The bunch of MD files in the codebase is becoming "tech" debt. It's just English prose, sure, but thousands of lines of English prose. Terse. Succinct. Difficult (if not impossible) to maintain manually without LLMs. That's not "baseline"
If it's a one-off script/program that doesn't require additional "domain knowledge", sure. But what if you need to give as context your whole backend repository because you need to take into account a few business rules? Why give anthropic/openai access to my "secret sauce" (e.g., company private repos)?
In that case, it's way better to simply write the code yourself.
PG's net worth is between 2.5 and 10 billion... so, I wouldn't take him seriously. Normal people (like the majority ones around here) won't ever have the opportunities/skills/luck all combined at a given point in time to generate billions. So any advice from his side regarding money is simply misleading.
> and should a company decide not to use AI they will have a hard time retaining devs (and they will need more devs)
Need more devs? Why? If a company was being profitable just fine prio AI era, they will still be profitable if they decide not to use AI. Shipping crap faster is not a formula for success. Shipping quality faster? I prefer shipping quality at a good pace
>The difference this time is pace: you could delay adopting “the cloud” for a couple of years and survive. With AI you might get a few months.
I don't think so. Take a good company A (with a good product and a good pace of good features) of today. Take the extreme case they decide not to use AI at all. Well, they will still be shipping good features at their current pace.
No amount of AI will make a bad company ship a better product than A's. If any, bad/mediocre companies will be pushing crap faster than they did before, but that's it.
AI can make good companies better, but cannot make bad companies good. Why does company A need to worry about shitty companies using AI? Sure, other good competitors could be using AI, but all in all, shipping "faster" is not the "mark" of good quality
In theory, ofc. But that doesn't matter. If you were doing something that took 2 days in average, but you were doing it in half the time, then that was fine pre LLMs. Nowadays your manager knows that with LLMs you need to deliver faster no matter what, and then it's more difficult to "hide" and to slack.
So, regarding the productivity argument: I don't get it. It doesn't really matter (for regular employees) that you can do now in 2h what before it took 2 days. Why? Because it's not that you have the rest of the day for yourself. You still have to work 8h/day as usual. But now the pattern is different: instead of enjoying the craft digging deeper into problems in the span of 2 days, now you are rushing into some slot machine with the hope of it giving you the right answer with the right prompt.
So, if any, I would say it's worse for us. Obviously, it's the completely opposite situation for corporations and executives: they are loving the AI situation so much!
I'm not sure. Engineers could still develop software the old way, you know taking months to deliver something like, let's say, Obsidian? Or Ghostty? Taking care of every single line of code, of dependencies, of good architecture. Truly the old way. And if the product is good it will succeed.
> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track.
But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.
This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading this thinks they are in top the 10-5% of their company/city/country, and therefore they think they are not "mediocre" engineers that can get affected by the introduction of LLMs. Statistically, they are probably wrong. So, it's all about ego. Chances are you are not a rockstar and LLMs will eventually take over your job.
As usual, the only winners here are corporations and executives. Most of us are the last monkeys in the chain, and so we'll get screwed.
For me the advantage is simplicity. I pick up the book and I read it. No matter where or when, I know I can read it. If the book gets damaged, I pick up another book, I don't mind.
The problem with digital books is that I need 3 different things working together: 1) a (charged) reading device, 2) corresponding software, 3) the actual digital book.
So the reading device can be put in unmaintained mode any time by the company who sells it. That sucks. Same goes for the corresponding software, although in this case I have more flexibility sometimes (i.e., I can install some open source software... but that's a hassle in itself). As per the actual digital book, don't get me started with DRM. One can pirate books, though, but then some people have ethical considerations.
I typically buy second-hand books. It's the best deal for me because I don't have the feeling to be super protective with them, and they are very cheap.
So, the hardest thing for me would be to leave my job and focus all my time in starting my own business. Leave friends and family behind to put all my effort on it. Is it worth it? No.
Agree. Have worked in a codebase using Temporal, and is pretty much a nightmare. I don't know about the infra side, but from the developer side, all the abstractions they bring to the table are poorly designed. Wouldn't recommend
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
I'm all for open models, open source agents, etc. I don't want to give more power to the big corps, though. Imagine what software engineering could become in 5 years if all thse big corporations gain even more power over us. It's a terrifying scenario (e.g., pay more so we don't show you ads in between claude code prompts; pay more so that the produced code doesn't incrust ads in your app...). Do you really want the same shitty experience we have now in the global internet, but deeply ingrained in your software engineering workflows?
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)