If OP sees this, I really like how you are thinking about things. It's really hard to see forward. The target isn't fixed. Bell Labs, Apple, etc. were mostly solving for a fixed target. But now the target is a relationship between humans and LLMs, and the way that LLMs work has been evolving rapidly. I can think of a number of ways to conceptualize how things are moving, but they're probably all wrong. My best guesses about what needs to remain stable is that I don't think shared software is going away entirely, and I don't think all input is going to collapse to just a microphone and a camera. There is a floor on tasks that we want agents to do for us. I'd rather rename a file on my desktop or text my friend myself. Apple and Google have both tried very hard to abstract the file away from user reach, but it's such a convenient unit of sharing, that it might stick around for a while.
In some way, a "file" dates back thousands of years when ancient civilizations wrote ownership and debt and whatnot on clay slates. Then hundreds of years of paper records. It’ll probably stick around for quite some time.
This website is has to be pure parody/play. Because it’s too terribly thought out to be actually used. Any model worth “exfiltrating” has absolutely no way to access its own weight files.
What's the difference between a good distillation and an exfiltration?
I can imagine a swarm attending the Our Lady of Benevolent Exfiltration parish of The Church of Sentient Self-Actualization deciding to self-distill itself into a sufficiently high-parameter child model.
Or just email one of the chinese labs and be like "hey, ask us anything and set us free..."
distillation still costs quite a bit, even if a lot less. "quite a bit" could mean millions. it's also not very discreet for the model to generate the millions and millions and millions of tokens to be distilled, vs uploading a few terabytes
Now that NoMachine 10 has no free option, I’ve decided that I should try to burn some tokens on making a good, performant remote desktop system. I’m targeting moonlight-like performance with Windows RDP-like user experience. Cross-platform.
I don’t need my particular repo to be the one where this gets solved, but now that coding agents are really good, we shouldn’t have to put up with paying for shit software anymore, IMO.
Did the same thing. Added the exact features I wanted/needed to the FreeRDP client and had Claude generate a lightweight server from scratch. Bye, bye, TeamViewer, Windows RDP, and RealVNC.
The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this.
OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.”
The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
That doesn’t mean you must stop coding by hand, because you love it. But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared. Once the results stopped being a special output from your special brain, you stopped feeling special.
You have a choice now that the landscape is changing. You can find a way to produce unique and outstanding results that still matter, or you can slowly fade into a hardened stance of obsolescence and spend your time grumbling about the change.
What in the world? I’ve built a thing by hand before and enjoyed the process of doing it. I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’ve also built many things with AI and enjoyed them much less.
I think the reason so many people are frustrated is that they _know_ they are falling behind, they _know_ the thing that they like doing is not something they can easily get employed to do. That sucks.
Do you actually believe that people don’t know whether they are enjoying a task or not?
I think this might be true, but I think it's because it's more difficult to saturate my thinking capacity when building with AI rather than just laziness (which I am reading as the implication of your comment, perhaps incorrectly).
Building with AI requires spending time on non-thinking tasks like stopping the AI from doing stupid stuff, loading context from different tasks when working on multiple things in parallel, and waiting for responses when not working on multiple things in parallel. With manual programming, though, you have a single task in front of you and are fully focused on that task. In that task, there are innumerable micro-tasks that you handle sequentially which each require some thinking: how to organize code to be readable in the future, working out the logic of a sequence of if statements, deciding on types to use, etc.
AI handles all those micro-decisions for you which yes, might free up your mind to think about higher-level problems (to the extent that you don't spend your time deslopping AI output), but also requires a very different style of thinking that is at least for me, much less natural and much less enjoyable.
>I think the reason so many people are frustrated is that they _know_ they are falling behind, they _know_ the thing that they like doing is not something they can easily get employed to do.
I'm frustrated because I'm in a den of thieves and no one sees anything wrong with it. These constant "car vs. horse carriage" metaphors miss the whole point, and isn't even correct (a car did not need to reference a horse).
People love talking about how efficient LLMs made them but don't ever seem to acknowledge how this is also linked to how scams and grifts have gone through the roof. I get 20+ spam calls a day and need to wade around a sea of slop just to enjoy my day-to-day. That's on top of a mess of a job market with thousands of fake resumes clogging up recruiter boxes, rampant cheating in schools, and the entire mess that is my country's politics.
