But I find it difficult to motivate it from the "productivity" angle. Like if I work for a day without an LLM today, it feels like I could go skiing instead, and the LLM will do what I would have done today in 10min tomorrow...
Im not complaining Im just pointing out how quickly the overton window is shifting.
Obviously that's not the case for everybody. 3 years ago, LLMs were very far from producing the quality of code I wanted in my domain.
Things are still found but normally it is a new test case or an edge condition we don’t have an automated test for. The ever growing e2e suite has reduced the amount of regressions pretty drastically.
EDIT: I forgot to note that automated e2e tests were always the answer to improving quality. AI has just made it cheap to have several layers of test coverage.
Seriously, why do people assume that what they feel should be how everyone else should be feeling?
Like: I'm normal, and I do X. Therefore other normal people will also do X. It's the basis for in-group/out-group. We're all normal and they are not. (for some definition of normal).
It was obvious in 2023 and it is obvious now yet we still have people in denial even today. These people need AI to take over the world and threatening them with eternal suffering before they will change their minds even a bit.
If I wait until tomorrow, though, my company won't see the difference.
All the work most people are doing it just going to be Ctrl+A deleted and replaced with someone else's LLM slop using Opus 8 in an afternoon.
All the shit people are building right now just feel ephemeral, like its going to float away on a breeze.
I don't know any software engineer who can say "if I was not doing what I do, society would get a little worse".
In the worst case.. sometimes you learn what's best by experiencing what's not.
This seems wildly inaccurate.
Ironically, I also had a change window last night to make some configuration changes to improve site reliability. It was a little challenging to get customer approval for both the cost & downtime for this. Let's just say... this will be a much more fun conversation to have next week, and for the account manager to have. "Yes, we'e proactively improved your reliablity, and here's why you were very smart to approve it and pay for it."
You sound self-employed.
We can of course do that privately, for just the heck of it, but it's not the right response for anything at societal level. We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s
I realise people on the monthly plans can't do it as easily. But I would say that as far as possible, having a plan B is the foundation of resilience.
That doesn't work for all systems, and not for all businesses, but I would say the mass majority can 'suffer' 24 hours without email or an LLM without everything going up in flames.
That's not always easy to do, but with something like inference providers it is, so why not kill two birds with one stone?
Another reason to have good Evals…
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
You are also a system. And, if you, as a system, don't run with Claude, you're not sufficiently hardened. People have made all sorts of helpful suggestions, like de-risking with multiple providers or just getting yourself a better Mac to run a local model.
The idea that: "No, no, we must have Claude, b/c it's the same as having a pen and paper!" is woefully naive. It's hard to attack the supply chain of pen and paper if you have a few extra reams and a few extra sticks. It's pretty easy for our geopolitical enemies to attack computers located far away from you, especially those systems are designed like fragile Rube Goldberg machines; furthermore, if we build an entire society (a system) to be productive only when we have LLMs, our issue isn't "insufficient-hardening". It's that the design is wrong.
Well, I just finished a meeting where we diagrammed out how change authority is to be structured as we split one group into two, which teams will retain what authorities. Zero claude involvement. Ten people in a room. Whiteboard and markers with a "scribe" taking notes. I am now editing old SOPs to reflect the decisions made in the meeting ... not something we would trust to claude or any other AI.
Let me know when the tech industry workers stop doing this and gains some solidarity, and I'll join you in that sentiment.
Until then, I pretty much need to bolster myself on the idea that one day I will need to switch frameworks, IDE's, and even OS's themselves. I'm the ones guiding the tools, not vice versa.
>We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s
The only 100% thing I will guarantee is that these tools will align to the incentives of their leadership over time, not the customers using it. add 10 9's if you want, that just guarantees that humanity is the weakest link.
I'm not sure if this is your intent, but this paragraph reads like satire given current real world events.
The systems you mention in your second sentence are failing at the "right response" you mention in your third, which dictates that contrary to your first sentence alternative action is necessary.
You cannot harden systems you have no control over. Societal level assurances require law and goverment regulation and enforcement. It is juvenile to pretend otherwise. If we were talking about government services, then as a taxpayer you would have some avenue to enact change.
Your only option when dealing with private companies is to try and become anti-fragile as much as possible at a personal level or at the level of your own company.
At our office we have a cleaning crew and when they come by to vacuum during office hours, everyone in our section takes a 5 minute coffee break and then it's done when we get back.
Our house has three carpeted steps between levels. Is there a Roomba that can clean those steps whilst cleaning the rooms on each of the levels? Or do I need one per step and the levels?
a) I’m not lazy enough to buy a Roomba. If I was, I definitely would be too lazy to nanny it around the house, lifting it up the three steps. b) When I am feeling lazy I hire a cleaner, who uses their own hand vacuum cleaner.
Time will tell.
I’m pretty sure doctors don’t abandon their patients during a blackout either, or even a war for that matter.
Mature professions have procedures and backup procedures for pretty much every non-catastrophic situation.
I'm not just talking about tools either. You mentioned redundancies and contingency plans. Layoffs have stripped workforces to barebones headcounts. How can you have redundancy when one sick man-day reduces your eng'g team by 50%?
> Which begs the question is Software Eng'g/Development a mature profession?
For every sense of the word pair "less mature," including, but not limited to, "less responsible for consequences of actions."
The equivalent for a dev is laptop, another AI, mobile hotspot and work at a cafe/library.
Microsoft being down is like having a contingency for a tornado.
I'm probably misreading your point, so, apologies, but I'd still just like to say:
Microsoft is a profit-driven, human-run corporation that mostly offers business infrastructure services. I think contingency planning for Microsoft service failures is almost entirely unlike contingency planning for adverse weather events?
Sounds like a normal thing to do if you live in Kansas. And perhaps we are all about to start living in the software equivalent of Kansas?
Of course proof by analogy is silly anyways, my email going down is not nearly as bad as a patient's medical equipment going down.
And even that only does so much, it was 45 years ago but my Grandmother had a stroke on the operating table because the power went out and generators didn't kick on until someone could run and manually start them because the autostart failed.
Or maybe more prescient; machine operators going home on a cold day because they can’t get their loader started.
From what I hear, the project managers are having a hard time sending emails anyway. We'll call it quits, winkwink.
Likewise, Anthropic / Dario has been busy proclaiming why nobody except themselves should be allowed to develop frontier AI, that we need "kill switches" in all AI models, and that we need a pause / slowdown on AI development because of the threat of open source models.
Essentially, they want complete lock in to their platform, so yes, it's very appropriate to ask questions when they can't meet basic 3 9's of reliability.
I was unable to do things beyond basic banking with my bank yesterday (and today) due to this outage. It just involves making changes to a merchant processing account for a nonprofit, but the point is that normal business activity grinds to a halt when it relies on an unreliable provider like this.