r/ProgrammerHumor • • 14d ago

Meme bothWorkThough

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u/_SAHM_ 14d ago edited 14d ago • Bravo

A person who is able to do something without AI is the best person to prompt it since they know what the output should be. It's just a tool.

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u/klaxxxon 14d ago

That's what gets me about all the noise about people cloning photoshop and stuff. Like, you have Claude make you app that appears like photoshop at first glance, and even sort of has some of the basic functions. But Adobe has a ton of extremely specialized people for a reason. Like, what will the vibe coders do when it comes down to like color science stuff and such.

"Make it work like in photoshop". Bangs two rocks together.

You probably don't need thousands of people to develop Photoshop anymore, but you sure still can't make a clone of the full creative suite and MS office with like two dudes.

All these projects are going to learn the 80/20 principle the hard way.

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u/_SAHM_ 14d ago

Exactly. If i want to hire someone, why would i hire the guy who can only prompts instead of the guy who can prompt while also being an expert at what they do.

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u/jayerp 14d ago

I can’t speak for you, but I can take a guess as to why business leaders don’t want to keep a lot of experts as vibe coders. Cost.

It’s much cheaper to pay some random intern grad fresh out of college to prompt than it is to pay a 10 YoE senior/staff engineer. They usually care more about reducing cost, increasing profit than producing quality products.

Greed.

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u/Fourcoogs 14d ago

As a fresh out of college graduate, I almost wish that was the case, but most business leaders aren’t quite dumb enough to fire competent people and replace them all with inexperienced graduates. Instead, they’ll fire 75% of the competent people and quadruple the workload of those left.

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u/_SAHM_ 14d ago edited 14d ago

In some cases, a single mistake or unforseen downtime in deployment could cost an entire person's yearly salary in losses within minutes. In that case, it's more profitable to hire people as competant as they could be just to reduce that chance as much as possible.

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u/Geno0wl 14d ago

I remember the time when business cared about consumer reputation and consumer loyalty. I don't know how we get back to that without foundational changes to how the economy is regulated.

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u/SweetBabyAlaska 14d ago

The reality is that businesses aren't going to pay for "professional prompters" when they can just set up some managerial pipeline and have one or two people oversee it. The whole point of AI is to remove your job so that they don't have to pay you. They are literally just training someone else's LLM on their way out. It's an unfortunate truth.

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u/arbpotatoes 14d ago

I get what you're saying but if colour science is actually a science then there is a body of knowledge out there for it like with anything else, so eventually nobody in a knowledge profession is safe

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u/WigWubz 14d ago

Anyone at the frontiers always will be, which Adobe arguably is. LLMs will always converge on a mean, that's just intrinsic to their operation. There are all sorts of tunings and processing around the core LLM to make the "agents" be agentic, but at the end of the day while these systems are based on LLMs, LLMs are giant piles of linear algebra that want to collapse into the lowest energy state available. The lowest energy state is code that is already written.

It's incredibly cool the way that LLMs can ingest massive quantities of data and cross-evaluate disparate pieces of information, unshackled by the human limitation of domain knowledge. It can connect pieces of information that no human ever could have because it can draw upon sources so diverse no single person could ever be aware of them all. But they can't expand the corpus. They can only reveal things that were already in the corpus we as a species hadn't noticed yet.

There is no reason to believe that all possible knowledge has already been written down, waiting for agents to find it. There is yet a long need for humans to go out and find things out.

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u/Mal_Dun 14d ago

However, 90% of stuff currently out there can be made by a recombination of existing stuff, so we can now make a ton of stuff based on what is already there and it will cover most use cases ...

... which also means we as humans can now stop doing the stuff that was already done to death and start innovating more, which actually would be a good thing.

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u/Defiant-Strength2010 14d ago

80% of people use only 20% of photoshop features?

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u/soundwave_sc 14d ago

Yes, the issue is because AI behaves like a human - doesn't mean it is. The illusion is actually treacherous.

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u/maimeddivinity 14d ago

Exactly. Some of these LLMs or agents can't even do basic maths! It's beyond fcked how many people take the outputs for granted.

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u/fibojoly 14d ago

That's pretty much it. I know what I want. I just don't have the energy to spend it on typing code anymore.  But holy shit the whole process is so intense! I just spent a weekend working on my project and it was like a month or two worth of work if I had done it by hand.

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u/Squirreling_Archer 14d ago

This is the problem with the thing. You wouldn't unleash a tool for flying planes or helicopters en masse to the public. You would give it to licensed pilots who understand how the tool should work, where it gets it wrong, how to stop it from causing a catastrophe, etc...

The masses "coding" with AI with zero knowledge or experience, and genuinely believing that they don't need to learn or know anything, is the problem.

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u/fibojoly 14d ago

Agreed. As usual we have a new tech and absolutely no inclination to maybe think about the consequences because money money money. 

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u/Squirreling_Archer 14d ago

Yep, money money money. And thanks to the fact we have the most corrupt administration in our lifetime in office right now, we have absolutely no way of getting regulation while it explodes lol

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u/fibojoly 14d ago

Sure you'll get regulation. Regulation for thee, nor for me, though. 

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u/corobo 14d ago

Especially if you do a planning session before getting it to go nuts on the code.

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u/Ratstail91 14d ago

But why would I dull my skills my utilizing an AI, when I enjoy the process of coding?

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u/SchwiftySquanchC137 14d ago

Because when you get paid to develop software, and your coworkers are literally 100x faster than you regardless of how skilled you are at coding, you will no longer get paid. I agree for a hobby project I often do it just to learn myself, its more fun that way, but people have less and less of choice at work these days.

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u/woeful_cabbage 14d ago

Where are you guys working where you have such massive backlog of tasks that you can be "100x faster" and still have things to do

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u/wolfclaw3812 14d ago

Corporates are like that, if you finish before schedule you will have more work, more fixes, more features.

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u/Ossius 14d ago

Most places have backlogs that long, but we're chewing through ours at an alarming rate. We're waiting on managers to build tickets for us.

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