MagicShel

Kinda sounds great. I was on a city-based discord server for about a year before I got bored and sick of arguing. I guess I'm technically still on it.

I made some friends. Almost had a couple face to face meets with the idea of exploring actual friendships, but he was more conservative-leaning than I (but very reachable) and kept getting into fights and leaving discord for bouts. He took the "suburbs are evil" crowd a little too seriously.

Not utopian, but having the geographical focus in common and knowing we could meet these folks face to face as we go about our days I think added an honesty and restraint to the interactions.

It also gives it sort of a community extension vibe without the douchebaggery of HOA Facebook groups or corporate bullshit of Ring neighborhoods.

That is a bit ... overblown. If you establish an interface, to a degree you can just ignore how the AI does the implementation because it's all private, replaceable code. You're right that LLMs do best with limited scope, but you can constrain scope by only asking for implementation of a SOLID design. You can be picky about the details, but you can also say "look at this class and use a similar coding paradigm."

It doesn't have to be pure chaos, but you're right that it does way better with one-off scripts than it does with enterprise-level code. Vibe coding is going to lead people to failure, but if you know what you're doing, you can guide it to produce good code. It's a tool. It increases efficiency a bit. But it also don't replace developers or development skills.

I'm torn. I wouldn't trust AI at all. But it could be entertaining.

Yeah, any AI with that much visibility into my life needs to be a locally run and personally controlled AI.

But frankly as much as I might like that for myself, I don't want it because then it'll be baked into work computers with the same set of circumstances except now you have to placate an AI for career advancement.

On the other hand, I just had an amazing idea for a n AI-powered USB device which emulates a keyboard but just does random SRS BIZNESS tasks like 16 hours a day. It'll find articles on the internet and graph all the numbers (even page numbers) in a spreadsheet. It'll create PowerPoints out of YouTube videos. It'll draft marketing materials and email them to random internet addresses. You'll be president of the company by the end of the month if AI has anything to say about it!

I was closing in on forty before I finally gave up on achieving that. I didn't even go back to school until I was nearly 30.

Now I'm 52 and I definitely won't get the salary boost (if any) for long enough to be worth the cost. And anyway I don't have any more time than I did at any other point in my career and that was the main factor for why I haven't. In fact, I've never worked harder or made as much money or frankly enjoyed myself as much as I have these past few months.

I have, over the course of my career, run into a few jobs that wouldn't consider you without a degree, but they were few and not even the best places to work in IT — looking really fucking hard at you guys, American automakers.

I don't gamble with money, only with lives.

Seriously though, I don't get the allure of sports betting. Or slot machines — which are just very expensive, very boring video games. You might win a couple of bucks, but the house just takes it right back. I'd rather put the same money into a pinball machine. It would take me longer to lose it and I'd have more fun and challenge.

That said, I thought the vote count looked skewed so I threw an upvote because I don't think the discussion in and off itself is bad. But no, I can't relate and don't care to change anyone's mind.

That's exactly the question, right? LLMs aren't a free skill up. They let you operate at your current level or maybe slightly above, but they let you iterate very quickly.

If you don't know how to write good code then how can you know if the AI nailed it, if you need to tweak the prompt and try over, or if you just need to fix a couple of things by hand?

(Below is just skippable anecdotes)

Couple of years ago, one of my junior devs submitted code to fix a security problem that frankly neither of us understood well. New team, new code base. The code was well structured and well written but there were some curious artifacts, like there was a specific value being hard-coded to a DTO and it didn't make sense to me that doing that was in any way security related.

So I quizzed him on it, and he quizzed the AI (we were remote so...) and insisted that this was correct. And when I asked for an explanation of why, it was just Gemini explaining that its hallucination was correct.

In the meanwhile, I looked into the issue, figured out that not only was the value incorrectly hardcoded into a model, but the fix didn't work either, and I figured out a proper fix.

This was, by the way, on a government contract which required a public trust clearance to access the code — which he'd pasted into an unauthorized LLM.

So I let him know the AI was wrong, gave some hints as to what a solution would be, and told him he'd broken the law and I wouldn't say anything but not to do that again. And so far as I could tell, he didn't, because after that he continued to submit nothing weirder than standard junior level code.

But he would've merged that. Frankly, the incuriousity about the code he'd been handed was concerning. You don't just accept code from a junior or LLM that you don't thoroughly understand. You have to reason about it and figure out what makes it a good solution.

Shit, a couple of years before that, before any LLMs I had a brilliant developer (smarter than me, at least) push a code change through while I was out on vacation. It was a three way dependency loop like A > B > C > A and it was challenging to reason about and frequently it was changing to even get running. Spring would sometimes fail to start because the requisite class couldn't be constructed.

He was the only one on the team who understood how the code worked, and he had to fix that shit every time tests broke or any time we had to interact with the delicate ballet of interdependencies. I would never have let that code go through, but once it was in and working it was difficult to roll back and break the thing that was working.

Two months later I replaced the code and refactored every damn dependency. It was probably a dozen classes not counting unit tests — but they were by far the worst because of how everything was structured and needed to be structured. He was miserable the entire time. Lesson learned.

Well, I mean, murder creates martyrs. Martyrs drive revolutions. By supporting a revolution, she is a terrorist. There is a certain shitty logic to it.

If you're writing cutting edge shit, then LLM is probably at best a rubber duck for talking things through. Then there are tons of programmers where the job is to translate business requirements into bog standard code over and over and over.

Nothing about my job is novel except the contortions demanded by the customer — and whatever the current trendy JS framework is to try to beat it into a real language. But I am reasonably good at what I do, having done it for thirty years.

If you get a good answer just 20% of the time, an LLM is a smart first choice. Your armpit can't do that. And my experience is that it's much better than 20%. Though it really depends a lot of the code base you're working on.

It was a vast improvement over expert sex change, which was the king before SO.

My first response is yes but it sucked.

But there is a more nuanced response that goes something like we have an obligation to all of our kids and to the point that his dysfunction made us unable to take care of our other kids either directly through time demands or by extension through exhausting us to the point where we couldn't care for ourselves and thus for them, you have to do a bit of triage.

Who do we have the greater obligation to, a 25 year old man or a 10 and 12 year old? Also he could have spread it around a bit, but he couldn't be honest with his dad or grandpa what he was going through. He expected us to all but kill ourselves so he could conceal what he was going through from people who wouldn't understand or would lose respect for him. He expected us to forsake obligations such as work and siblings, which could lead to loss of job and all the itinerant complications of that. That's all kinda bullshit, right?

Hell he was on our insurance, so losing our jobs would've directly harmed him in any event.