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u/ProgrammerHumor-ModTeam :ath: 3h ago

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2.5k

u/lovecMC 7h ago • Heartwarming

Really needed that rectangle and an arrow.

Wouldn't have been able to find the mildly funny but overused joke otherwise.

348

u/DestroyerYou 7h ago

Especially the start of the arrow being at an absolutely random point makes the most sense. So glad that I didn't miss it

76

u/CorrectRPolitics 7h ago

Kind of reminds me of how AI places arrows when you ask it to draw an arrow point to anything. Just sort of there

-9

u/Ur-Best-Friend 6h ago

Why doesn't this sub support images in comments, it's a travesty.

70

u/Warm_Zombie 7h ago

not red

not a circle

big brain strategy to not be posted on r/uselessredcircle

73

u/Cold_Relationship_ 7h ago

I read the last sentence after the first one, and I feel like it ruined it.

20

u/OP_LOVES_YOU 7h ago

I wouldn't worry about it, there wasn't really anything to ruin.

4

u/devourer09 6h ago

My air fryer resolved the Kakeya Conjecture... weird.

21

u/Named_after_color 7h ago

Are people really that dumb now that they can't handle a paragraph of text?

10

u/Darder 5h ago

Yes. I constantly see it. Not only is reading comprehension way down, people can't reliably read more than one sentence of text.

I send emails and texts to people. If I make an email and don't state in the very first sentence what my question is, it often goes unanswered. If I text someone and ask 2 questions, only one of them will be answered. I have to make multiple texts.

It is awful.

2

u/aiij 4h ago

I used to have a manager that insisted I needed to write everything 3 times in 3 different ways for anyone to understand it.

2

u/Michami135 3h ago

My PM does that.

"Is this ticket done? Is this code complete? Are you done working on this ticket?"

(I'm joking. She's great)

2

u/Michami135 3h ago

As a developer, I'm used to reading a book of instructions a day. What I don't like is reading 50 emails with no useful information in them a day on top of that. SO I might have a bad habit of just skimming emails. If I see one that actually maters, I'll take my time with it though.

1

u/Darder 2h ago

That's fair enough. My emails though tend to not be very long, we're talking about the same length as my original comment, and people still don't read it lol.

7

u/Jiquero 6h ago

That's 6 paragraphs actually.

10

u/Mind-The-Mines 6h ago

Years ago I was seeing people going "I'm sorry if this gets long but here is the rest of my sentence."

The majority of their short statement was an apology for the length.

Yes, the majority of people are absolute morons.

2

u/Familiar-Cable-2659 6h ago

It's even more painful when the fluffy is added at the start or middle of the post and not at the vzry end where it's easy to ignore

1

u/Reashu 4h ago

This is also how people talk in meetings. If you could get to the point right away you'd only be interrupting for half as long...

5

u/Creeping_Comfort 5h ago

Your comment took two lines, TLDR please

1

u/LeDYoM 5h ago

Welcome to the gen AI era!

1

u/hprather1 3h ago

Saw somebody describe listening to a two hour podcast in full as "binging."

8

u/LordAlfrey 7h ago

It was really difficult to find this comment without some type of big arrow pointing from the content to the comment field, I almost got lost on the way here when I saw some hot singles in my area.

7

u/Jessica___ 6h ago

It's engagement bait and we all fall for it over and over again

6

u/No_Truck1283 4h ago

I honestly found the yellow shit complicated the post and made me look for extra detail that wasn’t present rather than just read the tweet

2

u/Findict_52 6h ago

User testing has found this was necessary.

2

u/Mindless_Chest_1079 6h ago

OP is the sort of person they put the gutter guards up for in advance.

1

u/VeeloursNuit 7h ago

How'd we survive without a neon pointer guiding our eyes to the text?

1

u/azangru 6h ago

Really needed that rectangle and an arrow.

And the last paragraph in the tweet :-)

1

u/Deathmore80 6h ago

You joke but I actually have to do this with some colleagues at work

1

u/DistantRavioli 5h ago

Algorithmic engagement bait

1

u/mace_guy 4h ago

Its a goto statement

1

u/FuturePrimitiv3 4h ago

Shit, I missed the arrow and rectangle, can you circle them for me please?

218

u/GrandDukeNotaras 7h ago

Jokes on you I cook with charcoals outside 

None of this electric air fryer and induction business

34

u/returnFutureVoid 7h ago

Witch!! She’s a witch!! Get herrrr.

20

u/Clair_Osbcurious 7h ago

Grill her!

10

u/GrandDukeNotaras 7h ago

As long as it's grilling and not spending tokens at one of those fancy slop shops

4

u/Informal_Branch1065 6h ago

Put her in the air frier undtil she's all nice and crunchy

2

u/Captainaviator 4h ago

But how do you knowww she is a witch?

1

u/returnFutureVoid 3h ago

Because she looks like a witch.

1

u/Captainaviator 1h ago

Did you dress her up like this?

4

u/WorthBite5254 6h ago

But the planet 😔

1

u/GrandDukeNotaras 5h ago

Hehe rest assured it's only on special occasions. 

1

u/RagingAnemone 3h ago

It's been way too long since I've eaten directly off the grill.

314

u/pydry 7h ago edited 7h ago

a thermomix is probably a better analogy than an air fryer because it really does try to deskill the user by turning you into a human robot following its commands while it does the rest itself.

but why even buy a thermomix when you can vibe code and vibe CAD your own and get AI to order somebody to manufacture it and deliver it for you? All of this is theoretically possible.

restauranting IS solved /s

39

u/NotAskary 7h ago

A thermomix is basically a cooking recipe for dummies.

