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Transcript
Title text: This is how you all fucking sound
[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]
Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]
Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]
Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]
Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.
Well yes that’s the case with me i was never trained in coding just started out as a low level employee in an accounting department teaching myself how to do vba scripts in excel to do basic stuff and now im building data pipelines and web UIs with claude to automate reconciliations and rollforwards that used to take me a week without using Claude. I also have friends who are senior devs real master programmers, and yes they can do everything I do with claude faster and better.
But, while one claude agent isn’t faster than them, they have the ability to run a dozen agents at once getting 10x the work done they used to. Instead of paying ten good programmers $100K/yr each to be his code monkey slaves and not think too luch for themselves, they pay claude $2,500 a year to be ten codemonkeys and not think too much for itself.
It really is as game changing as the automobile was. That doesn’t mean an idiot can’t drive it off a cliff like they literally can with a car, and horses had some self preservation instincts that would save an idiot from riding over a cliff, but the answer is to let these idiots drive themselves off a cliff with AI, not to ban a new technology that helps a lot if you’re not an idiot about it.
It’s faster to go from the 50th floor of a building to the bottom by jumping out the window than it would be taking the elevator, but that just makes a mess of things. Similarly, you seem to be going faster with AI, and in some respects you are, but there’s also the matter of technical debt, which is the messy aspect that someone has to deal with later.
I have used AI to quickly write up small functions here or there, but even then I’ve had to go in and clean up the code because even in small tasks it can be messy. The mess scales with the size of the problem, even if you do split it up among more agents (in fact it can be worse if you use too many agents).
Especially when people claim 10x productivity gains (a suspiciously oft-repeated claim, by the way), alarm bells ring in my mind, because I’ve seen the garbage that AI generates, and no one is actually reading that garbage carefully and cleaning it up while maintaining 10x productivity.
And yet how much of our industrial engineering uses free falling gravity whenever safely possible? What’s wrong with a garbage chute straight from the sixth floor to a dumpster in the basement? What’s wrong with a water tower using gravity to store energy and let the towns water literally fall straight down 50ft into the plumbing system?
That’s what I’m saying, if an idiot breaks stuff letting it fall, that doesn’t mean we have to stop everyone from letting anything fall ever.
Im just building rest api clients, what technical debt? Then i have a simple streamlit server with a clean UI.
Like this is all cookie cutter stuff but now a layperson can do it. It’s basically ikea furniture for coding, and yeah im sure ikea uses a ton of water and energy and put a lot of furniture makers out of business, but that’s the way of the world. And yeah a complete moron finds a way to fuck up building ikea furniture too, but there is now a way for moderately smart people to put together furniture and also put together simple computer apps without dedicating their lives to the study of woodworking or coding.
So idk, i mean once every twenty minutes maybe i correct something Claude is doing, sometimes they look for stuff on the wrong hard drive, sometimes they request network access when it’s categorically not necessary nor what I asked it to do. Sometimes it wants to ping a server continuously until it no longer gets a 521 and i have to tell it “HELL NO STOP” but then my human coworker is like “yes this is why i love claude” and i just have to make sure that branch he’s working on never sees production.
But the semicolons brackets pythonwhitespaces are always in the right spot, variables are always instantiated properly and then dumped from memory based on best practices, while/for loops incremented correctly. And yeah it all costs me some number of gallons of water. It’s the water cycle it all ends up in the clouds and rains back down, idk sounds terrible for people who live in irrigated deserts but i could never live somewhere like that because i don’t do well in hot weather wcyd
Very cool. Welcome to the trade! I can tell you caught the passion for it! Lol.
With or without Claude, you’re a developer now.
If I can offer some advice: Don’t let anyone tell you which tools to use. And also never let anyone tell you that all the magic is in the tool.
Oh, yes. For the places that were already getting by on slinging CRUD (create/read/update/delete) calls, I can see how this is a game changer.
Although, the pattern I see over and over is that the boss-man buys cheap code for a few years, then pays ultra-premium prices for a consulting company to dig them out of their costly mess of spaghetti code.
They usually repeat this every few years.
These AI tools are promising to solve that, but so did Web 2.0 frameworks, and so did memory safe languages, and so did COBOl and BASIC. All of them helped, and none of them really solved the good/cheap/fast trade-off.
Lol. Yes!