My manager was non-technical, and so anytime he walked past my desk it appeared that I was hackin’ away. I had (and still do) have my terminal set up to be black background with bright cyan text.

A static amount of electricity may only be able to move the wings so much in a cold environment, right?

They got the application right, and began stumbling with the integration - created a developer account, got the API key, but in place of the applications URL, the had input “localhost:5345” and couldn’t get that to work, so they gave up. They never asked the tech team what was wrong, never figured out that they needed to host the application. Some of the fundamental computer literacy is the missing piece here.

I think (maybe hopeful) people will either level up to the point where they understand that stuff, or they will just give up. Also possible that the tools get good enough to explain that stuff, so they don’t have to. But tech is wide and deep and not having an understanding of the basic systems is… IMO making it a non-starter for certain things.

My GF has it set up on her iPad, phone, computer. App is on our TV and has no issues. We have Netflix at home. She’s non technical and hasn’t had any trouble once I gave her a login.

The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)

All hypothetical, but if compute + AI research continues at pace, in 5 years we should see extremely good local models.

I have ended up in the past being in a state of “don’t touch anything, it hasn’t broken in 6 months”. Then an update releases and I have to learn everything again. Beats paying 120 a month for whatever streaming services we would need.

I just don’t see how I could export 10x the work and have it properly validated by peers at this point in time. I may be able to generate code 10-20x faster, but there are nuances that only a human can reason about in my particular sector.

I’m now working in the backend, and SQL is a major requirement. Writing what I would call “normal” queries. I’ve been reaching for AI to handle this, pretty much the whole time - because it’s faster than I am.

I am picking up tidbits along the way. So I am learning, but there’s a huge caveat. I notice I’m learning extremely slowly. I can now write a “simple” complexity query by hand with no assistance, and grabbing small chunks of data is getting easier for me.

I am “reading, debugging, and maintaining” the queries, but LLMS bring the effort on that task down to pretty much 0.

I guarantee if I spent even 1 week just taking an actual SQL class and just… doing the learning, I would be MUCH further along, and wouldn’t need the AI at all. It’s now my “query tool”. Yeah, it’s faster than I am, but I’m reliant on it at this point. I will SLOWLY improve, but I’ll still continue to just use AI for it.

All that to say, I don’t know where the future goes - our company doesn’t have time to slow down for me to learn SQL, and the tool does a fine job - it’s been 1.5 years and the world hasn’t ended, I can READ queries rather quickly - but writing them is outsourced to the model.

In the past, if a query was written on stack overflow, I would have to modify it (sometimes significantly) to achieve my goal, so maybe the learning was “baked in” to the translation process.

Now, the LLM gives me exactly what I need, no extra “reinforcement” work done on my end.

I do think these tools can be used for learning, but that effort needs to be dedicated. In many cases I’m sure other juniors are in a similar position. I have a higher output, but I’m not quickly increasing my understanding. There’s no incentive for me to slow down, and my manager would scoff at the idea, really. It’s a tough spot to be in.

“There are 4 Rs in the word “burberrorrly.” Here they are highlighted: burberrorrly (positions 3, 6, 7, 9)”

Obviously not a real word, but perhaps the fundamental concept remains

Maybe for a non-dev it would be nice to submit a ticket and have it auto-fixed by an agent. But in the devs case, it feels like it would be faster to just do it manually.

Would be very interested to see whether it’s not just… regular LLM snowballing a paragraph into 12 pages of “technical design documents” and 10K lines of code. Not sure what kind of niche you’re in or what the business logic is, but it sounds to me like you’ve built a machine that… generates code you don’t need to look at??

Either way. A whole lot of words and sentiments that could have been inferred. People use the new tools, we feel they make us more productive (but by how much), and it’s scary because C suites are bearing down in FOMO.

I would have LOVED if they got some form of stats in here as to how much performance people are getting out of these. I’ve heard 100X, actually. I’ve heard 5X frequently. Some people think it slows us down. Nobody really knows, and I guess it depends on how you’re using it. I personally have said to my CEO that I feel 30-40% faster, though I hate to have numbers associated with it… these tools have been around for years now. 5X faster than… what? It’s just expected to learn the tools and use them where they help. I would love a consensus on actual, regular folk and how much more productive it makes them. I’m doubtful it’s north of 10X. 4-5X seems optimistic? Not sure.

At my company, it’s being essentially shoved down our throats - “be 5X faster, tomorrow, this guy on the AI podcast said this is possible!!” And if you aren’t using the tools to build some useless internal application, you’re looked at as a non-adopter.

It’ll be interesting to see where things go in the next year.

I use the code generation heavily in my day to day, though verification is a priority for me, as is gaining an understanding of the business logic + improving my skills as a developer. There’s a healthy balance between deploying 100% generated code and not using the tools at all.

It’s useful for research tasks, identifying areas I’ll be working in when developing a feature. However, this team has a gigantic backlog and there are TONS of things we are behind on, so it does feel like AI isn’t moving the needle for us, though it is helpful. I’d like to apply it in different areas, but my senior engineer is very anti-AI, so he doesn’t find the tools useful and is actively against using them. Like I said, there’s surely a balance…

I see us using / relying on them more in the future, due to pressure from above, along with the general usefulness of them.

I could be entirely wrong, but it feels like if AI were to get THAT good, the government would be affected just as much as the working class. We'd more likely see total societal collapse rather than the government maintaining power and manipulating / suppressing the people.

However, it’s worth noting the ingenuity surrounding the data. Solid article, and a lot of light bulbs went off over the years to get this tech to where it is today. Even though the tech is a black pit of despair.