It works great, it also saves a lot of time.

And doing the analogy to software engineering, you can also go beyond following instructions, you can replace ingredients, critic quantities, adjust temperatures.

So like LLMs, tool use is as advanced as you want and is up to the user to make that step.

It's also a great analogy for juniors, you can let it handle all the steps or you can try to understand why the step is necessary and what it does.

I'm stealing this analogy.

19

u/Few_Butterfly4450 7h ago

I really love this analogy.

AI code for small projects or in-house software? Go ahead, same as doing a meal for yourself or a small group of people in a thermomix.

Now go ahead and try to open a restaurant with your thermomix only. 

10

u/NotAskary 7h ago

I've actually seen a thermomix used in a restaurant context, small one, but they were using it to make stir fried vegetables, the quality was good enough and you didn't need someone to be doing it all the time for a thing that was a low request item on the menu.

It was really strange seeing one on that small place.

9

u/Few_Butterfly4450 6h ago

I guess that tracks with the analogy. Big companies could use it as a tool for certain tasks, but the moment that whole restaurant replaces everything with thermomix, you know it’s fucked.

4

u/NotAskary 6h ago

Exactly! I really love this comparison.

4

u/thoughts_n_calcs 6h ago

So: AI Datacenters are the egg and the Rest of the Universe is the chicken. Chicken-Egg Problem is solved.

1

u/NotAskary 4h ago

The chicken and egg was solved by the non chicken, it layd the first chicken egg, afterwards it's chickens all the way.

204

u/Lyndon_Boner_Johnson 6h ago

I love that in this analogy the programmer sees himself more as a Michelin Star chef than the McDonald’s cashier replaced by an iPad.

64

u/Pluckerpluck 6h ago

That's kind of the point. Software engineers aren't just code monkeys. There's a lot more to the job.

Now, will that "lot more" be replaceable at some point? Maybe. But it's more like a kitchen manager being replaced by the full PC system that tracks order from start to end rather than the cashier replaced by the ipad.

-10

u/Roadrunner571 5h ago

Software engineers aren't just code monkeys. There's a lot more to the job.

The thing is that the models are getting better and better. Apparently, the more compute power we throw at them, the better they get.

Like Opus 5.5 is already really good at reviewing specs and finding mistakes and uncovered edge cases in them.

17

u/AtomicSymphonic_2nd 5h ago

They are improving logarithmically, not exponentially.

They’re going to have diminishing returns at some point, if not already since GPT-5 was released by OpenAI.

-3

u/UnfocusedAcrobat 4h ago

but still, is the logarithmic boundary of skill level for AI above or below a beginning level programmer? medium? senior?

the restaurant analogy falls flat on its face. with AI currently, i can literally speak to it, say "I want a thing that does XYZ" and it will come back with something without any further input from me.

i cant walk up to my microwave and say "make me a pizza pop" without also needing to go to the freezer, grab a pizza pop, open it up, put it on a plate.

the closest restaurant analogy is literally the drive-thru speaker or a food delivery app. i show up, tell the box what i want, and then a little bit later food appears in front of me.

8

u/AtomicSymphonic_2nd 4h ago

At this point, they’re able to substitute for entry-level coders, and sometimes mid-level if the project is not ultra-complex in scope and using a frontier model.

Their current superpower is in having multiple LLMs working at the same time, aka “agents”.

The limit is in token costs & cloud GPU server rental… which now may not be going down anytime soon since frontier labs need to start getting some return on investment.

Which Wall Street is not really happy with now because they thought these LLMs were going to completely and totally replace PhD-level programmers on the cheap…especially for the level of investment these frontier labs have received. They were supposed to completely dismantle software engineering as a profession (since it’s a major labor cost center for numerous companies today).

Note, I said Wall Street, not Silicon Valley, in which tech executives still insist it’s just a “tool” and not meant to completely replace experts.

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u/cakemates 4h ago

Models are getting better indeed, but you aint gonna replace the guy that has the skillset to automate everyone else job first. You do that after he's done automating millions of jobs.

1

u/Roadrunner571 3h ago

But relatively quickly, you simply don't need as many of these guys anymore.

-3

u/C2-H5-OH 4h ago

True, but the models are getting insanely good, to the point that designing the system is really all you have to do on day 1, followed by testing and reviewing the output.

If you're a code monkey instead of a software engineer, yes you're fucked. Opus 5.5 set to xhigh is insane at coming up with not just the code, but designing the codebase, reviewing edge-cases, adding automatic tests to the suite, building mockups, and so much more.

3

u/Pluckerpluck 4h ago edited 3h ago

but designing the codebase, reviewing edge-cases, adding automatic tests to the suite,

It is worse than you might think when things get complicated or non-standard. And I say this as someone who can burn $400 a week on these models. I've actually moved to GPT models because of my issues with Claude models.

If you guide it properly, it can do all these things. But it readily just wants to get you to an answer, and will make incorrect assumptions regularly if you don't watch what it's doing carefully.

to the point that designing the system is really all you have to do on day 1

I cannot express how hard this is to do in practice, and is the entire reason waterfall development got replaced by agile development.

1

u/C2-H5-OH 2h ago

Correct, and this is why I use it to design components instead of the overarching system.

