> what's fine to just learn enough to supervise, and what can honestly just stay AI's job

It depends what "fine" means. If your goal is to build more things quickly, LLMs can help. If you want something that is more complex than few-weekend project that is doing something bespoke, or things that others will work on, or that is in a critical area where defects kill the value or reputation, the less you will be able to lean on AI design. Simply put - if you don't develop a skill for determining quality, your projects will balloon in complexity until they grind to a halt, as I'm sure as you've seen as a director.

This opinion is not shared widely and certainly runs counter to LLM enthusiasts, but for your situation I think it might be more true than say an experienced developer who's seen things go wrong.

> Problem is anything I find is stale within months given how fast this moves.

My opinion is that this is an illusion from AI marketing. Prompt/context engineering is slippery because whats in and whats out day to day moves fast, but the actual practice of software is old. There are still quite relevant talks and books and resources from the 90s (nearly 30 years ago!) available. If you center LLMs and AI as the cornerstone of your practice, as almost all AI marketing would have you do, you will find it difficult to do anything, and you will forever be a passenger to LLMs - and as someone who uses them daily, you should trust them about as much as you trust a self driving car to navigate a dirt road.

I'd recommend a few short real actual books: The Pragmatic Programmer and Code Simplicity (Oreilly). They can help introduce you to the world of tradeoffs that is the core of building software.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49065171

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

But watching large software projects fail over and over again, even when craftsmanship is demanded, often times the only way that good stuff gets in is the unpaid heroics of developers passionate about the project, who want it to be good. There’s so… little space for that nowadays, because there is so little stability in people’s lives.

It is the same mentality in all of business rn, everyone is ruthless and doesn’t give a single fuck about consequences because they won’t be coming for another 2 years at least and people have a short memory

Mark had that aha moment that people would just freely give him their data, and had no idea how it could be used against them. He built his entire empire on being able to get away with things that if anyone actually looks at is morally reprehensible, extractive and manipulative. Now the promise of AI is they will control and rule over the productivity and power structure of the whole world via the internet if they can get away with it.

I do find that both porting and translation projects have a much higher signal given the ease of mapping to tokens, when there is a proven working source to refer to - the source itself provides the validation. In a new project, you don’t have that validation.

For me its as simple as watching how people talk, and seeing how in every single case whatever the next thing is, if you believe It, there is only ever justification of doubling down, doing more, going deeper, reducing any doubt. These are not scientists, they're business people and salespeople, and a few optimists having recently on paper solved all their worldly financial needs.

Even if one throws that aside, spending time exploring and building with the most state of the art LLMs is just as instructive. I'm watching the implementation - whats working is ML models trained on specific domains (not much different than 5+ years ago), and whats not working is a general model that humanity can let go to work on its own. Sit in front and observe ideas turn to the samey intellectual, high-syllable mush. Its productive, but not in any way that's promised.

I grew up in evangelical christianity, and to them the end of the world is just around the corner, the same way it has been since I was a small child and likely will be when we are all gone. This isn't science. This isn't hypothesis experiment record results. This is very expensive astrology, shiny rock collecting, ritualistic meaning-making and self-justification.

Yall, with your incredible wealth and resources you could do real good in this world and make society better, healthier, better educated, and the whole world more equal, just, and reduce the desperation and suffering. Reject the false and self-serving narratives that empathy doesn't matter, that altruism isn't "effective". You can change a person's whole life in a moment.

... recently, as in the last 10 years?

Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught. I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.

We don’t move fast and break things when the things are kids, you maniacs

I’d have to know less than I do about what capabilities LLMs have and don’t have.