Comment by darkwater
5 months ago
With the basic and enormous difference that the feedback loop is 100 or even 1000x faster. Which changes the type of game completely, although other issues will probably arise as we try this new path.
5 months ago
With the basic and enormous difference that the feedback loop is 100 or even 1000x faster. Which changes the type of game completely, although other issues will probably arise as we try this new path.
That embeds an assumption that the outsourced human workers are incapable of thought, and experience/create zero feedback loops of their own.
Frustrated rants about deliverables aside, I don't think that's the case.
No. It just means the harsh reality: what's really soul crushing in outsourced work is having endless meetings to pass down / get back information, having to wait days/weeks/months to get some "deliverable" back on which iterate etc. Yes, outsourced human workers are totally capable of creative thinking that makes sense, but their incentive will always be throughput over quality, since their bosses usually give closed prices (at least in what I lived personally).
If you are outsourcing to an LLM in this case YOU are still in charge of the creative thought. You can just judge the output and tune the prompts or go deep in more technical details and tradeoffs. You are "just" not writing the actual code anymore, because another layer of abstraction has been added.
Also, with an LLM you can tell it to throw away everything and start over whenever you want.
When you do this with an outsourced team, it can happen at most once per sprint, and with significant pushback, because there's a desire for them to get paid for their deliverable even if it's not what you wanted or suffers some other fundamental flaw.
1 reply →
>If you are outsourcing to an LLM in this case YOU are still in charge of the creative thought.
The meetings will continue regardless. Those meetings aren't purely there for productivity reasons. It's the incentives for middle managers and directors and whatnot.
Its just that all that throughput of an outside team is pushed onto you and 0-3 more engineers. You will optimize accordingly for your job and get something out to satisfy their demands. Likely sacrificing quality in the process. It's not different domesticating the outsourcing.
And that's fpr now. Maybe in decades' time the engineer is extinct and it's simply cheap scriptors who run it.
It doesn't have to be soul crushing.
Just like people more, and have better meetings.
Life is what you make it.
Enjoy yourself while you can.
12 replies →
Not really, its just obviously true that the communication cycle with your terminal/LLM is faster than with a human over Slack/email.