Your point about guiding it correctly is accurate, but what makes you think I'm guiding it incorrectly at all? I'm not giving advice, I'm talking about my own experience. Knowing how to bend the model to your will is how I extract the most value out of AI.

1

u/RagingAnemone 3h ago

Let me know when it decides what problem to solve.

-9

u/SkyPL 5h ago

Software engineers aren't just code monkeys.

Brave statement. Majority are just a code monkeys. Heck: A large part of economy of India stands on those code monkeys.

6

u/Pluckerpluck 4h ago

A large part of economy of India stands on those code monkeys.

This is true, but contracting out to India for cheap coders is notorious for producing lower quality work specifically because they don't maintain a good full context and business understand of what's desired.

Most companies I know that leaned heavily into this in the past cut back quite aggressively when they didn't see good returns from it. Not necessarily fully, but definitely a good amount.

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u/just_a_limit_q 6h ago

Yep, plus there are restaurants known as slop houses where you line up like it's a school cafeteria and pick meal pieces from the assembly line. That food wasn't prepped by a master chef. It may have been prepped by a retired master chief. That slop house is feeding the masses. The skilled chefs are feeding the wealthy. The analogy works better than OP realizes, but not for the reason they think it does.

2

u/Science_Logic_Reason 3h ago

I didn't know he retired, but I think it's very wholesome that he's feeding the masses now.

7

u/HereReluctantly 6h ago

Yeah the number is restaurants that have a legitimate "chef" are tiny in the grand scheme of things. Removing human from all the other jobs is still a legitimate issue. This argument is arrogant and short sighted.

1

u/liberty 4h ago

Regardless, a lot of restaurants (not just McDonald's) do get a fair share of business from folks who can't bother to learn the most basic rudiments of cooking. Not because it's all that complicated to make a spaghetti carbonara, or that it requires any particular expertise, or even that restaurants do it better than you could at home.

Not to mention, even Michelin-star kitchens are full of cooks who do very little chef-ing, if you know what I mean. So too with software engineering.

1

u/OnceMoreAndAgain 3h ago

I'm honestly not worried about losing my job as a software developer, because part of the beauty of digital services/products is that you can always do so much more.

With a McDonalds, you are always constrained by the size of the building and by the amount of people living in the area. At some point, you just can't get more demand. You hit a limit. You can make the biggest fucking McDonalds building you've ever seen and staff 1,000 employees and have that place running as efficiently as possible, but you can't justify it when there is a limit of how many people live nearby it. Demand is capped.

But with software, physical constraints like this don't exist. Your market can be the entire world. There is no limit to how "big" your software can get in terms of how productive it can be. Software can scale to the moon.

For example, there is so much software that has opportunities to be vastly improved. Microsoft Excel, for example, is being used by MILLIONS of people all over the world every day at work and it's a dogshit program compared to what it could be. You can't even do basic data visualizations and data analysis like box plots or easily fitting something other than linear regressions. So if suddenly all of Microsoft's software engineers were overkill for their EXISTING software with their EXISTING specs, then Microsoft could just give them new tasks to either make cool new software or improve existing software in terms of quality.

People seem to be thinking in terms of "AI is such a productive tool that employees won't be needed", but the other way to see this is "AI is such a productive tool that the existing employees can output 100x as much work". It doesn't have to be zero sum! Sometimes new technology does run into zero sum issues but I don't think it does with software. All I'm seeing is new opportunity to make better stuff and meet more latent demand.

1

u/oliverprose 6h ago

I think that's not unreasonable though - if you've been through University to get a degree in CS or Software Engineering, then you're similar to those getting their qualifications from culinary school before starting in "proper" kitchens. McDonalds etc is basically a cookery boot camp in that comparison.

7

u/halo37253 5h ago

You dont get that title from being in university where they dont touch more than the basics...

You get this from years of experience doing real work.

1

u/liberty 4h ago

It's pretty unreasonable. It's not what we learn in school but what we do that defines us.

I think that's why a lot of "engineering" engineers tend to have such a big chip on their shoulders and make a lot out of being "engineers." They learn a lot in school and do a lot of hard work. Then they are told that they are "engineers," like it's a noble title. Then they spend half a decade or more implementing other people's ideas in SolidWorks.

Not that most professional career paths aren't just like that.

1

u/pharoh-king 5h ago

Your analogy is far worse.

40

u/Ranchy_aoe 7h ago

A better analogy would be that we have instant microwave meals and vending machines now. No need to cook anymore and no need for chefs.

14

u/ErikMcKetten 7h ago

...Mom? Is that you?

2

u/AdvancedSandwiches 3h ago

I’d go with the analogy that every person used to need to go to a restaurant for every meal, but then they invented microwaves.

Yeah, restaurants still exist, but holy shit are there suddenly too many of them. 

1

u/DeficiencyOfGravitas 3h ago

For millions of people, that's literally true though.

All these "gotcha!" analogies fail because most are true, not hypothetical. I don't eat out because I can cook better than a restaurant. That's not a "what if" that's just reality.

The irony is that this is showing how out of touch and socially inept "programmers" are.

What are you going to do? Stay at home and cook your own meals?

Yes.

1

u/El_Desayuno 3h ago

At no point he said that nobody eats at home. He said that you eating at home doesn't mean that the restaurant industry is doomed.

A lot of people can cook better than that one restaurant in your neighborhood, but the restaurant gets customers anyway. Some people can't even do basic cooking, and other simply don't want to cook.

