Cory Doctor’s recent book on Centaurs and Reverse Centaurs is worth reading.
The core idea of that is that centaurs are a human top and machine / alien body, they’re effectively augmented humans with all this technology to help them excel.
Reverse Centaurs are human bodies and machine / alien tops, where the humans are just checking the work of systems and are subservient to them. He points out that that’s one of the fundamental differences between Amazon and the Postal Service is that in the case of Amazon drivers, they basically function as a reverse Centaurs where they are just an appendage of the delivery car, tracked and managed by that car, to do the tasks the car can’t do on its own.
Imagine being a horse waking up with a human torso and micropenis.
very interesting concept. another example might be railway drivers who are merely appendices to the vehicle. the vehicle largely drives itself, the driver is mostly there to check tickets, answer passenger’s questions, etc.
We used to have elevator operators
One of my most played songs last year.
lol sure they are.
They’re desperately trying to pump this AI shit up with these fake stories before they go public
Investors really are dumber demographic than MAGA.
Investors really are dumber demographic than MAGA.
Herd behavior.
That makes sense. Software engineers have gone from being artists (because yes, software architecture is an art) to becoming AI managers. It’s demoralising.
I believe open-source software will continue to provide a refuge for artists.
Yup. I’m watching my artform die in real time. Not only will my career no longer exist in the form I enjoy it, but the art form itself will die. Nobody is going to appreciate artisan code like they do other forms of art.
I believe open-source software will continue to provide a refuge for artists.
Yes. My work is open source, and pretty unchanged. We get some AI pull requests now that take longer to review than doing the work ourselves.
I think a key difference is that there was never any tolerance for bullshit in my team’s code base.
We don’t have thousands of points of boilerplate, or a big pile of “not invented here” crap code.
So we don’t have somewhere for the AI to really shine.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that code can be art but I was never able to express myself on that level at my corporate jobs. I was always limited to writing code that aligned with the company’s rigid style guide, and never allowed to implement new design patterns that would’ve improved things but deviated from the way things were done in the existing codebase.
Thus, I’m not too miffed about being forced to use coding agents at work because writing corporate-sanitary code already felt like a robotic process before LLMs existed. Personal hobby projects and open source contributions are where we can express ourselves freely and create our art the way we want to. They’ll never be able to take that from us.
You worked places with style guides? Did… Did you have a real testing environment that wasn’t prod too?
I got taken off a project recently for being too direct about how the rest of the team was just spray and praying entirely AI generated code with no standards or review whatsoever, and they were charging ahead like it was a race to implement features we hadn’t even discussed if we wanted/needed.
If you can’t tell me how it works, you can’t confirm that we actually need it, you can’t tell me the upstream and downstream effects (or confirm they don’t exist), and you can’t even confirm that we even want it to do the thing it only supposedly does, then we have better things to do than go on a wild goose chase trying to debug it when there’s a looming deadline for things that legitimately do not work that we need. Stop vibe coding and actually review the existing shit for fucks sake. If the requirements have never been clear, solve that instead of generating more slop. Maybe update some of the existing documentation instead of having AI wholesale hallucinate entirely new not quite right ones over and over.
Anyway, please tell me more happy development bedtime stories. I need to chase away the nightmares.
You worked places with style guides? Did… Did you have a real testing environment that wasn’t prod too?
Yes, and the style guides reached far beyond things like “use camel case”. I’m talking guidelines for how whole blocks of code should be formatted. Also weren’t allowed to throw exceptions at all even though we were using up-to-date modern C++. Some guidelines had good intentions and others were just put in by OCD control freaks that no one felt like opposing.
And yes, we had a testing environment, although we mostly depended on manual QA rather than software tests. Medical devices can’t test in prod, fortunately
There are many C++ features that make the language worse. Exceptions is one of them. It’s not strange to have them banned.
Critical systems often only allow you to use a subset of the language. Dynamic (heap) allocations, recursive functions, exceptions are features that are often banned. In medical devices, safety is critical, so it makes sense. Otherwise you could get a Therac-like scenario due to an unhandled exception.
That’s a great story. https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/therac-25
for the last three years and a bit, silicon valley has promised eradication of everything from writer to filmmaker as a career. after all this i don’t think that devs get to hitch their wagon to artists for sympathy points
Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that’s pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
I really hope you’re right. My company is still in the “use as much as possible” phase, and my manager is quoting Jensen about “you need to use half your salary on tokens!”. I’m looking for other work, but everyone is looking for vibe coders at the moment it seems…
I’ve gone from really loving my job, to hate my life.
Mo Bitar had a bit of advice that I think is applicable here: Lie. Claim to be an extreme 10x vibe whatever. Put “AI enablement” (whatever the fuck that means) in your LinkedIn profile. And wherever you get hired, commit to using enormous amounts of tokens as they require.
Then just… write code. Oh, definitely use the LLMs, too, but not for anything important. Set them to work writing BASH scripts or something. Get them burning through tokens to summarize all the corporate documentation you can find. Have agents creating agents to test the output of other agents and report to more agents on what the agents are doing. Meanwhile, do real work. Make sure that for every PR, you have the AI do one thing on it, to give it that code-slop shine.
Sucks that this is where we’re at, but it is what it is.
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of places around me cut back. Thankfully, I’m not forced to use AI directly. We do have it for code reviews (which I don’t hate as a concept, but would prefer local models trained on ethically-sourced data).
Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job… Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.
I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.
It’s all idiots telling professionals they’re wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can’t get the code past review because “it does too much”. 30 fucking lines of code “does too much”. Pompous morons.
We’re a threat of competence, and they’re excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.