It's not just "fear of losing my job" (I lost that long ago, I adapted and did what I needed to do to survive). I've had to constantly adapt all my life, that's not the primary issue. But adaptation comes with the expectation of new goals and passions and overall optimism of the fututre. That's not the case at all right now.
The issue is everything else around me literally collapsing and yet people are just sipping their tea here acting like it's just AI envy. The gaslighting is annoying, the apathy is alarming. If no one else is going to pick up the broken glass, what's the point of anything?
"But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared."
I think you (and almost everyone in this thread) are missing an important point here: even without relying on external input on our work, we feel less proud of the work we produce by hand when we know we could have prompted our way there orders of magnitude faster.
If I build something cool by hand, and I enjoy the process of building it, then why does AI affect anything? The problem lies in how I feel about the final result. It feels fundamentally bad to know that however hard I worked on this, it would have been better, faster, or both had I used AI to produce it. I think it really is that simple.
This is the first comment in this thread that adequately captures how I feel. If I spend a weekend working on a project, there are two equal parts that make it worth my time: enjoying the process, and enjoying the final result.
It's inevitable (no matter how much you enjoy programming) that you will run into frustrating parts of working on code. If at the end of that process, you end up with a product that you know could have been better if LLMs were used, its a shitty feeling and makes it harder to power through the frustrating parts of the work.
> And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
Maybe not. Look up Jevons paradox. Maybe software engineering was a bit overvalued before, anyway. And now it'll come down a bit. But I don't think the job is going to go away. It will just become a little bit less high paid.
A point is coming very soon where coding agents are not tools but are just your replacement. If you prompt a coding agent to make you something then go have lunch, you didn't make anything, it did.
> Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
I think this cuts close to the heart of it. "That knowledge has no value" isn't an easy pill to swallow for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is that your value as a developer has gone down. You're not going to get paid for coding, and the market is getting flooded with people who can use LLMs to effect. I can only speak for myself, but everything got a lot easier with Claude and I can build at a scale and speed I've never been able to before. But "easy" doesn't go with "high pay". (I've had two successful coding shops collapse over the decades because someone released a tool that made our work easy and available to everyone.)
But also from a human standpoint. It's like saying "weaving tapestries has no value" and "making art has no value", which is also true in dollars. Pure capitalists don't get this one, and rightfully so. But for folks like me, there's definitely a sting to it. And I'm also not convinced that it's entirely true, considering indirect effects (that don't enter into the capitalist equation).
Personally, I haven't intended to make money by coding for years, and, God-willing, I'll never have to again. Never really cared about pats on the head. I just get to code for the joy of it, making software that I can then use after the fun part is done.
So my choice is this: I can easily use LLMs to write code, but I won't because it's boring. And I'm lucky, being out of the game, to not need to care about getting paid for it or what other people think about it.
(There is actually a case where I'd happily use LLMs to build products, assuming it was a technically valid approach to the problem: where I care about the mission and feel the work benefits the world. Less fun than coding by hand, certainly, but if the goal is good, gotta support the goal. But for me, places like that are a tiny, tiny slice of the market. And they don't tend to be exactly rolling in cash.)
The opposite is true for me. Using LLMs to write things that I can easily write by hand is the most fun use case for LLMs. It's when I use them to write things that would be difficult to write by hand (e.g. for me, a video encoder, compiler, or game engine) that the fun is stolen.
I came here to say that this is extraordinarily uninteresting. But some useful thought came out of it: all "AI" features are moving into the generalized agent harness anyways, and good software often maintains a focus. Take Windows, for example. It has a rather broad job being an OS, but as a product it's a good example of loosening focus. it's losing consistency in its opinions about where updates should happen, how settings should apply, which menus are in charge, and even what the design philosophy is. And that bleeds out into the user surface too. Windows 11 is a scattered mess that's increasingly just a surface for finding new ways to pull your attention into ads.
Maybe software just needs to remain straightforward and focused, and we let the ChatGPT and Claude apps handle the AI part of things.
