Readit NewsThe upcoming R3/R3x is likely to be a way more practical vehicle for most people, unless you have a large family to haul around. [0]
I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.
I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there.
If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.
For now I'm forced to use them to stay relevant, and simply hope I can hold on to some kind of employment long enough to retire (or switch careers).
While I think both sides have an argument on the eventual SWE career viability there is a problem. The downsides of hiring now (costs, uncertainity of work velocity, dry backlogs, etc) are certain; the risk of paying more later is not guaranteed and maybe not as big of an issue. Also training juniors doesn't always benefit the person paying.
* If you think long term that we will need seniors again (industry stays same size or starts growing again) given the usual high ROI on software most can afford to defer that decision till later. Goes back to pre-AI calculus and SWE's were expensive then and people still payed for them.
* If you think that the industry shrinks then its better to hold off so you get more out of your current staff, and you don't "hire to fire". Hopefully the industry on average shrinks in proportion to natural retirement of staff - I've seen this happen for example in local manufacturing where the plant lives but slowly winds down over time and as people retire they aren't replaced.
Yes exactly!
What will SWE look like in 1 year? 5 years? 10?
Hiring juniors implies you're building something that's going to last long enough that the cost of training them will pay off. And hiring now implies that there's some useful knowledge/skill you can impart upon them to prepare them.
I think two things are true: there will be way fewer developer type jobs, full stop. And I also think whatever "developers" are / do day to day will be completely alien from what we do now.
If I "zoom out" and put my capitalist had on, this is the time to stop hiring and figure out who you already have who is capable of adapting. People who don't adapt will not have a role.
> If you think that the industry shrinks then its better to hold off so you get more out of your current staff, and you don't "hire to fire". Hopefully the industry on average shrinks in proportion to natural retirement of staff - I've seen this happen for example in local manufacturing where the plant lives but slowly winds down over time and as people retire they aren't replaced.
You can look even closer than that - look at some legacy techs like mainframe / COBOL / etc. Stuff that basically wound down but lasted long enough to keep seniors gainfully employed as they turned off the lights on the way out.
I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?
Which is to say I feel like they're going to use ads on the consumer stuff just to stop bleeding out VC money as quickly, but nobody's deluded enough to think this is going to bring them much closer to profitability overall.
The waits are unpredictable length, so you never know if you should wait or switch to a new task. So you just do something to kill a little time while the machine thinks.
You never get into a flow state and you feel worn down from this constant vigilance of waiting for background jobs to finish.
I dont feel more productive, I feel like a lazy babysitter that’s just doing enough to keep the kids from hurting themselves
I try to fix it by having multiple opencode instances running on multiple issues from different projects at the same time, but it feels like I'm just herding robots.
Maybe I'm ready for gastown..
If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations.
The perks of a senior is also knowing when not to use an LLM and how they can fail; at this point I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what is safe to outsource to an LLM and what to keep for a human. Offloading the LLM-safe stuff frees up your time to focus on the LLM-unsafe stuff (or just chill and enjoy the free time).
The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it.
So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed.
I also miss writing code. It was fun. Wrangling the robots is interesting in its own way, but it's not the same. Something has been lost.
I'm convinced that VMs are the right primitive here, for now. Being able to give an agent full root and passing it in just the stuff you want it to have is super easy and it's extremely foolproof. I have my assistants free to install software, run docker, build their own nested VMs, etc. knowing that the boundary is sound and that no capabilities will ever be sacrificed.
I might switch to LXC to reduce the weight somewhat (easy with incus) but this requires providing a more limited set of tools (i.e. podman instead of docker).
bwrap is great, but you're stuck with the limitations of the environment, which depending on what you're doing may neuter the agent.
Parent said it would make more sense.
I guess in terms of the relative level of stupidity on display, it would be slightly less stupid to build huge reflectors in space than it is to try to build space datacenters, where the electricity can only power specific pieces of equipment that are virtually impossible to maintain (and are typically obsolete within a few years).
Allowing states to differ wildly was what let bygones be bygones, but no we can't have that anymore, everything nowadays seems to need to be imposed on everyone via 190,000 pages of federal regulations and 300,000 federal laws.
I'm not certain this is a good historical take.
When sates actually had this kind of leeway, they used it to defend chattel slavery, and even after losing a war in support of the institution they still distorted their laws to maintain apartheid.
Were bygones really bygones back in the good 'ol days of race based oppression? Maybe for the gentry, but obviously not for those who were being oppressed.
Especially when so many of those entities are wildly rotten and corrupt; but even if they weren't.
He (and similarly poorly informed people) would be better served by delegating the research task to somebody who is more capable.
We've got laymen Dunning-Krugering our health policy. This is bad.