Comment by Workaccount2

Comment by Workaccount2 a day ago

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People need to understand that a lot of angst around AI comes from AI enabling people to do things that they formally needed to go through gatekeepers for. The angst is coming from the gatekeepers.

AI has been a boon for me and my non-tech job. I can pump out bespoke apps all day without having to get bent on $5000/yr/usr engineering software packages. I have a website for my side business that looks and functions professionally and was done with a $20 monthly AI subscription instead of a $2000 contractor.

BeFlatXIII 16 hours ago

AI is divine retribution for artists being really annoying on Twitter.

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MyFirstSass a day ago

I highly doubt "pumping out bespoke apps all day" is possible yet besides 100% boilerplate, and when possible then no good for any other purpose than enshittifiying the web, and at that point not profitable because everyone can do it.

I use AI daily as a senior coder for search and docs, and when used for prototyping you still need to be a senior coder to go from say 60% boilerplate to 100% finished app/site/whatever unless it's incredibly simple.

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  • alwillis 18 hours ago

    > I use AI daily as a senior coder for search and docs, and when used for prototyping you still need to be a senior coder to go from say 60% boilerplate to 100% finished app/site/whatever unless it's incredibly simple.

    I know you would like to believe that, but with the tools available NOW, that's not necessarily the case. For example, by using the Playwright or Chrome DevTools MCPs, models can see the web app are it's being created and it's pretty easy to prompt them to fix something they can see.

    These models know the current frameworks and coding practices but they do need some guidance; they're not mindreaders.

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    • MyFirstSass 16 hours ago

      I still don't believe that. Again yes a boilerplate calculator or recipe app probably, but anything advanced real world with latency issues, scaling, race conditions, css quirks, design weirdness, optimisation - in other words the things that actually require domain knowledge i still don't get much help with, even with Claude Code, pointers yes but they completely fumble actual production code in real world scenarios.

      Again it's the last 5% that takes 95% of the time, and those 5% i haven't seen fixed with Claude or Gemini, because it's essentially quirks, browser errors, race conditions, visual alignment, etc etc. All stuff that completely goes way above any LLM's head atm from what i've seen.

      They can definitely bullshit a 95% working app though, but that's 95% from being done ;)

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  • Workaccount2 21 hours ago

    Often the problem with tech people is they think software only exists for tech or for being sold to others from tech.

    Nothing I do is in the tech industry. It's all manufacturing and all the software is for in-house processes.

    Believe it or not, software is useful to everyone and no longer needs to originate from someone who only knows software.

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    • MyFirstSass 20 hours ago

      I'm saying you can't do what you're saying without knowing code at the moment.

      You didn't give any examples of the valuable bespoke apps that you are creating by the hour.

      I simply don't believe you, and the arrogant salesy tone doesn't help.

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      • Workaccount2 16 hours ago

        LLMs can pretty reliably write 5-7k LOC.

        If your needs fit in a program that size, you are pretty much good to go.

        It will not rewrite PCB_CAD 2025, but it will happily create a PCB hole alignment and conversion app, eliminated the need for the full PCB_CAD software if all you need is that one toolset from it.

        Very, very, few pieces of software need to be full package enterprise productivity suites. If you just make photos black and white and resize them, you don't need Photoshop to do it. Or even ms paint. Any LLM will make a simple free program with no ads to do it. Average people generally do very simple dumb stuff with the expensive software they buy.

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  • vjvjvjvjghv 21 hours ago

    This is the same as the discussion about using Excel. Excel has its limitations, but it has enabled millions of people to do pretty sophisticated stuff without the help of “professionals”. Most of the stuff us tech people do is also basically some repetitive boilerplate. We just like to make things more complex than they need to be. I am always a little baffled why seemingly every little CRUD site that has at most 100 users needs to be run on Kubernetes with several microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and whatever.

    As far as enshittification goes, this was happening long before AI. It probably started with SEO and just kept going from there.

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    • almosthere 20 hours ago

      The reality is too, that even if "what is acceptable" has not yet caught up to that guy working at Atlassian, polishing off a new field in Jira, people are using AI + Excel to manage their tasks EXACTLY the way their head works, not the way Jira works.

      Yet we fail to see AI as a good thing but just as a jobs destroyer. Are we "better than" the people that used to fill toothpaste tubes manually until a machine was invented to replace them? They were just as mad when they got the pink slip.

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      • vjvjvjvjghv 17 hours ago

        I have told people that us techies have proudly killed the jobs of millions of people and we were arrogant about it. Now we are mad that it's our turn. Feels almost like justice :-)

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