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points by lsvg 4 days ago | 0 comments

I fall into the people pissed about losing jobs camp, can you explain how you keep a cheery attitude like you do?

I geniuinely don't see what I could make with this new tech, my brain immediately goes to "this app idea is worthless, anybody can make it now".

[–] mattlondon 4 days ago

As the OP said really. It is very very freeing to just be able to give a task that in ye olden days you knew was going to be a pain in the arse to do, and it will do it without you. Amazing.

It's like having extra copies of yourself that you can just fork and get stuff done. E.g. the other day I was in a meeting and there were some heavy discussions about a few gnarly issues. I fired off a few prompts in parallel while the AI researches options, approaches, made a prototype etc all while I was present and paying attention still in the face to face meeting. I am so much so much more efficient as an engineer now - getting better feedback, more bonuses etc. It's never been better - I handle thinking about the requirements, the computer science and software engineering big picture etc, and the AI handles the syntax trivia for implementation.

The models are really really good now.

The only downside is that as a result of more stuff getting done, we need to have more meetings to discuss what actually needs to be worked on.

[–] stemlord 3 days ago

You didn't really answer the question though, how are you not nervous about your job security and how do you still see any value in software that you make with almost 0 effort?

[–] mancerayder 4 days ago

People at work are cutting and pasting Claude output for use in routine messages on Teams, troubleshooting suggestions, and proposed architecture designs, and honestly it's some of the dumbest shit I've ever seen. I have to tell people to reword it in their own words, and I believe they often can't.

I've seen developers use Claude to make suggestions for infrastructure design that made absolutely no sense and did not consider our environment. I've seen people write English that grammatically made sense but logically did not.

I don't see enough complaints about this and it can't be just my company.

Is anyone else seeing really severe Dunning-Kruger?

I always check what AI says to me, and I use my own words. I think the average engineer is not.

[–] mattlondon 4 days ago

> I don't see enough complaints about this and it can't be just my company.

They call this "slop" - I think it is well known at this point?

[–] mancerayder 3 days ago

That it exists? Sure.

That it's a degradation in some environments? There's not a lot being said about this. The laments are usually developers sad that they're prompting instead of coding. My lament isn't about the art of it, it's the human reasoning that seems to have gone away in my workplace when it comes to engineers.

[–] Sammi 4 days ago

Think bigger. Don't think in features. Think in business workflows.

You are a consumer, so you naturally think like the consumer you are. But consumers want cheap stuff and only big big businesses are able to provide cheap stuff at massive scale. So stop thinking in b2c. For us little businesses the money is in b2b. Businesses pay lots of money to have problems solved. They want to focus on their core business and outsource the rest.

Consumers hate paying subscriptions. Businesses love paying subscriptions. Because then they can make their problems someone else's problem and focus on what their actual business is.

[–] motionlessveloc 4 days ago

Making an app has always been approximately 1% of the work involved in turning an idea into a business.

[–] dannyw 4 days ago

That’s not true in my opinion.

Maybe it’s 1% or 10% today, but a decade ago, having/assembling the technical chops to know how to build something was a huge part of the meat / barrier to entry.

[–] smodo 4 days ago

It can still be true though, because entry is nothing without sales and a continued search for product market fit. I don’t know about 1% but if you say ‘for every 100 apps launched in 2015-2020 only 1 turned into a sustainable business’ I’d say that’s in the ballpark.

If code becomes cheaper that may change the business fundamentals but it also means capturing customers becomes way harder.

[–] senordevnyc 4 days ago

In a former life I was a freelancer who built first version mobile apps for seed and pre-seed startups. I’m a decent dev, so what I built was always good enough. Virtually none of these startups survived, and there were dozens of them.

[–] vinibrito 3 days ago

What did you move into next?

[–] CuriouslyC 4 days ago

Even a decade ago marketing/growth was the massive lion's share. IMO just building something has been near meaningless since at least post-Ruby on Rails. The app stores have been inundated since the late 2010s.

[–] nemo44x 3 days ago

I’d challenge that and say that the opportunity cost was massive. So you needed to be super precise and confident in what to spend the time doing.

Now that opportunity cost is much lower so experimentation is more practical than before.

[–] robotmay 4 days ago

I've hit a weird point myself. I'm not overly interested in building software for other people now. What I'm able to do is build all my stupid hobby project ideas for my very specific use cases and not have to worry about making them profitable in order to justify the time spent on them. I just built my own point of sale system because nothing on the market meets my needs, and my needs are extremely niche.

[–] senordevnyc 4 days ago

Very interesting! What kind of business is your POS for?

[–] robotmay 3 days ago

I sell vintage cameras in an antiques centre, but only 3 days a week. I’d like to sell online too but I have no ability to put aside stock for that, and similarly I only have access to the stock a few days a week, which makes shipping awkward. Pretty much every item is unique and needs listing separately, which is a pain. This is probably doable on some existing POS but it’s almost certainly much more expensive than just building my own (I think Shopify starts around £40 per month for what I’d need, then still require a lot of customisation). A major aspect of my business is buying stuff in the stall and tracking its eventual sale price, which tends to be a pain on other systems when it’s all one-off unique items.

I also do repairs and so I recently added a job management system into the POS, which has been really useful so far. Next step is to sort out the online store/eBay integration aspect!

[–] mopsi 4 days ago

Take your time to set up the tools and just build something small. Create a personal website, or a calendar that helps to track friends' birthdays, or something else of that sort. It's a good way to calm yourself down, because it will give you a good picture of both the capabilities and the limitations of AI.

I've found it very liberating that I can handle some of the tedious parts of a project to AI. In the end, I spend perhaps the same amount of time on a project, but more of it goes to important work and less gets wasted on plumbing.

[–] lsvg 4 days ago

Thanks for the advice. I will try to repeat this, as I have already used the new tech and found it useful.

I am however worried that for the kind of work that the majority of the worlds tech workers do, this is a direct replacement for.

I guess we'll have to live to see.

[–] texruska 4 days ago

Ideas have always been worthless though, the alpha is still in making something good + useful

[–] senordevnyc 4 days ago

Upvote for what sounds like genuine curiosity!