The analogy I've had for myself is that it feels like using a bulldozer to dig rather than a shovel. If you use it to dig archaeological artifacts, it can make things worse than you started. A lot of the work however, is just moving dirt around, so you are wasting time by using a shovel.

Have you considered just answering truthfully?

Would you even want to work somewhere where you need to play a role and where they flip out when you say the wrong word you should've correctly guessed through mind reading? That sounds not like a job but a toxic relationship.

- Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years.

- Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year.

Having been in academia in the past and now in software I can say with a lot of certainty that this will take a lot more upfront work than otherwise.

Academic code does not have a lot of structure. And usually lacks a lot in terms of tests. While AI is best when it can mimic patterns as well as there are tests to target.

So you will probably need to budget a few weeks to establish good patters, docs as well as testing patterns before you can seriously make it really do what you want it to do.

This just sounds like a standard tech interview. Mind reading to find and perform the secret “signal”. Nobody flips out if you don’t find it, they just move on to one of the other 1,000 candidates for the role.

I remember the graduate recruitment days - If you told the truth you were the only candidate they saw all day that wasn't the captain of the football team, top of the class and voted most likely to succeed - aka the worst candidate they saw all day.

want a Flutter developer who is unusually strong at directing AI-driven software delivery. This is not a traditional "write the code yourself" role.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223956

Even with 3 weeks I'm just not the Fortran/C programmer to get that job done so I moved on to other things.

In that case, it's way better to simply write the code yourself.

But that's not worth trillions of dollars...

[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-No-Quack

The issue is, they don't want to provide "better" support but "cheaper" support. Imagine a trained agent that understands the big picture. Now imagine a company investing in humans to use AI to retrieve knowledge that the human can easily identify as being relevant or not, and using that knowledge to better aid the customer.

Right now AI is being sold as a "we don't need support personells" instead of "how can we provide better service." For a lot of products, better service will probably not matter as "cheaper" products will win most of the time.

Most people don't want to pay for better. They want to pay the same for something better, which is what companies are not investing their time in figuring out how to use AI properly for I think.

Now that’s real value.

It saddens me to see that high quality content is drowned in this sea of garbage to the point of being almost impossible to find.

From all the tech that we have, agents are really not that hard to learn on the job. They're also not a magical silver bullet.

Why?

If the winding path is actually interesting and gives you insights into how the person works, why would that be a bad thing?

IMHO the best of both worlds option is agents working with deterministic CLIs. Where the agent does the reasoning (and text generation) but uses CLIs to carry out all of the actions (issuing refunds, unblocking accounts, or whatever).

It's possible to get very reliable and consistent work out of agents when they're using well written prompts with well designed CLIs.

Instead of using the LLM to create deterministic tools, we are using LLMs to replace them. It's completely backwards and I don't know why people (especially high ranking people in my company at least) seem to think that this is the way forward. No, I don't want a whole CI pipeline that is just LLM prompts. Yes it's very easy, but it's expensive, slow and prone to failure in ways you can't even predict.

Same things like using LLMs for the code review process. What would have been a simple linting rule is now a pass with an LLM rather than using the LLM to create the linting rule, which it is absolutely excellent at creating.

The AI psychosis is a real thing.

Swift, not so much. It's relatively new. Looking at AI's abilities like an engineer's career span scaled about 10-20x of time makes it make a bit more sense.

It's going to be worse at newer/niche things, intuitively - which is only going to get worse as it "learns" from garbage outputted by other LLMs moving forward.

The classic AI Gell-Mann effect.

But I've seen Claude write crazy code in Python and JavaScript, too

"Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad?" - subheading: "Either way, let’s not be in denial about it."

It's clearly intended as rhetorical hyperbole - like "everyone's on their phone at the movie theater" or "everyone's fed up with AI hype".

If you read the actual transcript it makes it very clear that it's not claiming "Everyone is using AI" almost immediately:

> ChatGPT is the sixth-biggest website on Earth. Something like 43 percent of Americans in the work force use generative A.I.

Fair enough, so if there were one “right” answer, that would be the one to give whether true or not.

But here there is no obvious right answer. If the employer is looking for a particular answer, the poster doesn’t know what it is. In that case, the best thing to say is simply the truth, particularly when the truth that the poster gives here is completely reasonable.

The best benefit about working in a large office is that nobody checks the basement.

From the 3 people I interviewed, all of the answers are very similar which is along the lines of: Kinda, but we need to be careful of using it, privacy, hallucination, etc.

All very safe answers and doesn't say anything new to me. If they had been more specific about why and their experiences with it, I'd probably favor them more due to their experience with it. It'd also signal to me that they form their own opinion rather than simply following the crowd.

That is of course assuming that they're looking for some long-term stable team member.

A skilled interviewer smells dishonesty.

However, and to be fair, whether and how they act on it depends on the specific situation.

I think upskilling is the right move in this environment and it is dead simple: Invest a couple of days to show initiative, learn agents yourself and be able to speak from true experience.

The attitude suggested by your response suggests you haven't lived that reality yet.

Either way, I'd rather be rejected by an employer for speaking my truth, than lie to be somewhere I'd rather not be.

Plus, and leaving that aside, I have my doubts that even if you did that, that that company would stay alive for very long. Reality has the habit of eventually ripping this kind of unproductively delusional people (like e.g. a boss that flips if you don't say the right word with regards to the current hype) to shreds eventually.

