Comment by xXSLAYERXx

I'm similar ( turning 50 in a couple month, wife+2 kids etc) and was telling my wife this morning that the world of software development has definitely changed. I don't know what it will look like in the future but it won't look like the past. It seems producing the text that can be compiled into instructions for a computer is something LLMs particularly good at. Maybe a good analogy is going from a bare text editor to a modern IDE. It's happening very fast though, way faster than the evolution of IDEs.

That is the most down to earth summary of all things AI I've heard so far! Good luck with the cart and be good. :)

Same situation (50 last week, 2 kids) though have been unemployed for a year. Part of me thinks that, rather than taking jobs, AI is actually the only reason a lot of jobs still exist. The rest of tech is dead. Having worked in consulting a while ago, you can kind of feel it when you're approaching the point where you've implemented all the high value stuff for a client and, even though there's stuff you could do, they're going to drop you to a retainer contract because it's just not the same value.

That's how the whole industry feels now. The only investment money is flowing into AI, and so companies with any tech presence are touting their AI whatevers at every possible moment (including during layoffs) just to get some capital. Without that, I wonder if we'd be seeing even harsher layoffs than we already are.

> I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart.

This is the way. I think I'd like to be a barista or deliver the mail once all the jobs are gone.

Same, except I am over 60 and when I think of opening a mobile food cart it is sort of a Blade Runner vibe, staffed by a robot ramen chef that grumbles at customers and always says something back to you in some cyber slang that you don’t understand.

> I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart.

Please keep us posted. I'm thinking of becoming a small time farmer/zoo keeper.

How does code review usually go for you? Our org’s bottleneck is often code review, which is how we reduce bus factor and other risks. Getting to the pull request faster doesn’t really save us that much time.

Weird side question, but any chance you use(d) the same name on Playstation Network?

That you started at around 35 is a salient point, no? What did you do before?

You'd have to do even less copy-pasting. The switch to some agent that has access to your source code directory speed things up so much, the time spent pays for itself in the first day.

Is it just me, or does Claude Code's UI design which both prevents copy-pasting large snippets and viewing the code as its generated feel incredibly discomforting?

What were you doing before programming, at age 35? Different career?

Can you expand on the tech stack and languages used?

I have read this same comment so many times in various forms. I know many of them are shill accounts/bots, but many are real. I think there are a few things at play that make people feel this way. Even if you're in a CRUD shop with low standards for reliability/scale/performance/efficiency, a person who isn't an experienced engineer could not make the LLM do your job. LLMs have a perfect combination of traits that cause people to overestimate their utility. The biggest one I think is that their utility is super front-loaded.

If a task before would take you ten hours to think through the thing, translate that into an implementation approach, implement it, and test it, and at the end of the ten hours you're 100% there and you've got a good implementation which you understand and can explain to colleagues in detail later if needed. Your code was written by a human expert with intention, and you reviewed it as you wrote it and as you planned the work out.

With an LLM, you spend the same amount of time figuring out what you're going to do, plus more time writing detailed prompts and making the requisite files and context available for the LLM, then you press a button and tada, five minutes later you have a whole bunch of code. And it sorta seems to work. This gives you a big burst of dopamine due to the randomness of the result. So now, with your dopamine levels high and your work seemingly basically done, your brain registers that work as having been done in those five minutes.

But you now (if you're doing work people are willing to pay you for), you probably have to actually verify that it didn't break things or cause huge security holes, and clean up the redundant code and other exceedingly verbose garbage it generated. This is not the same process as verifying your own code. First, LLM output is meant to look as correct as possible, and it will do some REALLY incorrect things that no sane person would do that are not easy to spot in the same way you'd spot them if it were human-written. You also don't really know what all of this shit is - it almost always has a ton of redundant code, or just exceedingly verbose nonsense that ends up being technical debt and more tokens in the context for the next session. So now you have to carefully review it. You have to test things you wouldn't have had to test, with much more care, and you have to look for things that are hard to spot, like redundant code or regressions with other features it shouldn't have touched. And you have to actually make sure it did what you told it to, because sometimes it says it did, and it just didn't. This is a whole process. You're far from done here, and this (to me at least) can only be done by a professional. It's not hard - it's tedious and boring, but it does require your learned expertise.

Fellow old here… Sorry to tell you but robotic food carts are going to be impossible to compete against

So you’ll need some kind of humanistic hook if you want to get reliable customers

Expect there will be two worlds that are extremely different: the machine world of efficiency that most people live inside as gears of machine capitalism

The biological world where there’s no efficiencies and it’s primarily hunter gatherers with mystical rituals

The latter one is only barely still the majority worldwide (only 25-30% of humans aren’t on the internet)