8 ms·
“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude co
by sockgrant 10mo ago
“As a designer…”
IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first.
Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile.
I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I think the innovation is lagging in other areas. I don’t doubt they don’t yet have compelling AI tooling.
- ihaveajob 10mo agoI'm curious if you could share something about custom agents. I love Claude Code and I'm trying to get it into more places in my workflow, so ideas like that would probably be useful.
- verdverm 10mo agoI've been using Google ADK to create custom agents (fantastic SDK). With subagents and A2A generally, you should be able to hook any of them into your preferred agentic interface
- ambicapter 10mo agoI’m struggling to see how somebody who’s looking for inspiration in using agents in their coding workflow would glean any value from this comment.
- verdverm 10mo agoThey asked about custom Agents, ADK is for building custom agents (Agent SDK, not android)
- hagbarth 10mo agoIf you read a little further in the article, the main point is _not_ that AI is useless. But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth.
- NitpickLawyer 10mo ago> But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth. AGI is a lot of things, a lot of ever moving targets, but it's never (under any sane definition) "infinite growth". That's already ASI territory / singularity and all that stuff. I see more and more people mixing the two, and arguing against ASI being a thing, when talking about AGI. "Human level competences" is AGI. Super-human, ever improving, infinite growth - that's ASI. If and when we reach AGI is left for everyone to decide. I sometimes like to think about it this way: how many decades would you have to go back, and ask people from that time if what we have today is "AGI".
- hagbarth 10mo agoSam Altman has been drumming[1] the ASI drum for a while now. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is the vision he is selling. [1] - https://ia.samaltman.com/#:~:text=we%20will%20have-,superintelligence,-in%20a%20few https://ia.samaltman.com/#:~:text=we%20will%20have-,superint...
- xeckr 10mo agoOnce you have AGI, you can presumably automate AI R&D, and it seems to me that the recursive self-improvement that begets ASI isn't that far away from that point.
- HarHarVeryFunny 10mo agoWe already have AGI - it's called humans - and frankly it's no magic bullet for AI progress. Meta just laid 600 of them off. All this talk of AGI, ASI, super-intelligence, and recursive self-improvement etc is just undefined masturbatory pipe dreams. For now it's all about LLMs and agents, and you will not see anything fundamentally new until this approach has been accepted as having reached the point of diminishing returns. The snake oil salesmen will soon tell you that they've cracked continual learning, but it'll just be memory, and still won't be the AI intern that learns on the job. Maybe in 5 years we'll see "AlphaThought" that does a better job of reasoning.
- hollowturtle 10mo agoWhere are the products? This site and everywhere around the internet, on x, linkedin and so is full of crazy claims and I have yet to see a product that people need and that actually works. What I'm experiencing is a gigantic enshittification everywhere, Windows sucks, web apps are bloated, slow and uninteresting. Infrastructure goes down even with "memory safe rust" burning millions and millions of compute for scaffolding stupid stuff. Such a disappointment
- redorb 10mo agoI think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.
- hollowturtle 10mo agoChatGPT is... a chat with some "augmentation" feature aka outputting rich html responses, nothing new except the generative side. Cursor is a VSCode fork with a custom model and a very good autocomplete integration. Again where are the products? Where the heck is Windows without the bloat that works reliably before becoming totally agentic? And therefore idiotic since it doesn't work reliably
- layer8 10mo agoCiting AI software as the only examples of how AI benefits developing software, has a bit of a touch of self-help books describing how to attain success and fulfillment by taking the example of writing self-help books. I don’t disagree that these are useful tools, by the way. I just haven’t seen any discernible uptick in general software quality and utility either, nor any economic uptick that should presumably follow from being able to develop software more efficiently.
- xwolfi 10mo agoI made 1500 USD speculating on NVidia earnings, that's economic uptick for me !
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- muldvarp 10mo ago> IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. How are we building _for_ ourselves when we literally automate away our jobs? This is probably one of the _worst_ things someone could do to me.
- DennisP 10mo agoSoftware engineers been automating our own work since we built the first assembler. So far it's just made us more productive and valuable, because the demand for software has been effectively unlimited. Maybe that will continue with AI, or maybe our long-standing habit will finally turn against us.
- muldvarp 10mo ago> Software engineers been automating our own work since we built the first assembler. The declared goal of AI is to automated software engineering entirely. This is in no way comparable to building an assembler. So the question is mostly about whether or not this goal will be achieved. Still, nobody is building these systems _for_ me. They're building them to replace me, because my living is too much for them to pay.
