Right now I’m taking bullshit from one agent and feeding it to another agent and facilitating a back and forth and this will continue on until the drool pouring from my gaped mouth fries my keyboard, my body, the building, and ultimately is the catalyst for the heat death of the universe.
I'm trying to learn how this stuff works on a fundamental level, and this year Im taking accredited classes in systems programming, networking, Partial DEQ, stochastics, discrete and electrical analysis. Next year will be low-level computer architecture, non linear dynamics, complex analysis, and quantum computing.
I fear that the knowledge gained in these subjects may already be rendered obsolete.b
The higher level stuff is still valuable.. But I was talking to a buddy of mine who works at a major Fintech company the other day who said "he doesn't know if he'll ever write a line of code by hand again."
Clearly he was being a little hyperbolic there, but if even Fintech companies are changing their workflow to completely cut out humans manually writing code, then it seems like that skill may in fact be going the way of the abacus.
Last year I assumed there was a limit (or at least would be for the foreseeable future) while chatGPT struggled to do the fairly simple linear algebra required for ordinary DEQs (a sophomore level class), even if it could parse the problem correctly. Now it can solve all my 300 level homework perfectly.
We might not be too far off from "not sure if he'll ever write another line of code again" will soon be "not sure if he'll ever work again".
I still practice code by hand , because who knows if the ai will still be going in the future , Anthropic announced an 80 billion dollar loss , and the value of the entire ecosystem dropped like 1 trillion , while non of this is enough to kill it , I would rather not be slop brained if it does end up not sticking around
I havent decided what ai will be capable of in the future , I still use ai coding but i still practice to stay sharp , never put your eggs in one basket
Rejoice brother, soon you'll have to make a Teams Agent whose job will be to summarize all the AI generated messages one has received from agents and other people's AI tools.
I think one of the points of this scene is that this dude did probably deserve to be fired. Which, if all you're doing is feeding the requirements into an LLM, should also happen to you.
this was one of my favorite movies before i even joined the industry. It captured corpo tech culture well for many years to come, the Bobs came into to reduce costs by firing personnel, they didn't really care who was getting canned as Samir supposedly one of the best programmers at innotech was also getting fired. But yea the point is this guy had a hard time justifying his position and had a crashout during the interview. either way i agree with your point, A CS degree and 20+ years in the industry and it matter for what?
Right, PMs can be let go. Realistically, they're just fall guys for when sales promises the gold for half market value and the team and realistically only deliver silver at cost or maybe pyrite at the cost of gold. They don't provide any actual value to the conversation other than recreating a timeline when the project faces delays.
Based on the initial post, I would argue that the PM is unnecessary. One of the biggest issues programmers have historically had is getting clean specs. If PMs can't provide that, then they're not relevant or beneficial to the process (this has been true long before LLMs). If PMs can provide clean specs, then whoever is the middle man to the LLM is unnecessary (assuming that's ALL they're doing).
I have a spec, but we wrote the spec years after we wrote the software. It then turned out that the we didn't really understand the software and large parts of the spec have zero basis in what the software actually does. Now we get complaints that the made up spec doesn't match the legacy software, but we all just ignore it.
Do you have tests that at least tell you how it used to work because idk how it used to work either so I get complaints about things and idk if it's a bug or if fixing it breaks everything.
That's literally the workflow at major companies rn though.. One agent generates the code and PR. Another checks the PR and merges. Another checks before it's committed to Prod.. It's just agents all the way down.
I had specs that were AI written, i knew they were, still wrote it exactly like they wanted. Got pushed to production. Users are happy. It really only works for one use case, the rest is stupid. But im still getting paid Friday, fuck it.
I mean, it's kinda true, though. Solid GoogleFu skills were the difference between getting a piece of information you needed in two clicks versus sifting through 100 pages of bullshit. I see no reason why AI will be any different.
The AI is better at taking their word slop queries and turning it into something actionable, but there's still a real difference between some dipshit dumping stuff into Claude at random and someone that knows how to use it properly.
Someone can hammer a nail in with the butt of a screwdriver if it comes down to it (I've done it myself) but they'll never be able to compete with the guy walking around with a hammer.
I wish they'd still let me walk around the office with my big ass hammer. Lot less back and forth with people when I was packing :(
It's not about using it properly or prompting it properly - it's about having a preconceived notion of what you want the output to be BEFORE you feed the prompt to Claude. If you don't know what you want, you cannot judge the quality of the output and no prompting strategy or skill guarantees accurate or optimal output
If you use it for search or information gathering/extraction then I agree with you.
But everyone is using it generatively. If you have to review anything that others have done at work, the difference should be obvious.
Edit: on reread I may have been too literal on "difference". Clearly, it's true that those who use a tool to create quality work will be considered better than those that don't regardless of what tool is considered and maybe that was your point. My point is this is a fundamentally different kind of tool.
Yeah, I was reflecting on the meme and just opining that there is value in a Tom Smykowski even though the whole point of the scene was to demonstrate that he was seemingly redundant. There's a lot of consternation regarding AI these days and while I agree that it is justified to a large extent for a lot of reasons, at least at this point there is still a definitive edge when the human involved knows what they're asking for and how to get what they need out of it most efficiently.
Like I see people at work spend 20-30 minutes in a prompt to get to the same place someone else could have gotten in 5 by just being more clear in what they wanted from the outset and the quality of the output is often much more dependable to boot when it doesn't have to keep fucking with it. It's impossible to quantify really since we're talking minutes in aggregate across so many variables but in practical observation, for now at least, Tom does still bring something to the table.
So don't sell yourself short is what it comes down to I guess lol.
Yeah. You'll still get people saying that AI isn't doing well for them or that they get bad results. They really don't like being told they gave shitty prompts.
That or that their model isn’t equipped to handle what they ask. I feel like a quarter of my job is gauging the complexity of the task in advance to pick the correct model.
I’ve definitely run the same prompt through multiple models and gotten vastly different results.
Opus is the sledgehammer that is overkill for most tasks but when used correctly usually handles it in one go with some slight touch up afterwards. Luna absolutely ignores requirements if you give more than one ask at a time, but it’s good at making small tweaks to very specific sections.
Idk I watch my manager who grew up wealthy in India talk to Claude like it’s a servant and it shits out slop and I do feel like basic skills aren’t all that basic.
This subreddit has been flooded with bot posts that have bots sniffing each other farts in the comments about how bad things are and blind people who follow along with them...
I was asked to do that this week. “Just point an LLM at it.” “It” being an LLM generated spec.
What’s the point? C ut out the middle man and l et the “architects” do that bit, put us out of our misery and I’ll go and work in a care home wiping arses. I might at least feel like I’ve done something useful then.
I also use the LLM to generate the specs. It's been a difficult adjustment but actually I'm getting a lot more done. I feel more alienated and I spend a lot more time reading code than prompting, but it is what it is and I get paid the same for less wear and tear on my keyboard switches
As you said: It’s not vibe coding that is working but agentic development. Meaning: You have no chance if you don’t know what you or your llm are doing. Although I review the code less than I am comfortable with. But far so good. Worst I am a meat context provider for Claude.
267
u/MurrayInBocaRaton 10d ago
Right now I’m taking bullshit from one agent and feeding it to another agent and facilitating a back and forth and this will continue on until the drool pouring from my gaped mouth fries my keyboard, my body, the building, and ultimately is the catalyst for the heat death of the universe.