Elon Musk is a walking talking advertisement for the dangers of social media rotting your brain. But now I'd like to talk to you about white genocide in South Africa ...
That sort of thinking needs to first and almost-entirely be directed at China, India and Africa, then we can talk about sustainability and what the West can do.
Have you been in the same industry as the rest of us? 90% of all developers out there in the wild create "legacy code very quickly" anyways, they too create "slop" before we coined the term "AI slop". This mythical "someone who is actually qualified in the problem domain" you mention is maybe 5% of the entire software development ecosystem. If you work with only those developers, you're extremely privileged and lucky, but also in a very isolated bubble.
If you work on meaningful tech projects, where tech is a real driver to the businesses and there are genuine challenges to overcome, then you can't afford slop.
I say that, but then it's true I have seen businesses be successful despite low quality of software. It turned out that for those businesses, the value wasn't that much driven by tech after all.
I'm a "backend" dev, so you could say that I am very very unfamiliar, have mostly-basic and high-level knowledge of frontend development. Getting this thing to spit out screens and components and adjust them as I see fit has got to be some sort of super-power and definitely 20x'd my frontend development for hobby projects. Previous to this, my team was giving me wild "1 week" estimates to code simple CRUD screens (plus 1 week for "api integration") and those estimates always smelled funny to me.
Now that I've seen what the AI/agents can do, those estimates definitely reek, and the frontend "senior" javascript dev's days are numbered. Especially for CRUD screens, which lets face it, make up most screens these days and should absolutely be churned out like in an assembly line instead of being delicate "hand crafted" precious works of art that allows 0.1x devs to waste our time because they are the only ones who supposedly know the ancient and arcane 'npm install, npm etc, npm angular component create" spells.
Look at the recent Tailwind team layoffs, they're definitely seeing the impact of this as are many team-leads and managers in most companies in our industry. Especially "javascript senior dev" heavy shops in the VC space, which many people are realizing they have an over-abundance of because those devs bullshitted entire teams and companies into thinking simple CRUD screens take weeks to develop. It was like a giant cartel, with them all padding and confirming the other "engineer's" estimates and essentially slow-devving their own screens to validate the ridiculous padding.
Your UIs are likely still ass. Pre-made websites/designs were always a thing, in fact, it's (at least to me) common to just copy the design of another place as "inspiration". When you have 0 knowledge of design everything looks the greatest, it's something you kind of have to get a feel for.
Frontend engineers do more than just churning out code. Still have to do proper tests using Cypress/Playwright, deal with performance, a11y/accessibility, component tests, if any, deal with front end observability (more complex than backend, out of virtue of different clients and conditions the code is run on), deal with dependencies (in large places it's all in-house libraries or there's private repos to maintain), deal with CI/CD, etc, I'm probably missing more.
Twcs layoffs were due to AI cannibalizing their business model by reducing traffic to the site.
And what makes you think the backend is safe? As if churning out endpoints and services or whatever gospel by some thought leader would make it harder for an AI to do. The frontend has one core benefit, it's pretty varied, and it's an ever moving field, mostly due to changes in browsers, also due to the "JS culture". Code from 5 years ago is outdated, but Spring code from 5 years ago is still valid.
My time spent with Javascript applications has thus far been pretty brief (working on some aircraft cabin interfaces for a while), but a lot of the time ended up being on testing on numerous different types and sizes of devices, and making tiny tweaks to the CSS to account for as many devices as possible.
This has been a while; perhaps the latest frameworks account for all of that better than they used to. But at that time, I could absolutely see budgeting several days to do what seems like a few hours of work, because of all of the testing and revision.
Other people are dumping on you, but I think you're getting at where the real 20x speedup exists. People who are 'senior' in one type of programming may be 'junior' in other areas -- LLMs can and do bridge those gaps for folks trying to work outside their expertise. This effect is real.
If you're an expert in a field, LLMs might just provide a 2-3x speedup as boilerplate generators.
It's difficult for me to make a good evaluation on this comment.
With the AI writing the UI are you still getting the feedback loop so that the UI informs your backend design and your backend design informs the UI design? I think if you don't have that feedback loop then you're becoming worse of a backend designer. A good backend still needs to be front end focused. I mean you don't just optimize the routines that your profiler says, you prioritize routines that are used the most. You design routines that make things easier for people based on how they're using the front end. And so on.
