Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.
- Thread starter Traak
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Sheriff Cad
scientia potentia est
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Sort of alternates between omg AI is going to put us all out of work, omg look how pathetic this AI shit is it can't answer this simple question the way I want, and omg AI datacenters touched my wee wee inappropriately...
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Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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Sheriff Cad
scientia potentia est
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I forgot points four and five, four being "AI is the mark of the beast and this satanic shit is walking us down the wrong path" and then occasionally you see posts like you guys where it's like "I don't even write code anymore, I just manage the AI" and that part makes a lot more sense to me since I don't draft things by hand anymore either, why would you.
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Noodleface
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One thing ive noticed is that guardrails seem to not be consistent what so ever, at least with claude.
Ill use it reverse engineer the everquest structs/offsets for macroquest, and the older versions of claude will do it, no questions asks. This sort of stopped when fable first released as I think when it saw IDA related work, it would flag it and then force the work to the inferior models or just straight up refuse to do it depending how I asked.
Now it seems that if I use the skill I created to do the work months back, it ignores the limitation and manages to fully patch work that took days, just 6 months ago, into a couple hour effort.
Every once in a while it will still question the use case and if I tell it its just for a personal emulator, its says "o ok thats the clarification I needed, thanks." And shits it out
Ill use it reverse engineer the everquest structs/offsets for macroquest, and the older versions of claude will do it, no questions asks. This sort of stopped when fable first released as I think when it saw IDA related work, it would flag it and then force the work to the inferior models or just straight up refuse to do it depending how I asked.
Now it seems that if I use the skill I created to do the work months back, it ignores the limitation and manages to fully patch work that took days, just 6 months ago, into a couple hour effort.
Every once in a while it will still question the use case and if I tell it its just for a personal emulator, its says "o ok thats the clarification I needed, thanks." And shits it out
ShakyJake
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What I find curious is developers loudly advertising, “I didn’t use AI for this project!” Which has me thinking, okay, you’re an idiot? It’s kind of like, “Look at me, I built this house without power tools. It took me 30 times longer, and the construction is shoddy. Go me!”
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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Yeah a dev on my team keeps proudly exclaiming how little AI he uses and it's like... Read the room man. You're giving evidence to get fired.
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ToeMissile
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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alavaz
Trakanon Raider
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I guess I'm old enough now to empathize with people who cling to the good old days haha.
AI is joyless to me, and if I were in a position where I had to spend tons of time using it, I'd definitely be looking to move on to something else.
So while yeah, it's probably not smart for your bottom line to say you aren't using AI (especially at these companies that are mandating it). But in the same breath these people are also saying that they were happier not using it and I can feel them on that.
There's also this weird breed of AI people out there that I keep running into that constantly brag about their agents and how they are working amongst themselves right now building the greatest software project on earth, making money on the stock market, fingering their wife, and catching the biggest bass ever seen. I want to punch these people in the face and take the bat to their Mac Mini's.
AI is joyless to me, and if I were in a position where I had to spend tons of time using it, I'd definitely be looking to move on to something else.
So while yeah, it's probably not smart for your bottom line to say you aren't using AI (especially at these companies that are mandating it). But in the same breath these people are also saying that they were happier not using it and I can feel them on that.
There's also this weird breed of AI people out there that I keep running into that constantly brag about their agents and how they are working amongst themselves right now building the greatest software project on earth, making money on the stock market, fingering their wife, and catching the biggest bass ever seen. I want to punch these people in the face and take the bat to their Mac Mini's.
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ShakyJake
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I find this attitude bizarre. For me it is the opposite. This is exciting. My mind keeps turning over things I could build, because nearly anything I can think of is now possible. Do you enjoy coding for the sake of coding, rather than for what you are actually creating?
Koushirou
Log Wizard
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I guess I've got the boomer view, too. It's not fun anymore. Aside from it kind of just feeling like cheating, which I need to just get over at this point, it's just not satisfying and rewarding to me anymore. One of the things that appealed to me getting into programming was that to me it just felt like the digital equivalent of putting a motorized model together, turning it on and look, it goes! Write a bunch of shit, press run and look, it does a thing! It's just not hitting that itch anymore. But that's a weak complaint, I guess. Job's a job and it pays money for now.
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Noodleface
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I also do not think the job is fun anymore either. I only embrace it to remain gainfully employed. Ideally I'd move to product management since I'm just a product manager for my agents anyways.
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ShakyJake
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The model-kit feeling is real, and it is fine as a reason to like the work. It is a bad standard for whether the work is going well.
The job is to ship software that behaves correctly and can still be changed later. “Write a bunch of stuff, press run, look, it goes” is how you find out that a path is possible. It is not how you know the feature is dependable. A lot of the mess still sitting in old systems came from that itch: a new framework, nobody really knew the patterns, and the excitement of making it move got mistaken for knowing how it should be built.
If AI makes the run button less satisfying, that is a loss of a hobby feeling inside a job. It does not mean the job got worse. The bar was never the itch. It was whether the thing works and holds up.
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I get it, and there are some cathartic parts of coding that I miss, but I honestly could not go back. The genie is out of the bottle, man. Any future interviews I would ask about their AI usage and budget, and I would bail on any org that seems to be resisting it.
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What are the perks of Astro exactly - just the support or do they have extra tools? I took over our data infrastructure group a few years ago and migrated their ETL platform (.Net executables running in windows task scheduler) over to Airflow, which no one here had used before. It has been such an upgrade to the team’s quality of life. This company is winding down now, but if go somewhere else that needs it, I was wondering if Astronomer’s services would be worth it. Sounds like it would be.
Control
Avatar of War Slayer
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Hmm, I don't necessarily think any of those are in conflict.
It will put a crazy amount of people out of work. It will keep people from learning things they needed to know before. And that probably isn't the greatest path. And it's absolutely amazing at the things its good at and still fucking terrible at the things it isn't, while arguing very convincingly and confidently that it is. However, the bucket of stuff it isn't good at is getting smaller crazy fast.
(I'm undecided about whether or not the datacenter peepee touching is appropriate...)
Pretty sure I've done more "coding" since Opus 5.5 landed than I could do in a lifetime. Fucking thing still sucks at a lot of art things though. It's made massive progress compared to a few months ago, but visuals, especially 3d are still a giant bottleneck for game-y things.
"Claude, make WoW"
"No problem, back in an hour!"
"Um, characters are supposed to wear gear, and it's supposed to move with them you know?"
"It does!"
"Um, look at this screenshot..."
"Go fuck yourself meatbag!"
(possibly paraphrased)