This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems:
> There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand!
Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling.
I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he was doing this for education, not for work. He should have spent more like 6 hours before desperately reaching for the LLM. I imagine after 1 hour he would have figured it out on his own.
sho_hn 5 minutes ago [-]
Now imagine someone else reading this and genuinely considering 20 minutes a long time to wait :-)
sho_hn 19 minutes ago [-]
Remember the old days of our youth, i.e. last week Monday, when we still wrote code by hand?
phoronixrly 16 minutes ago [-]
I can't tell if OP is satire... I've just seen so many unhiged takes that this article reads completely in line with the discourse...
fouronnes3 30 minutes ago [-]
This is awesome! I myself did a 12 weeks batch at RC (W1'24) and had an absolute blast. Happy coding! Stay curious.
gregsadetsky 23 minutes ago [-]
fellow RC'er here - hi! I was Fall 2 '23.
mchusma 30 minutes ago [-]
You should do what you want, and as a break it’s fine. But IMO right now the most leverage for most people is learning how to effectively manage agents. It’s really hard. Not many are truly good with it. It will be relevant for a long time.
idle_zealot 17 minutes ago [-]
> It will be relevant for a long time.
Why would you think that? The landscape is fast-moving. Prompting tricks and "AI skills" of yesterday are already dated and sometimes actively counterproductive. The explicit goal of the companies working on the tech is to lower the barriers to entry and make it easier to use, building harnesses and doing refinement that align LLMs to an intuitive mode of interaction.
Do you think they'll fail? Do you think we've plateaued in terms of what using a computer looks like and your learnings for wrangling the agents of this year will be relevant for whatever the new hotness is next year? It's a strong claim that demands similarly strong argument to support.
aerhardt 24 minutes ago [-]
> It’s really hard
How? I just open multiple terminal panes, use git tree, and then basically it’s good old software dev practices. What am I missing?
bensyverson 13 minutes ago [-]
You're probably significantly underselling the value of your own "good old software dev practices."
baq 26 minutes ago [-]
The agents are already learning to manage agents, if it’s relevancy you’re looking for you might want to take up plumbing instead.
onair4you 18 minutes ago [-]
Not sure what you are using, but that’s easier said than done. I just set up an agent to ensure that my other agent would follow my coding guidelines by using hooks. The coding agent responded by switching to editing with `sed`, etc. to circumvent the hooks.
Claude Opus is going to give zero fucks about your attempts to manage it.
bdangubic 14 minutes ago [-]
this is exactly right, I don't manage agents anymore (and have spent countless hours before learning how to do so, now this is a skill like my microsoft access skills (which were amazing back in the day...)
the_gipsy 6 minutes ago [-]
If they're so great, then we will end up somewhere where it's easy to pick up.
sd9 25 minutes ago [-]
What has been most valuable for you?
It is hard indeed. I find it really quite exhausting.
Personally, I feel like I have always been a very competent programmer. I'm embracing the new way of working, but it seems like quite a different skillset. I somewhat believe that it will be relevant for a long time, because there is an incredibly large gap in outcomes between members of my team using AI. I've had good results so far, but I'm keen to improve.
sdevonoes 28 minutes ago [-]
For the average and mundane stuff, sure do whatever everyone is doing.
For the good stuff, there’s no alternative but to know and to have taste. Llms change nothing.
slopinthebag 22 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, it's really difficult to remember to tell it "make no mistakes". Typing a prompt is also really hard, especially when you have to remember the cli command to open the agent. Sometimes I even forget if I need to use "medium", "high", or "xhigh" for a task.
zingababba 24 minutes ago [-]
I see you got downvoted by I agree. I went through a massive valley of despair and turned back to hand crafting only to realize that for me coding was always a means to an end and I really didn't care at all about how I got there. Now I'm having a lot of fun building out all kinds of wonky projects.
Marazan 21 minutes ago [-]
> It will be relevant for a long time.
Citation needed.
tossandthrow 22 minutes ago [-]
I love being able to put my brain cells at lean, coq, haskell. All the fun stuff. And have my money job taken care of mostly with agents.
lrvick 16 minutes ago [-]
I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way.
What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and just let LLMs push straight to main for everything and they get hired as senior engineers.
It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.
If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code.
But also, I feel this way about the industry long before LLMs. If you are not confident enough to run Linux on the computer in front of you, no senior sysadmin will hire you to go near their production systems.
Job one of everyone I mentor is to build Linux from scratch, and if you want an LLM build all the tools to run one locally for yourself. You will be way more capable and employable if you do not skip straight to using magic you do not understand.
adamddev1 5 minutes ago [-]
> It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.