But how I read your comment is that there's no feedback loop here and given my experience with LLMs they're just going to do exactly what you tell it to. Hamfisting a solution. I mean if you need a mockup design or just a shitty version then yeah, that's probably fine. But I also don't see how that is 20x since you could probably just "copy-paste from stack overflow", and I'd only wager a LLM is really giving you up to 2x there. But if you're designing something actual people (customers) are going to use, then it sounds like you're very likely making bad interfaces and slowing down development. But it is really difficult to determine which is happening here.
I mean yeah, there's a lot of dumb coders everywhere and it's not a secret that coding bootcamps focus on front ends but I think you're over generalizing here.
This "anti-fascism" talk sounds all nice and noble. But we all know that actual left-wing extremists have taken over the term now and most members are terrorist-adjacent. The irony is that antifa and other such "anti-fascists" are way more fascistic than their hypothetical and currently non-existent "fascists".
> The irony is that antifa and other such "anti-fascists" are way more fascistic than their hypothetical and currently non-existent "fascists".
Ah yes, the non-existent fascists that:
1. Marched openly as neo-Nazis in Charlottesville (2017), chanting "Jews will not replace us," resulting in the murder of Heather Heyer
2. Organize under explicitly fascist banners like Atomwaffen Division, The Base, Patriot Front, Blood Tribe, Golden Dawn, CasaPound, etc., all of which self-describe using fascist or Nazi ideology
3. Attempted to overturn a democratic election on Jan 6, 2021, including coordinated efforts by elected officials to submit fake electors and pressure state officials to "find" votes
4. Advocate ethno-states and mass deportations, including prominent figures calling for the removal of citizenship, voting rights, or legal protections from minorities (see CPAC speeches, "remigration" rhetoric in Europe, AfD platform language)
5. Celebrate or inspire political violence, from the Christchurch, El Paso, Buffalo, Halle, and Oslo attackers, all of whom explicitly cited fascist or white supremacist ideology in their manifestos
6. Promote leader-worship and elimination of dissent, e.g. calls to jail journalists, dissolve independent courts, criminalize opposition parties, or rule "by decree" (explicit in Hungary, echoed rhetorically elsewhere)
7. Attack independent media and academia as enemies of the nation, while advocating state control or punishment for ideological non-compliance
8. Receive normalization or support from sitting politicians, including endorsement, retweets, pardons, or refusal to condemn clearly fascist groups when given the opportunity
Calling this non-existent requires either ignoring explicit self-identification or redefining fascism so narrowly that only a 1930s uniform and a written and signed oath counts. But that definition isn't what any serious person would dare to bring to a discussion.
Meanwhile, "antifa" is not a party, not a centralized organization, has no manifesto, no leadership, no unified program, and no plausible path to state power. Are there idiots who claim the label antifa? Sure. But there are idiots in literally every subset of the population. Conflating street-level illiberal behavior with an actual authoritarian nationalist movement collapses basic political distinctions however.
Well, considering TFA, it would be pretty strange if I did!
My point was it's silly to rely on a slow, expensive, unreliable system to do things you can do quickly and reliably with ten lines of Python.
I saw this in the Auto-GPT days. They tried to make GPT-4 (the non-agentic one with the 8k context window) use tool calls to do a bunch of tasks. And it kept getting confused and forgetting to do stuff.
Whereas if you just had
for page in pages: summarize(page)
it works 100% of the time, can be parallelized etc.
And of course the best part is that the LLM itself can write that code, i.e. it already has the power to make up for its own weaknesses, and make (parts of itself) run deterministically.
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On that note, do you know more about the environment they ran this thing in? I got API access (it's free on OpenRouter), but I'm not sure what to plug this into. OpenRouter provides a search tool, but the paper mentions intelligent context compression and all sorts of things.
Yes, but how far apart will the fracture be? For instance, Mac and Windows are further apart than Ubuntu and Fedora, despite both being fractures in the OS 'ecosystem' - it's far easier to be cross-platform between Ubuntu/Fedora than between Mac/Windows.
I would imagine because women are under-represented in this field, so naturally we have to weight gender over qualifications. It's just the way things are. I wish it wasn't and qualifications/ability played a 100% part in these decisions.
We're nearly-there. The humans then become the capital/resource to be acquired, not money.
That's why every country is somehow chasing that elusive "population growth". It creates more "things" to own, whether that be money by virtue of more people creating more money through economic activity or simply more people to claim as "yours" (for the elites/leaders).
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