throw83288 (u/throw83288)

throw83288 commented on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/bakugo

simonw · 6 months ago

+1 to this. There has never been a better time to learn to code - the learning curve is being shaved down by these new LLM-based tools, and the amount of value people with programming literacy can produce is going up by an order of magnitude.

People who know both coding and LLMs will be a whole lot more attractive to hire to build software than people who just know LLMs for many years to come.

throw83288 · 6 months ago

Can you just make a blog post on this explaining your thesis in detail? It's hard for me not to see non-technical "vibe coding" [0] sidelining everyone in the industry except for the most senior of senior devs/PMs.

[0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

throw83288 commented on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/bakugo

weatherlite · 6 months ago

I'm sure lots of potential students / bootcampers are now not going into programming (or if they are, the smart ones try to go into niches like A.I and skip web/backend/android altogether). This will work against the numbers of jobs being reduced by A.I. It will take a few years though to play out , but at some point we will see smaller amounts of people trying to get into the field and applying for jobs, certainly for junior positions. We've already had ~ 2 bad years, a couple more like this will really dry out the numbers of newcomers. Less people coming in (than otherwise would have) means for every person who retires / leaves the industry there are less people to take his place. This situation is quite complex with lots of parameters that work in different directions so it's very early to try to get some kind of read on where this is going.

As a new career I'd probably not choose SWE now. But if you've done 10 years already I'd ride it out, there is a good chance most of us will remain employed for many years to come.

throw83288 · 6 months ago

When I say 10 years I say that I've probably wanted to work in this field since maybe 10. Computing is my autistic hyperfixation. This is why I'm so frustrated.

throw83288 commented on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/bakugo

throw234234234 · 6 months ago

I don't know if I agree with that and as a SWE myself its tempting to think that - it it a form of coping and hope that we will be all in it together.

However rationally I can see where these models are evolving, and it leads me to think the software industry is on its own here at least in the short/medium term. Code and math, and with math you typically need to know enough about the domain know what abstract concept to ask, so that just leaves coding and software development. Even for non technical people they understand the result they want of code.

You can see it in this announcement - it's all about "code, code, code" and how good they are in "code". This is not by accident. The models are becoming more specialised and the techniques used to improve them beyond standard LLM's are not as general to a wide variety of domains.

We engineers think AI automation is about difficulty and intelligence, but that's only partly true. Its also about whether the engineer has the knowledge on what they want to automate, the training data is accessible and vast, and they even know WHAT data is applicable. This combination of both deep domain skills and AI expertise is actually quite rare which is why every AI CEO wants others to go "vertical" - they want others to do that leg work on their platforms. Even if it eventuates it is rare enough that, if they automate, will automate a LOT slower not at the deltas of a new model every few months.

We don't need AGI/ASI to impact the software industry; in my opinion we just need well targeted models that get better at a decent rate. At some point they either hit a wall or surpass people - time will tell BUT they are definitely targeting SWE's at this point.

throw83288 · 6 months ago

I think what's missing is that the amount of training data to effectively RL usually decreases over time. AlphaGo needed some initial data on good games of Go to then recursively improve via RL. Fast forward a few years, and AlphaZero doesn't need any data to recursively improve.

This is what I mean by generalization skills. You need trillions of lines of code to RL a model into a good SWE right now, but as the models grow more capable you will probably need less and less. Eventually we may hit the point where a large corporations internal data in any department is enough to RL into competence, and then it frankly doesn't matter for any field once individual conglomerates can start the flywheel.

This isn't an absurdity. Man can "RL" itself into competence in a single semester of material, a laughably small amount of training data compared to an LLM.

throw83288 commented on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/bakugo

pzo · 6 months ago

I will give a little more pessimistic answer. If someone is right now studying CS then probably have expectation that can work with this profession for 30-40 years until retirement and this profession will still pay much more than average salary for most of devs anywhere (instead only of elite devs or those in US) and easily to find such job or easily switch employer.

I think the best period of Software Devs will be gone in few years. Knowing how how to code and fix things will be important still but more important to be also Jack-of-Many-Trades to provide more value: know a little about SEO, have a good taste of design and be able to tweak simple design, good taste how to organise code, better soft skills and managing or educating less tech-savvy stuff.

Another option is to specialise in some currently difficult subfield: robotics, ML, CUDA, rust and try to be this elite dev with expectation would have to move to SV or any such tech hub.

Best general recommendation I would give right now (especially for someone who is not from US) to someone who is currently studying is to use that a lot of time you have right now with not much responsibility to make some product that can provide you semi-passive income on a monthly basis ($5k-$10k) to drag yourself out of this rat race. Even if you not succeed or revenue stream will run out eventually you will learn those other skills that will be more important later if wanna be employed (SEO, code & design taste, marketing, soft skills).

Because most likely this window of opportunity might be only for the next few years in similar way when the best window for Mobile Apps was first ~2 years when App Store started

throw83288 · 6 months ago

I would love to make "side revenue", but frankly I am awful at practical idea generation. I'm not a founder type I think, maybe a technical co-founder I guess.

throw83288 commented on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/bakugo

throw234234234 · 6 months ago

Be glad that you are empowered to pivot - I'm making the assumption you are still young being a student. In a disrupted industry you either want to be young (time to change out of it) or old (50+) - can retire with enough savings. The middle age people (say 15-25 years in the industry; your 35-50 yr olds) are most in trouble depending on the domain they are in. For all the "friendly" marketing IMO they are targeting tech jobs in general - for many people if it wasn't for tech/coding/etc they would never need to use an LLM at all. Anthrophic's recent stats as to who uses their products are telling - its mostly code code code.