It's not though. It's fundamentally different because TurboTax will still work with clear deterministic algorithms. We need to see that the jump to AI is not a jump from hand written math to calculators. It's a jump from understanding how the math works to another world of depending on magic machines that spit out numbers that sort of work 90% of the time.
teruakohatu 9 minutes ago [-]
> It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.
That is exactly been the situation for years. Once graduated accountants are not doing maths. They are using software (Exel, Xero etc.). They do need to know some basic formulas eg. NPV.
What they need to know is the law, current business practices etc.
sho_hn 14 minutes ago [-]
> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code.
So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers?
Serious question.
hallway_monitor 7 minutes ago [-]
Junior developers have always been a lot less effective than senior developers. We will need new senior developers so we will need to train junior developers. Maybe we train them by forcing them to do things the hard way. The slow way. By hand. Because if we let them do things the fast way they are going to cause some serious damage.
lrvick 5 minutes ago [-]
The same way I learned 25 years ago still works today. Volunteer on open source projects.
Always happy to mentor people at stagex and hashbang (orgs I founded).
Also being a maintainer of an influential open source project goes on a resume, and helps you get seen in a crowded market while boosting your skills and making the world better. Win/win all around.
sho_hn 3 minutes ago [-]
Can't disagree, that's how I did it too :-)
rafaelmn 8 minutes ago [-]
Even by pessimistic progress projections AI will be better than most at coding before this is a long term issue. And the output multiplier I'm seeing I suspect the number of SWEs needed to achieve the same task is going to start shrinking fast.
I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today.
lrvick 58 seconds ago [-]
But you have to be good at SWE to be good at security engineering and sysadmin, and the demand there is skyrocketing.
We have a completely broken internet with almost nothing using memory encryption or secure enclaves of end to end encryption or proper code review. Decades of human cognitive work to be done here even with LLM help.
Rendered at 21:55:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand!
Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling.
I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he was doing this for education, not for work. He should have spent more like 6 hours before desperately reaching for the LLM. I imagine after 1 hour he would have figured it out on his own.
Why would you think that? The landscape is fast-moving. Prompting tricks and "AI skills" of yesterday are already dated and sometimes actively counterproductive. The explicit goal of the companies working on the tech is to lower the barriers to entry and make it easier to use, building harnesses and doing refinement that align LLMs to an intuitive mode of interaction.
Do you think they'll fail? Do you think we've plateaued in terms of what using a computer looks like and your learnings for wrangling the agents of this year will be relevant for whatever the new hotness is next year? It's a strong claim that demands similarly strong argument to support.
How? I just open multiple terminal panes, use git tree, and then basically it’s good old software dev practices. What am I missing?
Claude Opus is going to give zero fucks about your attempts to manage it.
It is hard indeed. I find it really quite exhausting.
Personally, I feel like I have always been a very competent programmer. I'm embracing the new way of working, but it seems like quite a different skillset. I somewhat believe that it will be relevant for a long time, because there is an incredibly large gap in outcomes between members of my team using AI. I've had good results so far, but I'm keen to improve.
For the good stuff, there’s no alternative but to know and to have taste. Llms change nothing.
Citation needed.
What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and just let LLMs push straight to main for everything and they get hired as senior engineers.
It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.
If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code.
But also, I feel this way about the industry long before LLMs. If you are not confident enough to run Linux on the computer in front of you, no senior sysadmin will hire you to go near their production systems.
Job one of everyone I mentor is to build Linux from scratch, and if you want an LLM build all the tools to run one locally for yourself. You will be way more capable and employable if you do not skip straight to using magic you do not understand.
It's not though. It's fundamentally different because TurboTax will still work with clear deterministic algorithms. We need to see that the jump to AI is not a jump from hand written math to calculators. It's a jump from understanding how the math works to another world of depending on magic machines that spit out numbers that sort of work 90% of the time.
That is exactly been the situation for years. Once graduated accountants are not doing maths. They are using software (Exel, Xero etc.). They do need to know some basic formulas eg. NPV.
What they need to know is the law, current business practices etc.
So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers?
Serious question.
Always happy to mentor people at stagex and hashbang (orgs I founded).
Also being a maintainer of an influential open source project goes on a resume, and helps you get seen in a crowded market while boosting your skills and making the world better. Win/win all around.
I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today.
We have a completely broken internet with almost nothing using memory encryption or secure enclaves of end to end encryption or proper code review. Decades of human cognitive work to be done here even with LLM help.