- dasil003 10mo agoAutomating away software engineering entirely is nothing new. It goes all the way back to BASIC and COBOL, and later visual programming tools, Microsoft Access, etc. There have been innumerable attempts to do somehow get by without need those pedantic and difficult programmers and all their annoying questions and nit picking. But here's the thing: the hard part of programming was never really syntax, it was about having the clarity of thought and conceptual precision to build a system that normal humans find useful despite the fact they will never have the patience to understand let alone debug failures. Modern AI tools are just the next step to abstracting away syntax as a gatekeeper function, but the need for precise systemic thinking is as glaringly necessary as ever. I won't say AI will never get there—it already surpasses human programmers in many of the mechanical and rote knowledge of programing language arcana—but it it still is orders of magnitude away from being able to produce a useful system when specified by someone who does not think like a programmer. Perhaps it will get there. But I think the barrier at that point will be the age old human need to have a throat to choke when things go sideways. Those in power know how to control and manipulate humans through well-understood incentives, and this applies all the way to the highest levels of leadership. No matter how smart or competent AI is, you can't just drop it into those scenarios. Business leaders can't replace human accountability with an SLA from OpenAI, it just doesn't work. Never say never I suppose, but I'd be willing to bet the wheels come off modern civilization long before the skillset of senior software engineers becomes obsolete.
- lumost 10mo agoI think the question is whether those ai tools make you produce more value. Anecdotally, the ai tools have changed the workflow and allowed me to produce more tools etc. They have not necessarily changed the rate at which I produce valuable outputs (yet).
- awinter-py 10mo agocan you say more about this? what do you mean when you say 'more tools' is not the same as 'valuable outputs'
- colecut 10mo agoDo using the tools increase ROI?
- lumost 10mo agoThere are a thousand "nuisance" problems which matter to me and me alone. AI allows me to bang these out faster, and put nice UIs on it. When I'm making an internal tool - there really is no reason not to put a high quality UX on top. The high quality UX, or existence of a tool that only I use does not mean my value went up - just that I can do work that my boss would otherwise tell me not to do.
- elliotto 10mo agoUnder this definition, could any tool at all be considered to produce more value?
- lumost 10mo agono - this is a lesson an engineer learns early on. The time spent making the tool may still dwarf the time savings you gain from the tool. I may make tools for problems that only ever occurred or will occur once. That single incident may have occurred before I made the tool. This also makes it harder to prioritize work in an organization. If work is perceived as "cheap" then it's easy to demand teams prioritize features that will simply never be used. Or to polish single user experiences far beyond what is necessary.
- monkaiju 10mo agoAll I see it doing, as a SWE, is limiting the speed at which my co-workers learn and worsening the quality of their output. Finally many are noticing this and using it less...
- overfeed 10mo agoYour probably bosses think it's worth it if the outcome is getting rid of the whole host of y'all and replace you with AWS Elastic-SWE instances. Which is why it's imperative that you maximize AI usage.
- Capricorn2481 10mo agoSo instead of firing and replacing me with AI my boss will pay me to use AI he would've used..?
- overfeed 10mo agoNo one's switching to AI cold turkey. Think of it as training your own, cheaper replacement. SWEs & their line managers develop & test AI workflows, while giving the bosses time to evaluate AI capabilities, then hopefully shrink the headcount as close to 0 as possible without shrinking profits. Right now, it's juniors who're getting squeezed.
- whstl 10mo agoI don't think bosses are smart enough to pull this off.
- overfeed 10mo agoIncreasing profits by reducing the cost of doing business isn't a complicated scheme. It's been done thousands of times, over many decades; first with cheaper contractors replacing full-time staff, then offshore labor, and now they are attempting to use AI.
- a_bonobo 10mo agoI think that's also because Claude Code (and LLMs) is built by engineers who think of their target audience as engineers; they can only think of the world through their own lenses. Kind of how for the longest time, Google used to be best at finding solutions to programming problems and programming documentation: say, a Google built by librarians would have a totally different slant. Perhaps that's why designers don't see it yet, no designers have built Claude's 'world-view'.
- bgwalter 10mo agoIf you want to steal code, you can take it from GitHub and strip the license. That is what the Markov chains (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02724 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02724) do. It's a code laundering machine. Software engineering has a higher number of people who have never created anything by themselves and have no issues with copyright infringement. Other professions still tend to take a broader view. Even unproductive people in other professions may have compunctions about stealing other people's work.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoI'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.
- tmikaeld 10mo agoI’m in the same position, but I use AI to get a second opinion. Try it by using the proper models, like Gemini 3 Pro that was just released and include grounding. Don’t use the free models, you’ll be surprised at how valuable it can be.
- sanmon3186 10mo agoWhy would you wait for dust to settle down? Just curious. Productivity gains are real in current form of LLMs. Guardrails and best practices can be learnt and self imposed.
