If I could tell myself something at 16 it would be: Do what you want. Not what others want of you. Go after what you want, regardless of whether you think it will work out, or make you rich, or make your parents happy, or make your friends happy, or what religion says you "should" do, or what anyone says you "should" do.

But sure, make the kids even more depressed by telling them they need to learn how to build an LLM so they can get a job working themselves to death to make Paul and friends rich.

Manager: Why is the site down!?

Engineer: Because it can’t handle this level of traffic. We can rate limit to the level we can handle to keep the service running.

Manager: Okay, let’s do that!

Engineer: Okay. Rate limiting at N req/min.

Manager: I’m getting complaints we’re denying service to customers!? We can’t rate limit our users if they want to use it. Increase the rate limits.

I’ve had this conversation more than once in my career.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49311197

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Everything between instruction and working preview will collapse into the ADE. The engineer will shape working software by instructing an LLM, and be able to interact with the working software as it is developing. Reading code will be done rarely as part of debugging or analysis. Agile, product-focused companies are already operating like this.

However, the speed of software delivery will remain capped at the speed of intra-organization coordination. In other words, you can't deliver software faster than you can have meetings, handoff work, and make decisions. "Alignment" in corp-speak is already the bottleneck at 90% of companies. This is also why most companies will not be able to adapt. They can't ship faster as long as they keep product managers, meetings, and hierarchy between the builders and sellers. IMO this is why most alpha in the next decade will be had by remote senior engineers who only show up to meetings and alignment and otherwise automated everything else (already happening). That won't last forever as the AI-first, product-led organizations are going to eat everyone's lunch on a longer time scale (e.g. the one-person billion-dollar company people talk about).

Just my 2cents.

Coworkers all use it. For what I don’t know. None of them were hired from there.

Ambitious goals and new discoveries happen via novelty-based search. Progress in scientific discovery is measured by how different/interesting the outcomes are, not by closeness to a predetermined goal.

Discovery is a creative search that preserves optionality, whereas optimization restricts optionality. In other words, you usually don't discover anything novel unless you're trying new things that don't appear connected to the goal in the first place. Would an ML optimization loop have discovered transformers?