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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2024

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  • Oh layoffs are definitely happening. I’m just not sure if it’s caused by AI productivity gains, or if it’s just the latest excuse (the pandemic, then soft layoffs of “back to office” enforcement, and now AI). Esp since the companies most talking about AI productivity gains are the same companies that benefit from AI adoption…

    What I wanted to explain is just that the skills to program actually translate pretty well. At my old company, we used to say “you know someone’s a staff engineer, because they only make PowerPoint presentations and diagrams, and don’t actually write any code”. And those skills directly translate to directing an AI to build the thing you need. The abstracted architect role will probably increase in value, as the typing value decreases.

    My biggest concern is probably that AI is currently eating junior dev jobs, since what it excels at is typically the kind of work you’d give to a junior engineer. And I think that more gruntwork kinda tasks are the way that someone develops the higher level skills that are important later; you start to see the kinds of edge cases first hand, so it makes them memorable. But I feel like that might just be a transition thing; many developers these days don’t know bare code down to the 1s and 0s. The abstraction might just move up another level, and people will build more things. At least, this is the optimistic view. 🤷 But I’m an optimistic guy.



  • I think the biggest difference between this and blue-collars workers losing their jobs, though, is that the same people losing their jobs are also placed very to benefit from the technology. Blue collared workers losing manufacturing jobs couldn’t, because they were priced out of obtaining that mafacturing hardware themselves, but programmers can use AI on an individual basis to augment their production. Not sure what the industry will look like in 10 years, but I feel like there will be plenty of opportunities for people who build digital things.

    That being said, people who were looking to be junior developers exactly right now… uhhh… that’s some extrememly unlucky timing. I wish you luck.



  • I would say deep thinking work, I average around 3-4 hours, but range between 0-8 hours. Like if I really feel in zone, it’s easy to go hard, but if I didn’t sleep well, or had too much caffeine, or didn’t eat enough, it’s just joever. I think months of grinding is possible with the right motivation, but I find that trying to force that motivation is pretty hard; I think that’s often more environment-based, rather than solely individual effort (ala being in a class of very motivated individuals)

    The important part for me is trying to start every day (or whatever your schedule is), because it can be hard to know how well I’ll concentrate until I try for 30 minutes or so. And consistency over a long period of time is key.

    edit: oh, fwiw, specifically for Chinese, I have been building this recently… although it’s not done yet. https://hanzi.bpev.me/






  • bpev@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    Mmm it sounds like you’re using it in a very different way to me; by the time I’m using an LLM, I generally have way more than a general feel for what I’m looking for. People rag on ai for being a “fancy autocomplete”, but that’s literally what I like to use it for. I’ll feed it a detailed spec for what I need, give it a skeleton function with type definitions, and tell the ai to fill it in. It generally fills in basic functions pretty well with that level of definition (ymmv depending on the scope of the function).

    This lets me focus more on the code design/structure and validation, while the ai handles a decent amount of grunt work. And if it does a bad job, I would have written the spec and skeleton anyways, so it’s more like bonus if it works. It’s also very good at imitation, so it can help to avoid double-work with similar functionalities.

    Kind of shortened/naive example of how I use:

    /* Example of another db update function within the app */
    /* UnifiedEventUpdate and UnifiedEvent type definitions */
    

    Help me fill in this function

    /// Updates event properties, and children:
    ///   - If `event.updated` is newer than existing, update as normal
    ///   - If `event.updated` is older than existing, error
    ///   - If no `event.updated` is provided, assume updated to be now()
    /// For updating Content(s):
    ///   - If `content.id` exists, update the existing content
    ///   - If `content.id` does not exist, create a new content
    ///   - If an existing content isn't present, delete the content
    pub fn update_event(
        conn: &mut Conn,
        event: UnifiedEventUpdate,
    ) -> Result<UnifiedEvent, Error> {
    

  • bpev@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    100%. As a solo dev who used to work corporate, I compare it to having a jr engineer who completes every task instantly. If you give it something well-documented and not too complex, it’ll be perfect. If you give it something more complex or newer tech, it could work, but may have some mistakes or unadvised shortcuts.

    I’ve also found it pretty good for when a dependency I’m evaluating has shit documentation. Not always correct, but sometimes it’ll spit out some apis I didn’t notice.

    Edit: Oh also I should mention, I’ve found TDD is pretty good with ai. Since I’m building the tests anyways, it can often give the ai a good description of what you’re looking for, and save some time.