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>Disagree and if you actively use it in your workflow well you will realize its a major competitive edge.

Depends on your line of work. I regularly try to incorporate it with mine and find myself telling it that it's wrong more often than not. I'm yet to be convinced that double-checking and correcting an LLM's work has saved me any more time than wading through garbage SEO-filled results to find what I need.

>Nobody is going to hold you back from falling behind tho and I'm not here to convince you otherwise.

The cockiness/hubris is real.

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Willing to bet my career that how we use LLMs in 2027 will look nothing like how we use them in 2026 because of harness churn. My take is: focus on providing value to your company with the tools available today that appear least likely to churn out of existence tomorrow. The more specific and bespoke your harness, the likelier it is it will become obsolete very soon (I.e. the next frontier model release).
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Indeed.

It's promising technology, but the tools are far from mature yet.

And as they do mature, the ramp up will decrease and their won't be any particular benefit to being an early adopter. For reasonably bright people, there's essentially no penalty to "missing out" for a while.

As often, the FOMO-afflicted are churning on stuff that just won't matter. Which is fine if they enjoy it, but isn't something the rest of us need to fret over.

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100%. Imagine some talented engineer waking up from a 12 month coma. Do we honestly believe they’ll be permanently “behind” in the workforce because he wasn’t churning through LLM harnesses those past 12 months? What about 22 year old college graduates entering the workforce?

Keep abreast, don’t lose sleep, don’t sacrifice work-life balance. Help each other, especially your coworkers. The current craze seems to have created stack ranking monsters out of the whole industry.

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Most of the harness related work I've done has been writing better documentation in the repository, and importing existing external documents. This type of stuff is gonna be useful no matter what, and also helps human engineers!

I wish we could convince folks to write docs for human consumption, but docs are docs....

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Competitive edge with who? Your coworkers? Your boss’ efficiency demands?
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[flagged]
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Hard to believe that there are any non-mission-critical companies that won’t question one’s rejection of AI. Sounds insane, I know, but not using some LLMs to quickly look up a problem is akin to avoiding Googling when you have a problem.

Yes, they can be wrong. But if you’re competent enough, you should spot the irrelevant suggestions.

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Maybe?

I don't know. I used to agree with this, but after the umpteenth time of Claude recommending some obsolete or dead old library, old version, getting major version breaking changes dead wrong, writing code for it that's not even API compatible with the published docs, etc... I started to question whether it was actually faster. I end up pouring over the original documentation anyway.

I have learned some new things, been exposed to some new techniques, and learned about some new libraries, so it's hard to tell.

The problem is made worse by so much of the internet being AI slop now, traditional searching is a huge time waste too.

Looking forward to the next chapter of tech where we're able to use these tools appropriately and not destroy everything of value with them.

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Turns out you don't have to bet your whole career.

Do you think if AI turns out to be a dud, most of us will permanently lose our career as software engineers?

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I think some of us are witnessing brain rot spreading accross our peers already so I am pretty sure some people won't recover if one day their token quota/limit is removed/reduced for a reason.
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Not the same person, but in the event of an AI collapse I think those that relied on it will be at a disadvantage. The rapid deskilling that happens with AI usage is becoming more documented.
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If AI is good enough to cause peoples' skills to atrophy, then why would it collapse? It would seem that it was very useful indeed in that case.
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If your skills atrophy enough, maybe
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