Neil HenningIt feels like collectively our industry is going through the five stages of grief at present with respect to LLMs.
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Yora@neilhenning That's not a real thing.
And seems to imply you think everyone using slop is inevitable.
@yora I think it depends on the progress this year and next but if you extrapolate out Claude’s 4.5 -> 4.6 progress then it is inevitable.
As someone who takes great pride in my code and being a coder this brings me no joy.
@neilhenning That's preemptive compliance.
toerror@neilhenning @yora I read that 4.6 uses around three times as many tokens ( i.e, electricity ) as 4.5... I also read elsewhere that claude is *massively* subsidised.
An interesting thread from users :
@neilhenning @yora heh i totally misunderstood. i thought the last stage of grief is you accept that gen ai sucks.
but i guess that would be more like sowing vs reaping.
havchr@neilhenning For sure - it is easy to accelerate into nihilism - we just gotta hold on to the value of creating things for the instrinsic joy creating things brings to us. Easier said than done though. Also, yesterday I had my first "sparring" session with claude so I am heading to acceptance after a long period of resistance. I did however feel how easy it was to test the suggestions and roll with it without internalizing the math. I am no math expert, so I want to learn/understand the code
@havchr yeah it’s fine to be a craft furniture maker in the age of IKEA. It just massively changes the landscape.
Alexandre Mutel@neilhenning I haven't been through those stages. Despite all the disruption this will cause, I recently landed on similar thoughts https://ghuntley.com/real
It's both exciting and daunting, but it really is a revolution, and I never thought I'd see this in my career. I'm trying to convince as many people in my company to embrace it. We have a few hardcore devs, but the rest are split between folks slowly adopting it and folks in stages 1-3 still refusing.
Software development now costs less than than the wage of a minimum wage worker
Hey folks, the last year I've been pondering about this and doing game theory around the discovery of Ralph, how good the models are getting and how that's going to intersect with society. What follows is a cold, stark write-up of how I think it's going to go down. The
@neilhenning Mastodon crowd is mostly in 1-3, so that I have to go back to x.com to talk about such topic, despite hating so many things there.
Bartosz Taudul@xoofx @neilhenning It's quite funny that the shit tier forced memes (stochastic parrot, etc) in effect only reinforce AI as something useful. Hey, I can have a more coherent human-level discussion with a computer program than with some of the people, who are literally only capable of parotting things they read on the internet. Sigh.
jrovirab@neilhenning Yeah, let's face it and accept it with optimism, though. LLMs are changing everything, but I think the American AI companies are still going to collapse and it will mostly be a local thing and a big diversity of models.
The Seven Voyages Of Steve@neilhenning I think I’ll oscillate between anger and depression a bit longer, for old times sake
@sinbad it provides fantastic toots on here for me to have a chuckle at at least!
gustav@neilhenning I wonder how it’ll turn out. While I think programmers will be in the loop for any moderately sized project (has there been any large project completely written by AI and a nontechnical person driving it?), I suspect that people like me that would rather change careers than adapt is going to have a hard time finding a job in the future.
Andre Weissflog@gustav @neilhenning I really wonder how this whole "create applications by writing a spec" will turn out in the long run, it sounds like a 1970's waterfall enthusiast's wet dream, but there's a reason that idea never quite worked.
I'm firmly on the "spec is code and code is spec" side of things, e.g. if your spec needs to be as detailed as the code implementing the spec you gain exactly nothing, because iterating on the spec will take just as much effort as interating on code.
@gustav @neilhenning ...I also wouldn't be surprised if we'll see examples of "I can replace your 1000 line specification for LLMs with those 10 lines of handwritten code" ;) Because architecture astronauts are gonna architecture-astronaut, no matter if a human bot or LLM is generating the source code for their grand ideas ;)
@floooh @neilhenning A (nonprogrammer) friend said his agents had written 5 million loc in 2 weeks as if it was a good thing. I suspect the future is going to get a lot more bloated. As with capitalism in general, efficiency and good solutions doesn’t matter as much as velocity and hype :/
@gustav @neilhenning it's a cycles thing, if I had 'believed the hype' in the 1990s (and would be 'carreer-driven') I would have gone full in on Java and databases which would have made for a very boring life ;)
Similar I hope that a younger me today would chose a different path than going full-in on LLMs. This sort of "industrialized software development" always sucked and will always suck.
@gustav @neilhenning ...maybe some young underground rebels will figure out absolutely breathtaking new ways to juggle AIs, similar to early punk, hiphop and electronic music used sampling, instead of using LLMs to generate the 1000th cookie-cutter CRUD application.
Not holding my breath though... but such a hypothetical counterculture would actually make me interested in the topic.
Cort@neilhenning My plan continues to be to avoid them 100% for as long as it is feasible to do so, and to quit (and eventually retire) as soon as it's not. So far so good.
Morten Hilker-Skaaning@neilhenning if you profit from stolen goods, you're a part of the crime. If the AI agents weren't based on stolen goods, it would be a whole other conversation. But relying on them essentially addicts you to crime.
@morten_skaaning @neilhenning "Don't copy that floppy!" ;)
...I'm not in the AI camp, but I find it utterly fascinating how the table has turned on copyright and "intellectual property".
Daniel Gibson@floooh @morten_skaaning @neilhenning
ask again once copyright has been fully abolished for everyone, not just for AI corporations
ask again once copyright has been fully abolished for everyone, not just for AI corporations
@Doomed_Daniel @morten_skaaning @neilhenning yeah exactly, I'll sit at the sideline and watch the copyright wars between the media companies and AI companies unfold... and if the whole concept of patents is going down with the copyright ship, the better :)