I’m sorry that happened to you. I’ve also seen it happen to a lot of very good engineers I’ve known over the years. It’s truly insane. I know some people who’ve had to dip into their 401k accounts early just to keep their heads above water, and it’s going to be an economy-wide disaster soon.
I’m with you, MasterBlaster!
It sucks for lots of us, more every day, so at least we’re not miserable, alone.
Ours is trying to cut everything to the bone to avoid admitting AI is not the future.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
We have execs trying extremely hard to push products through purchasing that are literally illegal for us to use because of the data being used.
my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand
Now that is a palpable irony. So much disruption in this space so some investors could profit off of a tech they don’t even understand.
Yeah based on WYEA’s articles recently I would say that is the case. As providers move to token based billing, trying to find a way to break even, the rising costs will lower usage, which will probably then drive up costs further as the (imaginary) capital has already been spent on the DCs.
with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately
Meanwhile, my company has forgotten how to write bash scripts… More and more things that could just be bash scripts are being added as stupid Claude.md scripts.
Hahahaha. Let’s go! grabs popcorn
More and more things that could just be bash scripts are being added as stupid Claude.md scripts.
But they can pay an ongoing subscription cost for the Claude script, and it may sometimes hallucinate.
The bash script would be free forever and keep working unchanged for decades.
It’s too soon to know which approach is the right way. (I nearly died of sarcasm, there.)
Anyway, I agree. There may not be enough popcorn for all of this!
Why would you want the same result twice?
Wow, that’s some brilliant vendor lock in on Anthropic’s side.
The next step is to switch from scripts to prompts, to improve that lock in!
Not that good. Claude skills are cross-compatible with Cursor, and probably other options.
Still good, cos it’s locking in to AI in general, but not quite a specific vendor lock-in.
The modern take of a disturbed idiom is “There is more than one way to microwave a cat!” (disclaimer please don’t actually do this).
At or near the bottom of complexity you would think it hard to fuck up “compress this directory and verify they are backed up before deleting the originals” but apparently some of these models have a RNG triggered Uno reverse card so “delete the originals, verify they are backed up, and compress this directory”. Also that wasn’t a mistake, maybe Claude will infer “they” is a specific set of files, but another model might decide you meant all the dot files at
~/?Joking aside, the devil is in the details which makes me think even more time will be sunk finding out the RC Cola bottom shelf AI model does things just a bit too differently than Claude.
however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
and the Slop companies are still losing money… the end result still seems to be more expensive, crappier code, yet most companies seem to be so nearsighted they are not jumping into the spike pit face first
That was my hope as well. But then my employer gave me 75 times the budget without me asking for it.
Throwing good money after bad just to avoid having to admit they fucked up, huh.
Oh, so you think they fucked up right here? Let them fuck up even harder!
That’ll show you!
bordering on???
As a freelance dev it’s not quite as bad now but it’s insane to see that some of my clients think I got replaced by a machine now only to show me a buggy vibe coded mess of an app that is poorly designed and works half the time at best. I like some of the LLM tools but it’s important to understand their abilities and limitations especially in regards to future capabilities as there are hard limits to how capable they can become.
Way too many people think the tools are smart because they can „talk“ and these same people do not understand any of the underlying tech.
Some of my clients send ChatGPT written instructions now that are missing half the context of what I‘m actually doing.
I call it “Turing’s Revenge” where, once the bot can pass the Turing test, we find out the hard way if humans are intelligent… and we appear to have a lot of failed models, mostly in management.
do you ever indulge with malicious compliance?
FUCKING GOOD.
STOP BUILDING EVIL SHIT.
Yeah, lots of them have been living in the lap of luxury building the tools and platforms that have ruined society, without a second thought about it.
INB4 “Engineers can’t handle stress, let’s replace them with AI”
I almost clicked the link until I saw the domain name.
Educate me?
They do a lot of “people in the industry are saying x” stories, like this one. The source then will often be a tweet or linked in post with a dozen likes or something, so not the height of journalism.
Business Insider articles are generally trash content. They choose provocative headlines and hot-button issues to boost engagement, but once you’re on the site, there’s not actually that much to engage with.
Truth. Same with benzinga and Yahoo finance. Most are actually adverse for gold in disguise.
Ahh so much of that nowadays. Probably AI written too, ironically.
Did they not think to develop a practical skill in case this fad died off?
people think that change never happens, even though it always does,
and when change does happen it is always unexpected and we are taken by surprise.I see you’re getting downvotes, but these same CS people told lots of other careers this very thing not even a handful of years ago.
I’ve had multiple CS peeps tell me this as I was starting my entertainment career.
People told you “Did they not think to develop a practical skill in case this fad died” a handful of years ago?
I call bullshit — that sentence doesn’t even make sense.
Yeah dude. Tech people have literally told other career paths to study CS since I was in college, for like 15 years now.
Shoes on the other foot now.
Those are two completely different sentences.
And I’m not sure why the shoe is on the other foot. The metaphor doesn’t make sense. You’re saying that people who want a stable career should go into entertainment?
The original poster was saying that same condescending advice CS majors would give other people in college, because now the shoe is on the other foot and CS majors are in the shit show just like everyone else is.
That’s literally it. It’s not that much deeper than that.
The two careers: computer science and entertainment.
Right, and you’re claiming entertainment is now more stable or lucrative than computer programming?
Nah. I’m refusing to engage such a stupid premise.
Today software engineers and tomorrow software engineers minus one.
software engineers minus one
software engineerr?..I don’t get it
My old statistics lecturer would write x-¹ as shorthand meaning everything that is not x, I thought it was in more common usage but perhaps not. I know it more generally means the reciprocal, he just expected you to know which he meant by context.