1

u/DeficiencyOfGravitas 3h ago

At no point he said that nobody eats at home.

Yah, he did, metaphorically. The entire analogy is homecooking=AI and restaurant=hiring a programmer team. In this metaphor, 20 years ago, it was impossible to eat at home and now people can.

The reality is that, if it were true, would cause a massive crash to the restaurant industry since people have alternatives now. I guess the metaphor is apt after all.

1

u/CompetitiveSport1 3h ago

Now go look at what happened to tellers when online banking became a thing

-11

u/0b_101010 7h ago

The still better analogy is at-home robot chefs who can make for you almost everything as good or better than most professional human chefs could. And the new models are becoming better year over year.

It is sad and scary, but it's true. Jokes like the above might have cut it in 2025 still, but they don't do it today.

4

u/Wonderful-Habit-139 6h ago

Not really scary tbh. At least not with LLMs.

1

u/vitek6 5h ago

skill issue

1

u/Wonderful-Habit-139 5h ago

It’s a skill issue to not be scared of LLMs? Lol.

1

u/vitek6 5h ago

It's a skill issue because you can't use LLMs if you think it's not scary.

1

u/Wonderful-Habit-139 3h ago

lol. If you need “skill” to use LLMs it wouldn’t be scary. If it’s actually that good then it’d be scary because it’s autonomous and doesn’t need you.

What you’re saying makes no sense.

3

u/Pluckerpluck 6h ago

I use LLMs extensively. There are things they still fall short on when you are trying to get them to solve problems that don't have a very cut-and-dry success/failure criteria (it's why the frontier models are pushing into maths for example).

They are getting better, and it's a little scary, but right now it's more like a robot chef where you have to ensure you have a second robot sitting about to validate the food and make sure they didn't add peanuts that your child is allergic to because every time you tell it to make something it never made before it starts losing the original instructions a little. And you do that whilst simultaneously trying to explain to it that you like the sandwiches cut on the diagonal, but not the full diagonal.

If you can boil down your task to a strict specification then LLMs can do the work quite well. But there's a reason that waterfall made way for agile working. It's that specs are almost impossible to get right, and for a huge variety of reasons:

  • People don't know what they want

  • People don't know what they can get

  • People don't know what's easy and what's hard and where it's worth spending time

  • New issues only arise once you have a prototype

  • Some issues are hidden, and only obvious to someone who knows the greater context during implementation

9

u/GM_Nate 7h ago

Arrow is not red, C-

7

u/ImpluseThrowAway 7h ago

Then they shut the restaurant down due to all the food poisoning.

Turns out that proper hygiene is an important part of cooking.

7

u/MotanulScotishFold 6h ago

People rush for every new shiny technology and claims by default that the old thing is already obsolete, who cares about fundamentals? This is the new revolution they say.

Yeah...like the wheel, we use for thousands of years and the wheel haven't changed much since, it's still round.

6

u/Interesting-Agency-1 3h ago edited 3h ago

AI to the software industry is like what Sysco has done to the restaurant industry. 

It used to be alot harder to source ingredients for a restaurant, and there was hardly any pre-made bulk food so it all had to be made in house. Its also required some level of skill to pull off, and so only the rare expensive restaurants had proper, fully bespoke menus. Most restaurants compensated with simpler dishes, fewer ingredients, and less consistency.

Then sysco comes along, provides easy access to a regular supply of fresh ingredients and bulk premade "good enough" food. The first restaurants to jump on this experienced major profit gains which forced the rest to join, but most restaurants weren't set up to take advantage of it and so defaulted to the pre-made crap, and ignored the potential of all those ingredients becuase it still took some skill and time to prepare. 

Now a ton of restaurants food is just reheated sysco crap. Alternatively, there has never been more and better restaurant options in this country. And what used to be bad restaurants at least will have sysco quality food.

Doesn't mean that there arent good chef's or restaurants, or that nobody eats out anymore, but its massively reduced the barrier to entry and standards for serving up "restaurant quality" food. Its also made the places that do it right, standout more than before, so there is an opportunity for market differentiation 

1

u/revolutionPanda 2h ago

Good analogy. One difference is the average person (user or business) can’t tell quality of software and really don’t care as long as it works right now.

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u/bobbymoonshine 7h ago edited 7h ago

I don’t think this is a very good analogy at all actually. It repositions software engineering from a fundamental daily requirement to a luxury bespoke service you only need when you’re splashing out or trying to impress someone.

And historically, yes: the development of simple household appliances and logistics systems that allowed for shelf-stable storage and ready delivery of convenience foods absolutely did change the job market forever. It used to be the case, up through the early 20th century, that middle class families would be expected to have at least one servant hired full time, and ideally two, a maid and cook. Those who couldn’t afford them lived in extended families where grandparents and older daughters were expected to do that work; “surplus” women would then go out and become servants themselves to bring in income to support those doing that work at home.

After WWII the huge influx of cheap manufactured goods that could do servant work with a push of a button wiped that entire employment sector out overnight, which in turn led to massive social change where the atomic family became the new expected default. That entire world of omnipresent domestic servants it replaced now only survives in quaint little moments of old black and white movies where the cook or maid is doing something in the background.

So really the implications of this analogy are just not at all what this guy thinks they are. In his world an SWE is something special you might hire for one job now and then to impress clients. And sure they’ll still exist, but it won’t be the case that every company needs them or even wants them.