The real answer is either to pivot to a domain where the computer use/coding skills are secondary (i.e. you need the knowledge but it isn't primary to the role) or move to an industry which isn't very exposed to AI either due to natural protections (e.g. trades) or artifical ones (e.g regulation/oligopolies colluding to prevent knowledge leaking to AI). May not be a popular comment on this platform - I would love to be wrong.

throw83288 · 6 months ago

Not enough resources to get another bachelors, and a masters is probably practically worthless for a pivot. I would have to throw away the past 10 years of my life, start from scratch, with zero ideas for any real skill-developing projects since I'm not interested at all. Probably a completely non-viable candidate in anything I would choose. Maybe only Robotics would work, and that's probably going to be solved quickly because:

You assume nothing LLMs do are actually generalization. Once Field X is eaten the labs will pivot and use the generalization skills developed to blow out Field Y to make the next earnings report. I think at this current 10x/yr capability curve (Read: 2 years -> 100x 4 years -> 10000x) I'll get screwed no matter what is chosen. Especially the ones in proximity to computing, which makes anything in which coding is secondary fruitless. Regulation is a paper wall and oligopolies will want to optimize as much as any firm. Trades are already saturating.

This is why I feel completely numb about this, I seriously think there is nothing I can do now. I just chose wrong because I was interested in the wrong thing.

throw83288 commented on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/bakugo

bcherny · 6 months ago

Hi everyone! Boris from the Claude Code team here. @eschluntz, @catherinewu, @wolffiex, @bdr and I will be around for the next hour or so and we'll do our best to answer your questions about the product.

throw83288 · 6 months ago

Serious question: What advice would you give to a Computer Science student in light of these tools?

throw83288 commented on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/bakugo

throw234234234 · 6 months ago

It has the potential to effect a lot more than just SV/The West Coast - in fact SV may be one of the only areas who have some silver lining with AI development. I think these models have a chance to disrupt employment in the industry globally. Ironically it may be only SWE's and a few other industries (writing, graphic design, etc) that truly change. You can see they and other AI labs are targeting SWEs in particular - just look at the announcement "Claude 3.7 and Code" - very little mention of any other domains on their announcement posts.

For people who aren't in SV for whatever reason and haven't seen the really high pay associated with being there - SWE is just a standard job often stressful with lots of learning required ongoing. The pain/anxiety of being disrupted is even higher then since having high disposable income to invest/save would of been less likely. Software to them would of been a job with comparable pay's to other jobs in the area; often requiring you to be degree qualified as well - anecdotally many I know got into it for the love; not the money.

Who would of thought the first job being automated by AI would be software itself? Not labor, or self driving cars. Other industries either seem to have hit dead ends, or had other barriers (regulation, closed knowledge, etc) that make it harder to do. SWE's have set an example to other industries - don't let AI in or keep it in-house as long as possible. Be closed source in other words. Seems ironic in hindsight.

throw83288 · 6 months ago

What do you even do then as a student? I've asked this dozens of times with zero practical answers at all. Frankly I've become entirely numb to it all.

throw83288 commented on Software engineering job openings hit five-year low? blog.pragmaticengineer.co... · Posted by u/m3h

kragen · 6 months ago

The graph is very interesting! The number of Indeed openings looks like it's basically leveled off at the initial early covid number over the last year; it's not rising, but at least it's not falling anymore. That seems like pretty optimistic news for developers! Total compensation is still pretty high, I hear. And it seems likely that if humans aren't replaced wholesale by AGI, the opportunities for building valuable new software are likely to increase a lot over the next few years.

Smaller teams and more bootstrapping (as opposed to venture-funded rapid growth) seems likely to reduce the reliance on recruiters who are a plague on the industry, with few exceptions.

On the other hand, maybe a lot of tasks you could previously get a lot of leverage on with a simple Perl script will just be done directly by LLMs. Not if they're customer-facing, maybe, but in cases where you just need to get some data in a different format or something.

throw83288 · 6 months ago

This smells like AI.

throw83288 commented on Meta announces LlamaCon, its first generative AI dev conference on April 29 meta.com/blog/connect-202... · Posted by u/thoughtpeddler

hx8 · 6 months ago

Great! Maybe I can finally learn what I'm suppose to be using generative AI for to be more productive. I'll be tuning in and spinning up whatever models/tools they suggest, but the longer this tech wave occurs the more confident I am that gen-ai is going to tally up to be an at-most 3% lift on global productivity.

throw83288 · 6 months ago

Cursor Composer is a game-changer for greenfield projects, it's definitely not 3% change.

throw83288 commented on Meta announces LlamaCon, its first generative AI dev conference on April 29 meta.com/blog/connect-202... · Posted by u/thoughtpeddler

esafak · 6 months ago

Can't wait to delve into it!

throw83288 · 6 months ago

So excited to engage the core on our future exciting product developments as a team!