Technology has absolute qualities. Not a fantasy.
Are you being paid to browse hacker news? Probl not, but here you are.
Maybe you never considered this, but programming for other reasons other than a salary is a possibility.
If those pesky programmers gave it all away, for free, what would be left for you to sell? In this case, would you leave technology? Would you go somewhere else and practice your selling there?
Can't we defend building for the sake of building?
Doing for the sake of having fun?
Maybe you would be left with nothing to sell, I understand, but that's fine for me. Sorry.
Maybe the old assistant was le classic formal system that could deterministically infer your location and search for nearby locations that matched the query, ranking by distance ?
Fortunately we are waaaay past this now, we just words words words words words words words
It is ironic that in the gpt-4 era, when we couldn't see much value in this tools, all we could hear was "skill issues", "prompt engineering skills".
Now they are actually quite capable for SOME tasks, specially for something that we don't really care about learning, and they, to a certain extent, can generalize.
They perform much better than in gpt-4 era, objectively, across all domains. They perform much better with the absolute minimum input, objectively, across all domains.
If someone skipped the whole "prompt engineering" and learned nothing during that time, this person is more equiped to perform well.
Now I wonder how much I am leaving behind by ignoring this whole "skills, tools, MCP this and that, yada yada".
Prompt engineering (communicating with models?) is a foundational skill. Skills, tools, MCPs, etc. are all built on prompts.
My take is that the overlap is strongest with engineering management. If you can learn how to manage a team of human engineers well, that translates to managing a team of agents well.
My answer is that the code they generate is still crap, so the new skill is in being able to spot the ways and places it wrote crap code, and how to quickly tell it to refactor to fix specific issues, and still come out ahead on productivity. Nothing like an ultra wide screen monitor (LG 40+) and having parallel codex or claude sessions going, working on a bunch of things at once in parallel. Get good at git worktree. Use them to make tools that make your own life easier that you previously wouldn't even have bothered to make. (chrome extensions and MCPs!)
The other skill is in knowing exactly when to roll up your sleeves and do it the old fashioned way. Which things they're good/useful for, and which things they aren't.
It will never change.
Managers will consider every stupid metric players push to sell their solutions.
Be it code coverage, extensive CI/CD pipelines with useless steps, "productivity gains" with gen tools.
The gen tools euphoria is stupid and will cease to exist, but before this was bdd,tdd,DDD, test before, test after, test your mocks, transpile to a different language and then ignore the output, code maturity, best practices, oop, pants in head oriented programming...
There is always something stupid on the horizon this is certainly not the last stupid craze
Every single metric inferred from code itself should be discarded.
Opinions derived from this metrics should be entirely discounted as well,they are doomed, no point in listening.
It's even worse once I realized what the company was. Of course they lead with the most BS metrics that could most easily be sold to some idiot exec to justify buying their product.
Create an automated tools that inserts comments and line breaks wherever it's possible.
Productivity multiplied by 10^23.
With humans being this stupid, I'm not that impressed they confused llms to human cognition. Maybe it truly is a replacement.
Is this like your belief? Transformers et al were invented by researchers with the explicit goal of surveillance and mass profiling? You think maybe that could have been an unintended effect of something/someone else? Or it's all the researchers fault?
i do not believe transformers were created by independent and autonomous researchers.
will not blame individuals, no. but yeah, pretty much, I maintain the original point.
if the question is what are the incentives in place and funding mechanisms to pursue such technology...surveillance and mass profiling. 'we want to serve YOU as well as we can, and we want to know what YOU stands for' kind of profiling and surveillance, not necessarily the all knowing god government kind.
... Who do you believe invented Transformers then? Not the authors of the paper? What leads you to believe so? I'm genuinely curious, as I've never heard someone claim this before, and would be very interested in hearing how you ended up with these ideas.
Will formal verification be a viable and profitable avenue for the middle man to exploit and fuck everybody else?
Then yes, it absolutely will become mainstream. If not, them no, thanks.
Everything that becomes mainstream for SURE will empower the middleman and cuck the developer, nothing else really matters. This is literally the only important factor.
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