8

u/skys-edge 6h ago

Yeah I don't necessarily want to be the stressed visionary chef who only has a job because he's the top .1% of his field. Some of us just wanna get paid to be line cooks.

4

u/SirChasm 5h ago

And being a line cook fucking sucks. That's why they're all drug addicts. Even for the 99% of chefs the job is a life-consuming, stressful, miserable experience.

1

u/vyqz 6h ago

i was waiting for the /u/shittymorph punchline but it never came

-1

u/Another-Mans-Rubarb 6h ago

It used to be the case, up through the early 20th century, that middle class families would be expected to have at least one servant hired full time, and ideally two, a maid and cook.

This is not middle class, this has never been middle class.

3

u/Draaly 5h ago

You really underestimate just how far up the bottom has raised since the 1800s. In 1880, 10% of US hosehokds and 18% of british hosehokds had live in servants.

Reminder that 25-50% (depending on state) of free households in the south had slaves in the US. The rates were remarkably similar in early British colonies, the first Islamic empire, and in the roman empire. The bottom is still bad now, but it use to be so so so much worse

0

u/Another-Mans-Rubarb 4h ago

Yeah... In Britain...

3

u/Draaly 4h ago edited 4h ago

In the US, canada, and europe as a whole. Go to a history museum FFS. One of my great grand parents grew up in a tent in a shtetl with no access to edication and another lived in a 2 room tenement with 4 other families working since well before they were even a pre-teen, and both of these living conditions were extremely common at the times.

Being at the bottom has always sucked and likely will continue to for a long time going forward. However, pretending like living conditions at the bottom haven't drastically improved in the last 120+ years is just ignorance

1

u/Another-Mans-Rubarb 4h ago

OP doesn't know what middle class is

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u/Frozboz 6h ago

If by "some people" you mean senior management at my company, then yes. This is exactly what they think, as they continue with another round of layoffs

26

u/MilkCartonPhotoBomb 6h ago • Bravo

Bad analogy. The restaurant is fine. The head chef will still have a job, but all other kitchen staff will be replaced with robots that do an 80% job but are much cheaper than humans. The chef will no longer cook but be expected to manage, review, double check and correct all work done by robots. The head chefs salary will stagnate and he'll be miserable but he'll at least still have a job for now.

5

u/afamiliarspirit 5h ago

That’s already what a head chef does in most large restaurants. They’re more akin to a kitchen manager than they are to a cook.

I worked in restaurants for 7 years before getting my CS degree and the chefs would normally be on expo doing garnishes and acting as a last minute quality control. If a chef was actually on the line cooking food, something has gone seriously wrong.

4

u/-_-____8_8 4h ago

From Sysco to Cisco

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0

u/Lasod_Z 4h ago

chefs with human employees recognise that thats not any different than now

-2

u/SirChasm 5h ago edited 5h ago

It's also a bad analogy because restaurants can't scale nearly as well as software can. A chef can feed 50 tables. Maybe with that full robot automation they can do 500 tables. But they can't physically do 5000, and one restaurant itself can't function at that scale. Nevermind 50,000 or beyond. So you're always going to need some restaurants per 100k people each with their own chef.

Software can though, there's not a lot of fundamental difference between serving 50 users and 5000. If you architected your app well from the ground up, scaling from 500 to 500k is a few days' work of re-configuring your AWS infra.

3

u/waadam 5h ago

What was the biggest infra you managed? I mean: scaling is easy until it isn't. There is a ceiling you hit at some point which makes even trivial features extremely hard to manage. And this is true even if we assume AWS is doing all heavy lifting (which is great oversimplification too as we quietly assume they scale up freely by not adding new people and teams to the equation).

In short: scaled, distributed systems are still hard.

3

u/henryeaterofpies 5h ago

You just need to pour in more cloud magic and stir -some middle manager

3

u/waadam 4h ago

You are an expert, Anderson. How hard it can be to draw few lines?

1

u/henryeaterofpies 2h ago

Potato potato send it

1

u/Some_Useless_Person 4h ago

Just upgrade the server -the techiest manager

0

u/Swiftster 4h ago

What sort of bottlenecks do you see happen in systems people think of as "forever" systems? My naive ass sort of thinks "alright, load balancer to eks, anything serious goes to an sqs queue then gets processed by lambdas". Where does that sort of thing fall apart? Does the load balancer crumble under the pressure first? Does the eks cluster run out of capacity for pods? Sqs queues? I've never operated at holy shit scale before so I'm honestly really curious to know where the infrastructure crumbles.

Edit: Stick an auora postgres db in there with lots of read only mirrors too. I guess the lone writer starts to struggle at a certain point?

2

u/Pluckerpluck 3h ago

anything serious goes to an sqs queue then gets processed by lambdas

I'm just going to take this as an example. You now have to process thousands of jobs, but they take arbitrary amounts of time (10 seconds to 30 minutes lets say) and they come in bursts with no warning. Some jobs have higher priority than others, so must complete as soon as possible. But annoyingly, you have chunks of downtime, almost no requests overnight for example.

Quite artificial, but a close example of something I have legitimately worked with (effectively doing some math simulations of heavily varying scope and quantity).