I much rather prefer someone who needs 3 seconds to triage a question and tell me: "This is X, I know this, here is the solution" or "This is Y, I don't know it, but I will get back to you within 24h".

I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes". There is no jointly with your boss. Let's do a some math of a 1:12 manager to direct report ratio. That means for every hour you have, your boss only has 5 minutes. And if you talk to your boss' boss, they have 25 seconds for every of your hours.

I think you'd rather have good odds at some companies and 0% at others, rather than abysmal but non-zero odds at all companies.

And as an added bonus, you might get hired at a company where you're actually a good fit, rather than one you weasled your way into, and get to pay rent, food bills, and other expenses through employment for a long time!

Look at musk's companies. They will basically never (on any near timescale...) produce GAAP profitability and yet their IPO is in the trillions. To the point that S&P refusing to suspend their GAAP profitability requirements means the index will basically never see this company in it (which I'm quite pleased about).

The power of already-accumulated capital is simply more powerful than things like "don't be completely pants-on-head stupid about a recent fad" "don't seig-heil in front of the world stage" "there's no point in having people come to an office just to spend all day on zoom" etc etc etc.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and companies can remain irrational longer than you can go without contributing to your 401k.

You're describing a coding sweatshop. What is the point of any discussion at all then? If the "boss" can't carve out enough time, that's their own problem. Letting that stress propagate to the team is plain bad leadership.

I know you might think some of these candidates don't have other much better choices to find work, but they absolutely do.

But that sounds more like "evasive" is the problematic attribute and not "long winding".

Which does show up at the same time often, true. But not always.

Although you can certainly do a better-and-worse job of preventing these kinds of issues.

We are slowly waking up to the fact, which was always true, that “coding” is just a fanciful preparatory task in order to appease the spirits properly so that we may invoke the spirit of what we are actually after: a live, running process that does useful things. Code is completely useless when separated from that fact.

Typing it is a complete waste of time unless getting up close and personal with it will result in some kind of useful and actionable improvement in you or your understanding. Knowing when it does and when it does not have this property is a skill of its own.

Not to disagree of course that time is limited, but in my experience, optimizing it this harshly leads to poor results, because eventually, you just get leapfrogged by reality.

Hyper-optimized systems are brittle and can't really adapt to the market changing.

But yeah, I guess they still need developers. Just doesn't sound like a fun job :D

"Wouldn't give a straight answer on question X" isn't an instant no-hire, but it's not a positive signal.

Some people might use skill-based scripts, MCPs, or some kind of raw access to a database. My point is that well designed CLIs are the optimal programmatic interface, for many reasons.

Of course I will do that, I get paid for doing that.

Most of the times I can convince that AI is not necessary by showing small PoC flow with AWS diagrams of data flows. This works well especially if the ask comes from technical people.

Other times the C-level interjects (CEO, CFO, sometimes even CTO) and demands that AI should be there. I literally had CEOs send me instagram reels of some AI shovel-sellers to demonstrate that I am wrong and AI is the way to go. No point arguing after that because I have no problem implementing whatever AI they want rather than losing a paying project.

Like, perhaps, understanding that it is free of security and functionality bugs.

If you find yourself writing repetitive code you should consider adding a layer of abstraction. If your language isn't powerful enough you can write a code generator.

That is one of the things code does. It also communicates the developer's thoughts about how that process should work to others. If the latter is neglected, the code becomes very difficult to collaborate on. Very few lines of code that are written are "write once". Mostly they're changed, repeatedly, over time by many people. The live, running process is a very temporary entity by comparison. Yes, it needs to exist and do useful work. No, it is absolutely not the only thing that matters.

I bet lemmings are grateful they were left behind.

It beggars belief that people think that they should rush in some uncertain direction, like some drawbridge is going to be lifted the moment people work out what the right direction is. It's utter stupidity.

I believe this is the general belief about basically every human skill, that if you stop doing the technical fundamentals you get worse at understanding the activity. The question is whether coding is like sailing a square-rigged wooden ship, which became completely useless knowledge after the invention of the steam engine, or if it's like playing an instrument, which while technically unnecessary after the advent of MIDI and other tools, absolutely hurts your ability to arrange, compose and perform if the skill is neglected.

For my money: I think the AI scenario is more like the latter, but "humans are worse at coding" isn't the consequence I see coming. I worry that in ten years we will be awash in software that's impossible to understand. I don't think that's happened in any human industry ever. Someone has always understood how the machines are built, even if they're very remote from the users of the machine.

I'm unlikely to run into many of the problems that (for example) the PornHub developers hit, several times an hour.

In that case, I benefit from folks like you, that allow me to have solutions that scale down to my level.

That's one of the things that I appreciate about the PHP that the LLM provides. It uses modern idioms that make better use of the modern language.

Code is obscenely low level.

Some systems do support issuing refunds, among many other actions, by creating an appropriate row in a database.

No one has ever needed to do that for something that is new. And if it’s not new, you want to do it repeatedly with some guarantee of reliability. Not just in an uncontrolled manner.

That is why we have snippet systems, macros and code generators. And the best with code is to solve problem once and reuse the solution. Which we have done with libraries, frameworks and supporting software.

It's… like… not that simple.

There's a whole level of ignorance out there that is honestly dumbfounding to even comprehend. The numbers for numeracy and problem solving are even more horrifying.

(It's for this reason that the most popular apps in the US are algorithmically generated feeds of photos, and often-non-verbal videos shorter than a TV advertisement.)