shinycode (u/shinycode)

shinycode commented on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday campedersen.com/singulari... · Posted by u/ecto

ericmcer · 16 hours ago

Great article, super fun.

> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory.

You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.

It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.

shinycode · 14 hours ago

Because companies made models build/stolen from other people’s work, and this has massive layoff consequences, the paradigm is shifting, layoffs are massive and law makers are too slow. Shouldn’t we shift the whole capitalist paradigm and just ask the companies to gives all their LLM work for free to the world as well ? It’s just a circle, AI is build from human knowledge and should be given back to all people for free. No companies should have all this power. If nobody learns how to code because all code is generated, what would stop the gatekeepers of AI to up the prices x1000 and lock everyone out of building things at all because it’s too expensive and too slow to do by hand ? It all should freely be made accessible to all humans for all humans to for ever be able to build things from it.

shinycode commented on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday campedersen.com/singulari... · Posted by u/ecto

xmprt · 14 hours ago

Then wouldn't open source models running on commodity hardware be the best way to get around that? I think one of the greatest wins of the 21st century is that almost every human today has more computing power than the entire US government in the 1950s. More computer power has democratized access and ability to disperse information. There are tons of downsides to that which we're dealing with but on the net, I think it's positive.

shinycode · 14 hours ago

Does it also means the US government has x1000000 more power than the one in 1950 ?

shinycode commented on Eight more months of agents crawshaw.io/blog/eight-mo... · Posted by u/arrowsmith

arrrg · a day ago

To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before).

I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything.

Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewhere in terms of relatively low value things nobody built before because it just wasn’t worth the time investment – but those things are necessarily relatively low value (or else it would have been worth it to build it) and as such also relatively limited.

Software has amazing economies of scale. So I don’t think the builder/tool analogy works at all. The economics don’t map. Since you only have to build software once and then it doesn’t matter how often you use it (yeah, a simplification) even pretty low value things have always been worth building. In other words: there is tons of software out there. That’s not the issue. The issue is: what it the right software and can it solve my problems?

shinycode · a day ago

I agree. It’s really easier to build low-impact tools for personal use. I managed to produce tools I would never have had time to build and I use them everyday. But I will never sell them because it’s tailored to my needs and it makes no sense to open source anything nowadays. For work it’s different, product teams still need to decide what to build and what is helpful to the clients. Our bugs are not self-fixed by AI yet. I think Anthropic saying 100% of their code is AI generated is a marketing stunt. They have all reasons to say that to sell their tool that generates code. It sends a strong signal to the industry that if they can do it, it could be easier for smaller companies. We are not there yet from a client perspective asking a feature and the new feature is shipped 2 days later in prod without human interactions

shinycode commented on How to effectively write quality code with AI heidenstedt.org/posts/202... · Posted by u/i5heu

raw_anon_1111 · 4 days ago

No one who has any knowledge or who has ever used an LLM expects determinism.

And there are no computer professionals who haven’t heard about hallucinations.

Reviewing whether the code meets requirements through manual and automated tests - and that’s all I cared about when I had a team of 8 under me - is the same regardless. I wasn’t checking whether John used a for loop or while loop in between my customer meetings and meetings with the CTO. I definitely wasn’t checking the SOQL (not a typo) of the Salesforce consultants we hired. I was testing inputs and outputs and UX.

shinycode · 3 days ago

Having a team of 8 people producing code is manageable. Having an AI with 8 agents that write code all day long is not the same volume it can generate more code in a day that one person can review in a week. What you say is that, product teams will prompt what they want to a framework, the framework will take care of spec analysis, development, reviews, compliance with spec. Product teams with QA will make sure the delivery is functionally correct. No humans need to make sure of anything code related. What we don’t know yet is, does AI will still produce solid code trough the years because it’s all statistical analysis and with the volume of millions of loc, refactoring needed, data migrations etc what will happen ?

shinycode commented on How to effectively write quality code with AI heidenstedt.org/posts/202... · Posted by u/i5heu

p1esk · 4 days ago

I have enough savings for a few years, so I might just move to a lower COL area, and wait it out. Hopefully after the initial chaos period things will improve.