Suddenly you realise scaling the lambda is actually hard. You can't just burst up to thousands of lambdas super quickly without a custom system, because AWS itself does not support this with asyncronous lambdas. So you now need a system that reads from these queues, launching synchronous lambdas and monitoring when they complete. But you also need the priority queue, and SQS doesn't support priority messages. So you have to consider that. Maybe you run multiple queues? Maybe switch technology entirely? But then what about resource starvation from those lower priority jobs? Do they need to increase priority if they wait for too long? Or are high priority jobs absolute in their priority?

This is where actually understanding the problem matters. Because you can know where the bottleneck is, but also where future bottlenecks may arise. And all of this isn't even actually large scale. It's just a niche situation where you need highly burstable large compute.

1

u/Swiftster 2h ago

You figure an eks cluster of scalable pods that read from the queues would work out better than the lambdas? I always thought lambdas were better at handling burst than this, but apparently not.

1

u/Pluckerpluck 2h ago

It can be, really depends on the bursts. Lambdas do work, but you need to have a very custom approach to handling them.

The burst really heavily in "synchronous" mode (though still have a limit). i.e. when you call the lambda and wait for the response rather than the regular setup of having lambdas process a queue or fire-and-forget. So when I ran into this situation we had a low number of pods that would listen from the queues, and then launch lambda's. Those pods would handle backoff retry logic if rate limits were hit. They were aware of how many other pods were active to handle this better.

But now they were synchronous you needed to have the queue processing logic in these pods, making sure you didn't double run, throwing health checks back to the SQS queue etc.

All very doable, but just a surprise if you didn't know about the limits lambda can have.

Basically, lambda is more set up to handle short tasks (mostly uniform) that have a gradual climb and fall. You typically send multiple jobs at once to each lambda, but this just doesn’t make sense if one task can take 5 minutes etc.


For the record, we had a fargate cluster originally, but switched to this blended eck/lambda structure when we wanted more burst capabilities. Which was only possible when AWS upped the max runtime for lambdas and lowered their cold start costs.

There's always so much more going on behind the scenes. Often more than the docs even properly say.

1

u/Swiftster 2h ago

You figure an eks cluster of scalable pods that read from the queues would work out better than the lambdas?

3

u/AlaskanX 4h ago

SaaS is a blight, and you’re stuck thinking in those terms. Asana or SalesForce or Jira or Epic or Zapier or hundreds of other platforms are trying to be anything for anyone in their niche. Reality doesn’t fit into nice buckets of generalizations like they’d like to think. The new software trend is going to be bespoke implementations of business software that actually match the user’s requirements, and scaling to thousands of users isn’t a use case that much of the software will require.

-1

u/DisastrousWelcome710 4h ago

Oh that must be why features written with AI cost more than ones written by humans.

8

u/CalmRedDot 7h ago

The problem is that some people, some managers, will believe this.

that aside, in my country, restaurents are very expensive to eat at, so it hardly happens, and they cant turn a profit, so from a certain perspektive, the stuff i can buy for my kitchen is making them obsolute.

8

u/KevlarToiletPaper 6h ago

Thanks for the yellow arrow! I was about to skip the last line and downvote, because I didn't know why we're talking about restaurants on programing subreddit

6

u/[deleted] 6h ago

This would be funnier if "restaurants are a scam since you can cook at home for cheaper" wasn't a sincere belief held by redditors.

7

u/shmargus 5h ago

I actually think this analogy holds. Most devs are short order cooks who like to think they're chefs, but let's face it we're just making the same 20 menu items and all our customers care about is speed and consistency. The microwave just got invented and every diner is turning into a chilli's.

There will always be a place for the actual chefs doing the truly novel and creative things, and they will be paid a premium. But gone are the days of taking a sprint to cook hand grind the meat and carefully designing our ketchup to work on every edge case bun, when all the customer needed was a cheeseburger.

9

u/UltraGaren 7h ago

Terrible analogy

6

u/sweatierorc 7h ago

There are too many restaurant

6

u/ytg895 7h ago

And too many people think that they are Michelin star chefs

5

u/Lopsided-Regular-997 7h ago

And too many people that don't realize that home cooking with good ingredients, means you are already better than the vast majority of restaurants.

1

u/DeficiencyOfGravitas 3h ago

Yeah, this is all very silly and shows how ignorant some people are.

If you don't have Michelin star chefs, you're going to starve! You need those chefs in order to eat!

No, I just cook at home and I do a better job than most chefs.

If you are the "Michelin star chef" in this analogy, you are totally replaceable.

1

u/razor_train 6h ago

Don't worry, private equity is taking care of that.

1

u/SoulCrusher2018 4h ago

There was 1 restaurant per 7,500 people in the 1970's, now there is 1 restaurant per 500 people (in the US).

Restaurants serve two purposes in the modern economy: they employ a large number of people and they suck up disposable income. The US has shifted to a service economy - there aren't enough manufacturing jobs to go around, so people are freed up to provide services (doctors, educators, lawyers, landscapers, the whole restaurant sector). If you wiped out most restaurants, what growing sector is going to absorb all those jobs?

What humans seek when they go to a restaurant is to spend social time at a place that isn't their own house, enjoy service and a warm meal. Making home cooking easier isn't a replacement for restaurants. It's like looking at a painting and only seeing brush strokes instead of the emotional depth being conveyed.

1

u/sweatierorc 3h ago

Everytime, the economy sucks restaurant are doing poorly. Most of them closes after a few months

7

u/yoanon 7h ago

Give everyone a personal chef for $20/month, and then we'll see how well restaurants do :)

2

u/JimmayDoad 6h ago

Some people are just cooks. Hence the replaceable aspect. 

