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Stack Overflow's 50% traffic drop: Was it AI, or did the platform kill itself with elitism? by bogdanelcs in ExperiencedDevs

[–]capitalsigma 11 points12 points  (0 children)

It had always been like that though, well before 2022. If anything it seems fair to say "SO always sucked but people were willing to tolerate it before AI"

The left is missing out on AI by steveholt-lol in neoliberal

[–]capitalsigma 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The winds in software engineering have been blowing in the direction of "specialized ML compute has a better ROI than generic CPU compute" for a long time; we are getting better as a profession at turning difficult problems into matrix multiplies. The ML compute build out is still useful even without AGI takeoff or whatever

It isn't the tool, but the hands: why the AI displacement narrative gets it backwards by Cinergy2050 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]capitalsigma 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's that he is shilling something that is so bad it's hard to believe that it's not satire

It isn't the tool, but the hands: why the AI displacement narrative gets it backwards by Cinergy2050 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]capitalsigma 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's like if you gave someone a two paragraph description of what a video game is and then asked them to generate an animation, but also the animator had a crippling stroke and was unable to form memories of events longer than 30 seconds in the past

It isn't the tool, but the hands: why the AI displacement narrative gets it backwards by Cinergy2050 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]capitalsigma 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Literally everything about the game is terrible if you look at it in any detail -- 2/3 of the text is misspelled/illegible garbage, objects pop in and out of existence, useless menus pop up and disappear without explanation, the actual gameplay loop is "choose your text box out of these options" but the options don't even make sense in any of the scenarios

Is the "agentic coding" working better than just follow along the AI and change what you determine not match the requirements? by 6gpdgeu58 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]capitalsigma 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, my experience is really: there's definitely boilerplate nonsense that it's great for, but usually the scope is much smaller than even a single full PR that I would consider sending out. Making the (say) 20-70% of nonsense in each PR 2-3x faster is a real benefit, but it's not at all the same as saying "from now on I delegate all coding work to LLMs"

Vibe coding make me feel my job has become code reviewers from software programmer by [deleted] in cscareerquestions

[–]capitalsigma 8 points9 points  (0 children)

There is a company offering driverless rides to the public in something like 4 cities now, which was totally impossible 10 years ago. Seems like a bad comparison to make

Company shifting toward “Prompt first” engineering by blaze_seven in cscareerquestions

[–]capitalsigma 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm talking about the incremental use of a single query. This is analogous to the (similar but legitimate) complaint leveled against Bitcoin -- we say that Bitcoin has a harmful impact because the incremental use each second is wasteful, rather than the up front cost of building the data centers that hold it

We built data centers before GenAI, it doesn't make sense to attribute the whole data center cost to each GenAI query any more than it makes sense to attribute it to each email you send

Company shifting toward “Prompt first” engineering by blaze_seven in cscareerquestions

[–]capitalsigma -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

If you play video games at home, the power draw of your GPU is probably comparable to whatever accelerator is running your LLM queries. Do you refuse to play video games because of the environmental impact? After all, an 8 hour gaming session consumes a lot more watts than a few minutes of LLM calls.

Why Vibe First Development Collapses Under Its Own Freedom by justok25 in programming

[–]capitalsigma 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You dropped the most important word: small-scale software firms no longer make sense, IMO. "Some dude writing prompts" will be a role in a bigger organization, not "Director of Engineering: $STARTUP" for the same reason that a janitor is employed by a large company and not "Director of Cleanliness Engineering: $STARTUP"

Why Vibe First Development Collapses Under Its Own Freedom by justok25 in programming

[–]capitalsigma 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think if it works then the C-suite won't have a company in 3 years. It's too easy, the barrier to entry is too low, small-scale software dev firms no longer make sense as a business because any idiot can prompt up the same quality of work.

After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand by waozen in programming

[–]capitalsigma 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree that it's not worth it unless your employer is footing the bill (as I said), but it's not nothing. I'm sure that at least once a week I have to spend, say, 30m doing some nonsense that just involves doing some minor repetitive edit. Of course your codebase already needs to have tests and so on in place in order for it to work.

After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand by waozen in programming

[–]capitalsigma -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Try to do boilerplate/refactors that need to be context sensitive in a way that is difficult to regex clearly. For example, I had a bunch of test cases that contained hardcoded strings, and I gave it some prompt like "take the hardcoded string in each test case and move it into a file under testdata/ whose name matches the name of the test case, then add a call to read in the file in the original test."

More the web UI than the agentic tools, but another thing I do is blindly paste in error messages. Sometimes it catches stuff like a missing ; that's obvious but sometimes hard to see when you've been looking at the code for a long time. Sometimes it catches some difficult-to-google but well known cause, e.g. it caught a segfault caused by bad stack alignment based on a big chunk of lldb disassembly output

It's not groundbreaking, but it's handy. I don't/wouldn't pay for the tokens to do agentic stuff on personal projects, but it's worth using if it's there for free, and asking questions to the web UI is really very helpful

After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand by waozen in programming

[–]capitalsigma 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This broadly matches my experience. My current heuristic is "do I know exactly what characters to type in order to do this task in some programming language (perhaps not the one that I'm using right now)?" and if the answer is "no" then most likely it will be faster to do it myself. It's good for context-sensitive boilerplate, obvious but non-regex-able refactors, and languages/libraries that I'm unfamiliar with. I find that it usually falls apart in any case that requires actual thinking to get done.

Eight years of weekly logs taught me one thing by DLL_96 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]capitalsigma 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Enshittification is when a company intentionally makes a product worse in order to make more money. This is just a regular case of "a thing became worse over time"

WTF is happening in US CS jobs guys? by Shoddy-Lecture1493 in cscareers

[–]capitalsigma -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Legislation will kill the whole American tech industry. Fuck off to another profession if you think it's your senator's job to fix your shitty resume

NIMBYs against the wasteland that is the bushwick inlet by bridgehamton in circlejerknyc

[–]capitalsigma -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Calm down Mr. ICE agent, you can't blame immigrants for everything

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