The article's point is sound, but its missing a key component. People who build simpler systems are capable of getting more done - the build takes less, the maintenance takes less, etc. So when the engineer choosing simplicity is looking to get promoted they might have 3 or 4 bullet points to their name instead of 1.
Of course, over-simplification is the wrong decision some times, the same as abstraction and complexity is the wrong decision some times...
Your shortcut for promotion is generally building value for the company, but people need to remember that promotions support the business and they aren't free to the company.
Unfortunately, no, simpler systems often take longer to create. It's always easiest to just add some janky widget hanging off the side, than to rejigger the whole system to be simpler. It's like the Pascal quote: "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."
They take less to review and maintain etc, but the credit for those positives aren't assigned to the original engineer. Which is the point of the article.
Interesting story for sure (to be clear I'm not talking about the writing by Reuters), but would you buy or skip the OpenAi IPO?
To me it feels like one of those throw some play money into it and see what happens sort of situations. Expect it will return negative due to the raw financials and outlook, but small chance the brand carries enough weight with the public that it spikes.
I've written these words multiple times here on HN, and have a draft blog by virtually the same title. I can't agree more with the sentiment, though I think theres some nuance the author is missing out on. Regardless, thank you for sharing.
there was a thing on hacker news a couple of months ago by a group that measures that... the TLDR is that hot liquids or hot materials against plastic during production does increase micro plastics in food, which makes sense. Obv, we still don't have a full understanding of the health implications.
also, I think the company here is being generous to themselves... mocha pots, and pretty much all pour overs are all plastic-free... they really aren't the first to do plastic-free
The author of this article is missing whats really going on:
Hard novel things are still hard and valuable, easy things are now super easy and really aren't valuable anymore.
Lets take an easy thing... like a meal planning app or a todo list or something. Its what we would all call a weekend project, but in 2022 it would be hard to develop, get the legal stuff reviewed, do the marketing, and do all the rest of the operations in a few weeks. That stuff is basically a series of prompts now.
Now lets look at a hard thing, such as decreasing the cost of titanium production (courtesy of orca: https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/there-has-to-be-a-bett...)... to be able to scale operations and bring the cost down you are going to have to do some real science and engineering... LLMs can certainly help you, but this challenge is a far cry from something that an LLM can handle.
*Novel things have just become MUCH MUCH more valuable, slop is way way less valuable*
Fantastic Article, well written, thoughtful. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes:
* "Then it professionalised. Plug and Play arrived. Windows abstracted everything. The Wild West closed. Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became appliances. The craft became invisible."
* "The machines I fell in love with became instruments of surveillance and extraction. The platforms that promised to connect us were really built to monetise us. The tinkerer spirit didn’t die of natural causes — it was bought out and put to work optimising ad clicks."
* "Previous technology shifts were “learn the new thing, apply existing skills.” AI isn’t that. It’s not a new platform or a new language or a new paradigm. It’s a shift in what it means to be good at this."
* "They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of... But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening."
* "Typing was never the hard part."
* "I don’t have a neat conclusion. I’m not going to tell you that experienced developers just need to “push themselves up the stack” or “embrace the tools” or “focus on what AI can’t do.” All of that is probably right, and none of it addresses the feeling."
To relate to the author, I think with a lot of whats going on I feel the same about, but other parts I feel differently than they do. There appears to be a shallowness with this... yes we can build faster than ever, but so much of what we are building we should really be asking ourselves why do we have to build this at all? Its like sitting through the meeting that could have been an email, or using hand tools for 3 hours because the power tool purchase/rental is just obscenely expensive for the ~20min you need it.
From an economics standpoint the current state of the economy and the labor market doesn't really make any sense with the narrative being pushed.
Companies are claiming that they are achieving productivity gains from AI yet we've seen basically no evidence of it. Furthermore, if there were gains from it, we would expect the companies seeing the benefit to invest more into those productivity gains rather than less. Or put bluntly, they claim they are "buying money at a discount" but they just don't feel like buying more money.
The more reasonable explanation is that the economy is actually not in great shape, and companies/leaders are lying about the state of their companies (shocking right?). Companies are taking advantage of "AI" (LLMs) in narrow fields that are already highly codified (software, medical, legal, etc) but adoption is lower or even unwanted in other areas.
The labor market in software probably reflects this. You would avoiding hiring unless you need to; if you need to you are going to hire well because there is a lot of talent in the labor market... the only exception to this might be companies willing to take some risks (lower skill labor) for various reasons (financial, industry, etc).
There are a lot of charlatans out there selling this vision of a world where agents do all the work and software engineers are completely replaced... but it doesn't hold any water. Expect Javons paradox to be your favorite phrase as soon as the economy starts doing better.
If I remember correctly statistics were a state secret in Soviet Russia.
You are getting tbere with your current administation. They are clueless and lying trough their teeth about everything including the economy.
I think this is the real problem you need to solve. Replace them with someone who actually know what they are doing and not someone's retarded cousin who can repeat the party line.
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