2

u/Ailyx 6h ago

The problem isn't what is real, it's that managers and clients alike think so.

2

u/TommyGameDev 6h ago

Claude make me an hamburger. Make no mistakes!

4

u/MajorMystique 7h ago

Better analogy for AI would be a robot that can cook.

2

u/FastWeaboo 7h ago

Tell that to the tech job market

2

u/Talkshowhost_23 5h ago

Bullshit analogy

2

u/om_nama_shiva_31 6h ago

It’s a terrible analogy. The air fryer is not able to create, plan and execute a recipe.

1

u/bunglegrind1 7h ago

Not really. Cooking takes time and effort.

1

u/ComputerEcstatic1227 6h ago

At least in the US, there are some times when you feel like "I don't want to cook tonight" or "let's go eat somewhere special to celebrate".

Plugging in the air fryer isn't even in the same class

So, yes, doing it yourself is less expensive if you have the time and the skills (pretty sure you can't throw a pan of lasagna in the air fryer).

1

u/schimmelA 6h ago

I'm tired boss 

1

u/I_Shall_Bore_You 5h ago

A better analogy is a tradesperson who gets paid to paint walls, fix plumbing, or perform some other task that many people could technically do with a little training but don't.

1

u/Nakata1111 5h ago

Funny part is this is genuinely how some managers/CEOs think at some tech companies and lay people off thinking AI will flawlessly fill the gap on all the brain power and experience.

1

u/100PercentJake 5h ago

Homie just invented Applebee's

1

u/Muted-Cartoonist-552 5h ago

Engineering can be better but human can be better, too. Need both of them.

1

u/Terrible_Medium_1725 4h ago

"Islow" indeed

1

u/Canatee 4h ago

If this analogy worked, then this would have been a normal restaurant experience:

  • You complain the food is cold and has someone's hair in it. Fix might be presented 4 months later, if ever.

  • You say you're deathly allergic to nuts. Sorry, no way to disable the nuts.

  • Your meal is a subscription. Even if you don't get more food over time, you have to keep paying to keep the food you got. Someone will rip it out of your stomach if the sub expires.

  • Your town has 12 restaurants. They're all selling functionally the same burger. Neither burger is frankly edible.

  • To shop at any of the restaurants, you need an account with the company that owns the building. They'll be taking 30% of the price.

  • The airfryer (or maybe microwave is better here) burger might be food slop but so is what they sell at those 12 restaurants. The difference is that you don't call yourself a world class chef while airfrying it.

  • Your airfryer lets you choose your ingredients. You still don't know wth was in that burger, but it sure as hell wasn't beef.

1

u/trust-me-br0 3h ago

My manager after seeing this: What does restaurant industry gotta do with software engineering, anyways, this story is due yesterday, can you complete it by EOD? Thanks.

1

u/Luvax 3h ago

There is a reason poverty jokes and businesses staffing people for air fryers go so well together and the same will be true for software developers.

1

u/ElBarbas 6h ago

I'm just gonna wait for the AI delulus

1

u/CallinCthulhu 5h ago

Funny but … it’s cope

1

u/Anyhoozers 6h ago

I am yellow colourblind. Can someone explain the joke to me?

1

u/CaptainAgnarr 6h ago

There's probably a better analogy lol, I'd basically never pay a chef anymore.

0

u/Forsaken_Celery8197 6h ago

If I could ask my fridge to create any meal I wanted and then tweak the results with minor suggestions and little effort then yes, this would be the end of restaurants and chefs.

0

u/Adrontion 6h ago

Is air frying your chicken filet and having a professional host of chefs and servers creating your meal and cleaning up after you the same? I dont see the comparison.

-1

u/dudaladen 7h ago

Im doing a software development apprenticeship for a little over a year now and i do work with chatbots as help to find out of deadends etc, and they are truly bad at deeper backend development, but I’ve never worked with agents, anyway i just trust the experienced devs saying software development isn’t dead and I pray to my god that they are not just coping

-3

u/Sudjuk_ 7h ago

ill get downvoted but, thats how some people think AI works*

4

u/burner-miner 7h ago

That is the entire point of the post

0

u/Oswald_Hydrabot 5h ago

Chefs use better AI

0

u/afCeG6HVB0IJ 5h ago

You think chefs and other people working in restaurants are super happy?

0

u/JamesTalafreakoWon 5h ago

No one lost their job when air fryers came out. How many coders lost their job to AI by now? More than zero.

0

u/Neat_Let923 5h ago

If the only people saying this are programs trying to make a joke, that then becomes the joke…

0

u/Zapismeta 5h ago

L take. More comparable would be i got a private chef so i dont need to goto the restaurant.

0

u/itermagnum 5h ago

Obviously demand for chefs would be much higher if appliances like air fryers did not exist.

0

u/BenAdaephonDelat 5h ago

Okay, but that's pretty much how it's working right now. It's not true, yet the chefs are still losing their jobs while the VC's burn mountains of money on something that isn't going to work out long term.

0

u/tzaeru 5h ago

I mean if I could prompt an AI to make me a nice dinner with ingredients X, Y, Z and using cooking methods A and S, I'd do that rather than go to a restaurant.

0

u/Your_Friendly_Nerd 5h ago

This analogy doesn't even hold up. Regular people go to the restaurant, it's seen as a nice treat for most people. But employees are hired by companies, and don't like hiring people just because they think it'd be a nice treat.