- bluefirebrand 10mo ago> Productivity gains are real in current form of LLM I haven't found that to be true I'm of the opinion that anyone who is impressed by the code these things produce is a hack
- lomase 10mo agoI just started a project, they fired the previous team, I am possitive they used AI. The app is full of bugs and the client will never hire the old company again. Whoever says is time to move to LLMS is clueless.
- lbreakjai 10mo agoHumans are very capable of creating bugs. This in itself is not a tell.
- signa11 10mo ago> IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. the jury is still out on that...
- voidhorse 10mo agoDid you read the essay? It never claimed that AI was useless, nor was the ultimate point of the article even about AI's utility—it was about the political and monetary power shifts it has enabled and their concomitant risks, along with the risks the technology might impose for society. This ignorance or failure to address these aspects of the issue and solely focus on its utility in a vacuum is precisely the blinkered perspective that will enable the consolidations of power the essay is worried about...the people pushing this stuff are overjoyed that so few people seem to be paying any attention to the more significant shifts they are enacting (as the article states, land purchase, political/capital power accumulation, reduction of workforces and operating costs and labor power... the list goes on)
- morshu9001 10mo agoYeah, I'll gladly AI-gen code, but I still write docs by hand. Have yet to see one good AI generated doc, they're all garbage.
- dr_dshiv 10mo agoAgree. I also wonder whether this helps account for why some people get great value from AI and some terrible value.
- morshu9001 10mo agoIt can also be bad if you're writing code in a tech island, with an abysmal codebase, or with weak AI tooling
- toenail 10mo agoThe AI docs are good enough for AIs, to throw them at agents without previous context.
- buu700 10mo agoIncidentally, I just spent some time yesterday with Gemini and Grok writing a first draft of docs for a complex codebase. The end result is far more useful and complete than anything I could have possibly produced without AI in the same amount of time, and I didn't even have to learn Mermaid syntax to fill the docs with helpful visual aids. Of course it's a collaborative process — you can't just tell it to document the code with no other information and expect it to one-shot exactly what you wanted — but I find that documentation is actually a major strength of LLMs.
- morshu9001 10mo agoThat use case works, I meant writing designs
- smoody07 10mo agoThis. Design tends to explore a latent space that isn't well documented. There is no Stack Overflow or Github for design. The closest we have are open sourced design systems like Material Design, and portfolio sites like Behance. These are not legible reference implementations for most use cases. If LLMs only disrupt software engineering and content slop, the economy is going to undergo rapid changes. Every car wash will have a forward deployed engineer maintaining their mobile app, website, backend, and LLM-augmented customer service. That happens even if LLMs plateau in six months.
- lomase 10mo agoCan you show something built with those tools. The only reply I have got to this question was: it created a sap script.
- elevatortrim 10mo agoI disagree. I think, as software developers, we also mostly speak to other software developers, and we like to share around AI fail stories, so we are biased to think that AI works for swe better than other areas... However, while I like using AI for software development, as also a middle-manager, it increased my output A TON because AI works better for virtually anything that's not software development. Examples: Update Jira issues in bulk, write difficult responses and incident reports, understand a tool or system I'm not familiar with, analyse 30 projects to understand which of them have this particular problem, review tickets in bulk to see if they have anything missing that was mentioned in the solution design, and so on ... All sorts tasks that used to take hours, now take minutes. This is in line with what I'm hearing from other people: My CFO is complaining daily about running out of tokens. My technical sales relative says it is now taking him minutes to create tech specs from requirements of his customers, while it used to take hours. While devs are rightfully "meh" because they truly need to review every single line generated by AI and type-writing the code is not their bottleneck anyway. It is harder to realise the gains for them.
- pigpop 10mo agoAs trite as it is, it really is a skill issue still due to us not having properly figured out the UI. Claude Code and others are a step in the right direction but you still have to learn all of the secret motions and ceremony. Features like plan mode, compact, CLAUDE.md files, switching models, using images, including specific files, skills and MCPs are all attempts to improve the interface but nothing is completely figured out yet. You still need to do a lot of context engineering and know what resources, examples, docs and scope to use and how to orchestrate the aforementioned features to get good results. You also need to bring a lot of your own knowledge and tools like being fastidious with version control and being able to write extremely well defined specifications and tasks. In short, you need to be an expert in both software engineering as well as LLM driven development and even then it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot by making a small mistake.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- insane_dreamer 10mo agoThat's because LLMs are optimally designed for tasks like coding, as well as other text-prediction tasks such as writing, editing, etc. The mistake is to project the same level of productivity provided by LLMs in coding to all other areas of work. The point of TFA is that LLMs are an excellent tool for particular aspects of work (coding being one of them), not a general intelligence tool that improves all aspects (as we're being sold).