shinycode · 3 days ago

For someone at your position with your experience it’s quite depressing that your job is going to be automated. I feel quite anxious when I see young generations in my country that say themselves they are lazy about learning new things. The next generation will be useless to capitalist societies, in a sense that they won’t be able to bring value through administrative or white collar work. I hope some areas of the industry will move slowly toward AI

shinycode commented on How to effectively write quality code with AI heidenstedt.org/posts/202... · Posted by u/i5heu

p1esk · 4 days ago

I still have to tell it what to do, and often how to do it. I manage its external memory and guidelines, and review implementation plans. I’m still heavily involved in software design and test coverage.

AI is not capable yet of automating my job completely – I anticipate this will happen within two years, maybe even this year (I’m an ML researcher).

shinycode · 4 days ago

Do you mean, from your perspective, within 2 years humans won’t be able to bring anything of value to the equation in management and control ?

shinycode commented on How to effectively write quality code with AI heidenstedt.org/posts/202... · Posted by u/i5heu

raw_anon_1111 · 4 days ago

> Code is intention, logic, specific use case all at once. With a non deterministic system and vague prompting there will be misinterpreted intentions from LLM because the model makes decisions to move forward. The problem is the scale of it, we’re not talking about 1000 loc. In a month you can generate millions of loc, in a year hundreds of millions of loc.

People are also non deterministic. When I delegate work to team of five or six mid level developers or God forbid outsourced developers, I’m going to have to check and review their work too.

It’s been over a decade that my vision/responsibility could be carried out by just my own two hands and be done on time within 40 hours a week - until LLMs

shinycode · 4 days ago

Ofc people are non deterministic. But usually we expect machines to be. That’s why we trust them blindly and don’t check the calculations. We review people’s work all the time though. Here people will stop review machine LLM code as it’s kind of a source of truth like in other areas. That’s my point, reviewing code takes time and even more time when no human wrote it. It’s a dangerous path to stop reviews because of trust in the machine now that the machine is just kind of like humans, non deterministic.

shinycode commented on How to effectively write quality code with AI heidenstedt.org/posts/202... · Posted by u/i5heu

gspr · 4 days ago

I hear you. And maybe you're right. Maybe I'm deluding myself, but: when I look at my skilled colleagues who vibecode, I can't understand how this is sustainable. They're smart people, but they've clearly turned off. They can't answer non-trivial questions about the details of the stuff they (vibe-)delivered without asking the LLM that wrote it. Whoever uses the code downstream aren't gonna stand (or pay!) for this long-term! And the skills of the (vibe-)authors will rapidly disappear.

Maybe I'm just as naive as those who said that photographs lack the soul of paintings. But I'm not 100% convinced we're done for yet, if what you're actually selling is thinking, reasoning and understanding.

shinycode · 4 days ago

The difference with a purely still photograph is that code is a functional encoding of an intention. Code of an LLM could be perfect and still not encode the perfect intention of the product. I’ve seen that in many occasions. Many people don’t understand what code really is about and think they have a printer toy now and we don’t have to use pencils. That’s not at all the same thing. Code is intention, logic, specific use case all at once. With a non deterministic system and vague prompting there will be misinterpreted intentions from LLM because the model makes decisions to move forward. The problem is the scale of it, we’re not talking about 1000 loc. In a month you can generate millions of loc, in a year hundreds of millions of loc.

Some will have to crash and burn their company before they realize that no human at all in the loop is a non sense. Let them touch fire and make up their mind I guess.

shinycode commented on How to effectively write quality code with AI heidenstedt.org/posts/202... · Posted by u/i5heu

p1esk · 4 days ago

I don’t read or edit the code my claude code agent produces. That’s its job now. My job is to organize the process and get things done.

shinycode · 4 days ago

In this case why can’t other agents just automate your job completely ? They are capable of that. What do you bring in the process of still doing manual organization ?

shinycode commented on Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era? · Posted by u/44Bulldog

shinycode · 8 days ago

Drop AI, open a basic editor and write everything by hand without asking anything to AI. Do searches by yourself. That’s how world worked for decades pre 2022. Debug by your own, without asking anything to AI as well.