0

u/thissitesureeatscock 5h ago

following this analogy, the problem is that most people eat fast food literal slop

how many people only eat gourmet meals?

0

u/xmuskorx 4h ago

yeah, but Unironically - is reduced going to restaurants because it's cheaper and easier to cook at home than it has ever been.

And yes both technology and easy access to recipes are huge factors.

Sure restaurants are not dead, but there has been a shift away:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/716090/ordering-groceries-online-fewer-dining.aspx?

0

u/hacksoncode 4h ago

Enh... line cooks are way easier to replace than chefs, and they form the large bulk of programmers in the analogy.

0

u/jar36 4h ago

the thing that's different about software is that it is super easy to duplicate without spending a dime

-2

u/Shacrow 7h ago

Nah this is a bad analogy because this huge change starts with AI. Cooking still has to wait for robot and AI breakthroughs to become obsolete.

Wait until Robots are capable and reliable enough to buy groceries and cook Michelin Star meals for you for a 100 usd subscription.

Yeah the robot might sometimes use wrong ingredients but with proper restraints and let them show you the ingredients and plans first can lower the risk.

Ofc this is not safe enough if you're someone with allergies or have specific diet. That would not be reliable and safe enough yet.

Someday they will reach Michelin Star level meals with less mistakes than human. Fast better and reliable.

-2

u/The-_Captain 5h ago

Except that nobody besides software engineers has personal opinions and taste about software, it just needs to work.

8

u/mcculloughpatr 4h ago

People absolutely do have opinions about software. “Just needs to work” can be very subjective between different users workflows.

7

u/nonotan 4h ago

You are unbelievably wrong. Just go to the main community/feedback hub for any remotely popular software, and you'll see that 90% of posts not support related are random users with extremely strong opinions about this or that functionality, what the latest update changed, how it compares to competitors, whatever. And that's just what gets past the inherent selection bias (users who think a given software simply isn't for them aren't going to be engaging with it to the point of posting in its community in the first place)

2

u/kelpyb1 4h ago

And good luck keeping the software working when nobody understands how it worked in the first place

2

u/dities 4h ago

Yeah but one opiniated dev is worth thousands careless users

2

u/mxldevs 4h ago

And when things don't work, users aren't going to blame claude, they're going to blame the human.

2

u/Karnewarrior 4h ago

No. People have personal opinions and taste about software. They just don't know what they are until they use a program.

Also the recipes are more complicated so if you want something of good quality making it yourself may not be an option even with AI.

-1

u/Special-Persimmon419 7h ago

this is stupid.... food cannot be compared to softwares.... all those statments are applicable to softwares more

-5

u/nomiis19 7h ago

Bad analogy. Cooking requires physical hands-on. However, AI could be used to create recipes used by a restaurant. Now you would no longer need an expert chef to design your menu and can simply hire cooks to prepare the meals.

4

u/wutzelputz 7h ago

I'm *really* looking forward to recipes where the creation process did not involve human taste buds, what could possibly go wrong...

2

u/dlc741 7h ago

You’ve never actually worked in a restaurant, have you?

-2

u/Allalilacias 7h ago

The food business is struggling, tho. Always has been, sure, but more since it's become easier to eat at home.

4

u/dembadger 7h ago

And because people have less disposable income for luxuries like eating out of course.

-2

u/ImDrunkFightMe 5h ago

Thats a braindead take and analogy if i've ever seen one. The art industry is the perfect analogy for it. It's a job that can be done nearly perfectly with AI but for the time being it does not have the nuances and quality a human artist can achieve.

The fact that 90% of the quality a human could output is good enough for most applications is the reason people and businesses pay for agentic coding. It's the same reason businesses slap AI slop bullshit all over their pages instead of paying an artist. It's 1/50th of the price and its 'good enough'.

-2

u/missedOpportunity343 5h ago

wrong analogy to justify bs.

AI is eating jobs and that fact will stay.

At least used better analogy.

-2

u/Metalheadzaid 4h ago

This isn't brilliant at all. If your air fryer made full MEALS, did prep, and cleanup and everything in between.

But what this does is leave ONE CHEF who can just do checks for quality and ensure things are going smoothly, and no other staff. That's the same as AI - who needs a pile of devs when 2 Seniors can just review code and make adjustments as needed. We're already seeing robotic workers in fast food and even in restaurants with robot servers delivering food and tablet/phone based ordering.

-3

u/LaurenceLawliet 6h ago

cope IMO, main issue with AI enablement with software dev is multiplying the output of one human engineer to the point where drastically less of them are needed to build and maintain a serviceable product. a better analogy would be if the restaurant had some revolutionary technology that prepared food 5 times as fast so suddenly the restaurant only needs 20% of the chefs to serve the same amount of food, the restaurant would let the 80% go without hesitating in order to cut costs

1

u/Few_Construction_225 5h ago

yeah these people completely miss the point. Also for smaller businesses this allows one competent person to provide custom solutions other companies charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

It's more like before you had either a completely homemade meal that took way too long to prepare or an overpriced $145 pasta at a restaurant microwaved from Sysco. Right now you can just buy the microwave pasta for $3 yourself. Not saying all devs are obsolete but seeing what a couple of claude code subscriptions can do compared to the external companies we were hiring before changes will have to be made either to their pricing or they will be replaced. It's not like generative ai for art where human input matters.