If you assume that LLMs are about to make software development a dead-end, then the best answer to keep a good income is to ride the wave. Do nothing and get left behind, embrace it and maybe you'll find a new niche.
Maybe AI will finally be the tool that allows us to get rid of some of the people we have who do nothing more than push paper around. Maybe. But somehow I doubt it, at least not in a typical big corporate environment. And I have zero concern about us letting actual software devs go. Things will have to change pretty dramatically before we get that far.
You mean the middle management? I have been in environments where they were almost literally made up of pencil pushers. Wouldn't be too sad to see them go. Only half joking, but it is written in jest.
Nope, just people who basically swivel chair information from one place to another. Useful in some way, should have been automated a long time ago, and yet persist.
But yes, middle management would qualify ;-). My manager seems spooked by LLMs. Loves to use them to write his emails, but seems to internalize that since they're doing his job for him at this point, his boss may figure it out.
I figured, just wanted to verify, because while the former seems like the obvious answer, it could be argued with a straight face that Apple's strategy is in fact the latter. Or something like it.
Agreed. Nobody really talks about most other countries, while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic. So we're constantly a target.
> while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic
s/is/was
The US is trying really hard to lower its position on these lists. The US has not been near the top of reading/writing/arithmetic in a long time. The US is undoing a lot of federal regulations by eliminating/reducing agencies meant to regulate things like EPA, FDA, Dept of Education.
Is this really pervasive? E.g. To my knowledge the "AI" enhancement that iPhones do automatically is limited to the usual sorts of post-processing for contrast, color, etc. There is an AI editing mode that leans more into generative fill capability that would be analogous to the Samsung incident but I don't think it's happening automatically to every photo you take.
> The towing numbers are always higher in Europe than US too, despite being the same cars (as far as I know).
Mostly due to differences in environment, AFAIK. Americans drive faster, and towing instability seems to increase with the square of the speed. Also, most travel trailers in the US wouldn't be car-towable anyway, because we have expectations on amenities and size that are predicated on using at least a half-ton pickup for the tow vehicle. Trailers with the compromises needed to be towed European-style aren't popular, so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
5 more years? That’s quite pessimistic, given how much evidence we have that LLM coding has as much of a long tail problem as any other tech we’ve created.
I feel blessed to have been married throughout the entire Covid experience and since. I tried remote work a couple times when I was in my 20s, and it was awful. It took a surprisingly short amount of time before I was going a bit nuts. Talking to myself a lot, making noise just to make noise, etc. Turns out I need the interaction.
Covid was a breeze because my wife works from home and I have two kids. So I'm not lacking for someone to interact with. And lest I fall into the trap of thinking that it's also because I'm just past 50 now, I occasionally get proof that I'd be just as screwed today. Like the last couple days -- my wife went on a trip for a few days, and my kids are in high school, so I have had the entire work day to myself. If it were all meetings, I'd probably be okay. But Thursday and Friday were both quiet, no meetings, just getting stuff done. And I found myself whistling, singing, making noise, and getting a little punchy by the end of the day when the kids came home.
Some people just aren't cut out to be isolated. People might accuse me of seeming like a loner, and I kind-of-sort-of am in a way, but I do need social interaction pretty regularly.
Yeah. My wife doesn’t work and I have worked from home since pre-COVID. We had a 1 and 2 year old during covid and it was ridiculously convenient in many ways. Very lucky timing for us.
One thing I love about WFH is that I have more time to be friends with people I want to be friends with on my terms. Work colleagues can remain colleagues.
Some people will have different struggles and deal with it differently, for sure. It’s probably not for everyone. It’s definitely for some people.
I'm using Claude Code at this moment to do some work for me. It's doing a pretty great job, if I'm being honest. It's going faster than I would, overall, but it's not some kind of 10x magic. It does things faster and in some cases better on the first shot, but it misunderstands and needs guidance on plenty of things, tweaks, etc. Even if I don't necessarily tweak the actual code and just ask Claude to go clean up it's shit, that still takes time.
I think the folks who say 20-40% faster is typical are definitely in the right ballpark. And that's best case. There are plenty of times where my biggest blockers are not anything Claude will ever be able to fix.
Maybe the result of this whole experience will be grudging appreciation from management that software developers aren't just coders. Maybe. I'm an optimist, though. And my manager already knew that.
For me, one of the big improvements is the ability to legitimately work via text message. That probably sounds dystopian in a bunch of ways to some people. But there are times that I want to work, but couldn't, previously.
Now I can work from wherever, whenever, by speaking into my headphones, and have it persist. Sure, I want to be in front of a screen to do final syntax review, but I don't mind planning out architecture and guiding an LLM towards a cohesive result while going for a walk or jog. That's just not a workflow that would have been viable 3 years ago.
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