.org/papers/w34170

> how do you get politicians that actually want to save money

What makes you think that they don't save money? looking at the state of public services and infrastructures (at least in my country), I can see how we don't spend as much as we should, which I suppose qualifies as saving. Budgets for education, justice, police, healthcare often decrease too. Also seeing how many billionaires we have, it's also obvious to me that we actually need more tax, not less.

> If my kids have a 1/3 chance of interacting with someone that doesn’t think college is worth it, then that impacts how I think about whether to orient the next 20 years of savings around saving for my kids college.

It doesn't matter what people think, the question is whether the jobs your kids want to do require a degree or no. Let say they want to be a doctor or a lawyer, then college education is needed. Even programming which is a field with a lot of self-taught people and hobbyists, professionals without a college degree are the exception.

No I don't (anymore), and I think they may be obsolete. If you work with other people, chances are you won't be able to enforce good engineering practice in your projects. People ship code like there's no tomorrow and nothing can stop them. Software is becoming a black box. Unless maybe you work in an industry where security is paramount.

I never had such a laptop but I'm very curious to see how this can work in practice. I really don't see what could be done on efficiently on the screen. In regular computer use, my wrists lay on the computer or desk and move very little. On the other hand, lifting the arm requires some non-negligible effort and break the flow.

"Never attribute to evil that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

> But work should never be the end.

Why not? if some people think that work is the most meaningful pursuit of their life, why not. I knew people like that, my dentist for instance, he was working all the time because that's what he liked to do.

Of course, not everybody has the luxury to have a fulfilling job, and some people work more than what they'd like. But saying things like that on your deathbed you'll be full of regrets because they worked too much is a bit naive.

> Work to live, don't live to work

This is a bit of a cliché. Many people have the option to stop working, they don't because they love what they do. How would that be less worth pursuing than other things? not everybody feel like spending their time on hobbies or family.

I suppose there's a wide range of salaries, but for "big tech" level, the salaries are largely sufficient to compensate for housing costs.

In London, lots of jobs (at least for senior SWEs)

I think there are not many professions that you can experience first-hand in your childhood (if you're lucky enough to be exposed to it). Programming your calculator in BASIC isn't exactly the same thing as being a SWE, but it translates pretty well I'd say.

Many people struggle finding a career, for me it was pretty obvious from the start that I liked programming (and maths) and that I could make a living doing that. Competitive sports or music may be examples, but unlike programmers, very few people do actually make a living doing so.

This is typical of working with agents, not only maths. "I implemented this with agent A, and don't understand the logic, but agent B think its correct". But then you ask a simple clarifying questions to B on a random thing in the code and it'll tell you that this part is actually wrong. At least in maths they have Lean...

Any reason why META surged after hours? is that related to this news?

This is what we do in my company, give the guidelines to the model. Unfortunately, the model isn't always following them and it's impossible to enforce them manually. There's too much code to review, the code is generally low quality, and is more often than not auto-approved by AI.

Unless you're working on your own project on which you have full control, or you have a strong authority figure in your company who cares about that, it's a lost battle.

It's sad for anyone who love their craft, but tbh I'm not even sure it matters anymore for most projects.

To give a different point of view: I've been taking Bromazepam for 25 years, but very occasionally when I'm very anxious or can't sleep, a few times a year, never more than 1-2 days in a row. It's been helpful, especially when I was younger as sometimes I was paralyzed by anxiety. I never had the slightest sign of addiction but was also careful not to rely on that too much (and never had any addiction problem).

I've also seen friends or family members who used and stop these drugs without much difficulty.

This isn't medical advice obviously, but I wouldn't rely on anecdotal experience to form an opinion on this. These drugs can certainly be helpful to some people.

People working at Meta tend to gravitate around the same group of tech companies who offer the same range of salaries, same selection process, same internal structure. Many of them aren't particularly brillant SWEs (in the sense you don't need to be an elite coder or top PhD), although they can deliver based on the evaluation processes in these companies.

Meta has a bad reputation in some circles, but I don't think there's anything peculiar or particularly evil about them, at least not worse than similar publicly traded big tech companies. They are amoral money-making entities.

That being said I agree that their products suck. I don't use them, besides what's app because it's difficult to avoid. It's also end to end encrypted so it doesn't really matter regarding mass surveillance.

Was an OCaml programmer for a long time, Rust is the closest mainstream programming language.

> It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.

True, but dealing with agents is still easier than dealing with people (at least for introverted personalities). That being said, you still need to deal with other people's army of agents.

> Especially the toxic manosphere culture at the moment.

The experience of living/traveling in the US is very different from what can be seen on social medias and forums. At least in big cities in blue states.

> The idea/justification is that Claude is given the ability to voluntarily stop its conversations, thus any token it outputs that isn't a stop token is voluntary.

I don't get this argument. How is it different from any algorithm that returns a stop token on some inputs? what makes the token "voluntary" for Claude?

> The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is

Why would they care? maybe they're aware of millions of inhabited planets and life isn't anything special for them.

Also, humans are a dominant and invasive species right now, but in geological times, our dominance couldn't be nothing more than a spark. Scenarios for destruction of civilization are numerous (nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, super volcanos, asteroids) and very possible even in the short term. Trump could do it tomorrow morning if he feels like it.