Comment by yoyohello13
1 day ago
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.
I love learning new stuff, but for whatever reason the AI stuff doesn’t interest me. So I learn other stuff, only so much time in the day.
I like learning new stuff, but not if it's going to be completely obsolete in 6 months.
> 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
Thank you for the subtitles, it's not like I didn't understand the lingo, I just couldn't make sense of the implied meaning.