Comment by brandonmenc
1 day ago
I admit to pangs of this, but it's really never made any sense because the implication is that the profession is now magically closed off to newcomers.
Imagine someone in the 90s saying "if you don't master the web NOW you will be forever behind!" and yet 20 years later kids who weren't even born then are building web apps and frameworks.
Waiting for it to all shake out and "mastering" it then is still a strategy. The only thing you'll sacrifice is an AI funding lottery ticket.
Finally a voice of reason. The tools will just get better and easier to use. I use LLMs now, but I'm not going to dump a bunch of time learning the new hotness. I'll let other people do that and pickup the useful pieces later.
Unless your gunning for a top position as a vibe coder, this whole concept of "falling behind" is just pure FOMO.
Same. I only just started using agents a few months ago.
Earlier this year the ecosystem was still a mess I didn't have time to untangle. Now things are relatively streamlined and simple. Arguably stable, even.
I feel behind, sure, but I also don't think people on the bleeding edge are getting that much more utility that it's worth sinking dozens or hundreds of my very limited hours into understanding.
Besides, I'm a C programmer. I'll always be several decades behind the trend. I'm fine with that.
Doing small project for customer. They have explicit instructions that I can't even use some unapproved AI... So well they are paying. So until it is actually forced I see no pressure to move there.
And rest of my field. Automated tools do part of work. AI probably some, but not enough of actually verifying findings and then properly explaining the context and implications.
Yeah Karpathy is engaged here in more hype creation. Software engineers pretending they just smashed some particles together and there is a whole lot of new data to math out.
It's high dose copium. Please keep the good times rolling! Buy my books! Sub to my stack!
Meanwhile, with local models, local RAG, and shell scripts, I am wandering 3D immersive worlds via a GPU accelerated presentation layer I vibe coded with a single 24GB GPU. Natural language driven Unreal engines are viable outputs today given local only code gen.
Karpathy and the SV VC world thought this would be the next big thing to pump for a decade plus; like web pages and SaaS. But the world is smarter, more adept at catching up that it is just state management in a typical machine. The semantics are well known and do not need re-invention.
The hilarity at an entire industry unintentionally training their replacements.
Yeah that's my view too. It's definitely fine to wait a couple of years (at least), and see what emerged as most effective and then just learn that, instead of dumping a ton of time now into keeping up with the hamster wheel.
Unless you're in web dev because it seems like that's one of the few domains where AI actually works pretty well today.
Or if you like learning new stuff. Personally that has been best part of being programmer.
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> Unless your gunning for a top position as a vibe coder, this whole concept of "falling behind" is just pure FOMO.
???
The person you're quoting has a point. Everyone is losing their minds about this. Not everyone needs to be on top of AI developmemts all the time. I don't mean you ignore LLMs, just don't chase every fad.
The classic line (which I've quoted a few times here) by Charles Mackay from 1841 comes to mind:
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
"[...] In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
— Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
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And here I am partying (coding) like it's 90s (C++ desktop apps) and web never happened... :)
It's pretty nice that C has garnered such hate because there's apparently very little focus on getting LLMs to write good C. It's all Rust and Python and whatever this month's fad language is. LLM fans mostly leave us alone apart from the "C bad rewrite the world in rust" crew.
I'm very happy being decades behind the curve here. C's slowness is perfect for me.
You’re the real unicorn!
If anything I'd expect all these tools to be easier for new engineers to adopt, unburdened by how things were before.
> unburdened by how things were before.
What burden are you talking about? Using LLMs isn't that hard, we have done harder things before.
Sure, there will be people that refuses to "let go" and want to keep doing things the way the like them, but hey! I've been productive with vim (now neovim) for 25 years and I work with engineers that haven't mastered their IDEs at the same level. Not even close!
Sure, they have have never been "burdened" by knowing other editors before those IDEs existed, but claiming that I would have it harder to use any of those because I've mastered other tools before is ridiculous.
Not sure how to address this without just restating TFA. Not all change builds on existing knowledge, and sometimes it is so rapid that keeping up is difficult.
Absolutely agree.
I took this approach when the Kubernetes hype hit and it never limited my prospects.
People did say that in the 90s. Hence the rush to put everything on the web, whether there was any real business case for it or not. And most of it went up in flames at the end of that decade.
This argument only makes any sense at all because the demand for software developers continually grew.
As long as more software developers are needed your logic obviously holds, it is irrelevant whether you are a master. There are enough jobs for "good enough". But what if "good enough" is no longer a viable economic niche? Since that niche is now entirely occupied by LLMs.
Eh, for myself as a middle-aged software engineer, it feels a little like the last chopper out of Saigon. I feel less and less confident that I can make as good a living in software for the next decade as I have for the last couple. Or if I want to. The job is changing so fast right now, and I’m not sure I like it. When I worked in big tech, I preferred being an IC over an EM or tech lead because I like writing code. Now it feels increasingly like you can’t be an IC in that way anymore. You’re now coding through others, either humans or AI.
Sure, I can write code manually, but in my case I’m working full time on my own SaaS and I am absolutely faster and more effective with AI. It’s not even close. And the gains are so extreme that I can’t justify writing beautiful hand-crafted artisanal code anymore. It turns out that code that’s “good enough” will do, and that’s all I can afford right now.
But long-term, I don’t know that I want to do that work, especially for some corporation. It feels like the difference between being a master furniture craftsman, and then going work in an IKEA factory.
You'll make more money than ever cleaning up AI generated messes.
I had few projects like that this year and I can say it how messy and demotivating its to cleaning up mess.
And its actually not well paid because client now has the expectation that mostly everything is now done, you have to just only fix few things and you even have AI at your disposal so expect that you just write a better magic prompt.
I think actually often its faster and cheaper to start from scratch or at least rewrite whole module (of course still with AI with just better vibe engineering rather than vibe coding).
It's similar with house renovation - often its just cheaper and faster to tear whole building down rather than fixing it.
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I greatly respect your opinions here but I really doubt that would ever happen.
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First, I’m highly skeptical of that, especially over the course of the next decade.
Second, do you actually want to do that work? I don’t. I spent years working as a freelancer and I cleaned up a lot of shitty code from other freelancers. Not really what I want to spend my 50s doing.
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What I like to say is that writing software is getting so easy that I don't know how to do it anymore.
Tell that to recruiters! If you're senior you're always expected to know everything.