PR by Xuan-Son Nguyen for `llama.cpp`: > This PR provides a big jump in speed for WASM by leveraging SIMD instructions for `qX_K_q8_K` and `qX_0_q8_0` dot product functions. > > …
What you’re afraid of is precisely what was tried with outsourcing dev jobs. That proved to work in some areas where you have very boring crud apps, but was a complete failure in others. I expect LLMs are just going to work out in a very similar fashion.
Meanwhile, the most enjoyable coding I’ve done was never done for money. If anything, I can see AI taking over work turning programming away from being a career and into a way for people to express themselves artistically the way you see with demo scene, live coding, generative art and so on. I don’t see that as a bad thing.
What you’re afraid of is precisely what was tried with outsourcing dev jobs. That proved to work in some areas where you have very boring crud apps, but was a complete failure in others. I expect LLMs are just going to work out in a very similar fashion.
Okay but like again, I’m not afraid of losing my job. I’m afraid that we’re going to lose real capability as a society. It’s how our oligarchs are practically morons compared to past oligarchs who built hundreds of libraries, or how we don’t have the real capacity in the US to build rail.
I’m currently working as a platform architect coordinating 5 teams over multiple products building a platform for authoring, publishing and managing rich educational courses across multiple different grade levels. I do most of the greenfield development still, I personally manage a DSL and tools for it, while figuring out platform requirements and timelines for other teams including my own. I used to work on a real time EEG system doing architecture and signal processing. I’ve architected and implemented medical logistics platforms. I’ve been a first engineer at a couple of startups. I’ve literally written purpose built ORMs, schedulers, middleware frameworks, and query frameworks from scratch. I’ve worked at almost every major common role at a principal level except security (which is mostly fake) and embedded so front end, back end, database optimization/integration, infrastructure, machine code on JVM and X86, and distributed computing. I haven’t work in niches like networking, industrial, ML or quantum, I’d only really want to explore quantum or networking in reality. But quantum is something you typically need PhDs for otherwise it’s gonna be a bit grunty. OSS may bring up engineers for some of these roles, but in practice the majority of OSS projects don’t reach the level of complexity that I’ve worked at – the ones that do aren’t community projects they’re corporate ones.
Very few people can step into my shoes, most principal engineers I’ve met average out at a large project where they implemented a strangler once or twice. The system currently has a hard time reproducing me, if the bottom falls out it’s gonna be good game. I’m happy that LLMs are helping you rediscover your passion, but the kind of stuff you’re talking about are toys. Personally they’re not fun, they’re mostly boring, I enjoy building large technical systems in complex problem spaces in a high level reproducible way. Everything else gets stale quickly. I’ve built out systems where if you blow on the code the tests turn red without test maintenance and creation being a burden. The goal was high value test in 5 minutes in that system. The future I see is that everything is just shittier because the skill that is hard to find and is dying is understanding the essential complexity at the 10,000 ft view, the 100 ft view, the 1 ft view, and the 1 micrometer view. I can barely find developers who can innately understand essential complexity at one of those view points. I’ve met about 20 who can do all 4 and I’ve met maybe like 400-ish devs in my life.
The only passion project I wanted to start I basically decided to call off because if successful it would be bad for the world. I wanted to build a high level persona management software that could build swarms in the tens of thousands without being discovered.
If LLM removes programming as a job, might be nice, but in practice it’s just gonna mean more people on the struggle bus.
I’m afraid that we’re going to lose real capability as a society.
The US has far bigger problems than LLMs to worry about in the near future. Personally, I’d be far more worried about the rate of deindustrialization in the states, lack of people who know trades, engineers, farmers, and so on. All of that is far more crucial than the software industry. Meanwhile, even if people started losing this expertise, it’s not like it can’t be learned again if needed. The whole software industry has only existed for a handful of decades, and society got on just fine before it appeared. This is just complete hyperbole I’m afraid.
What I think is most likely to happen with serious engineering going forward is that the human aspect of the work will shift towards writing formal specifications that encode the desired constraints for the system, including things like memory usage, runtime complexity, and so on, and then having LLMs figure out how to generate code that passes the spec.
Incidentally, you can do this stuff without LLMs as well, for example Barliman is a program synthesis engine that is able to take a signature for a function and figure out an implementation, it can even compose functions it already wrote to solve more complex problems. Combining something like that with LLMs could be very effective.
I see this is as a similar advancement as creation of high level languages. Plenty of people moaned that nobody learned assembly anymore when C showed up, and making very similar arguments to the ones you’re making. Then people started moaning about garbage collection, and how you weren’t a real programmer if you weren’t managing memory by hand. Every time a new technology comes around that makes programming easier and more accessible, there are inevitably people screaming that the sky is falling. LLMs is just the latest iteration of this phenomenon.
And more people struggling on the bus because we have more automation is a result of capitalist relations. That’s where the ire should be directed.
What you’re afraid of is precisely what was tried with outsourcing dev jobs. That proved to work in some areas where you have very boring crud apps, but was a complete failure in others. I expect LLMs are just going to work out in a very similar fashion.
Meanwhile, the most enjoyable coding I’ve done was never done for money. If anything, I can see AI taking over work turning programming away from being a career and into a way for people to express themselves artistically the way you see with demo scene, live coding, generative art and so on. I don’t see that as a bad thing.
Okay but like again, I’m not afraid of losing my job. I’m afraid that we’re going to lose real capability as a society. It’s how our oligarchs are practically morons compared to past oligarchs who built hundreds of libraries, or how we don’t have the real capacity in the US to build rail.
I’m currently working as a platform architect coordinating 5 teams over multiple products building a platform for authoring, publishing and managing rich educational courses across multiple different grade levels. I do most of the greenfield development still, I personally manage a DSL and tools for it, while figuring out platform requirements and timelines for other teams including my own. I used to work on a real time EEG system doing architecture and signal processing. I’ve architected and implemented medical logistics platforms. I’ve been a first engineer at a couple of startups. I’ve literally written purpose built ORMs, schedulers, middleware frameworks, and query frameworks from scratch. I’ve worked at almost every major common role at a principal level except security (which is mostly fake) and embedded so front end, back end, database optimization/integration, infrastructure, machine code on JVM and X86, and distributed computing. I haven’t work in niches like networking, industrial, ML or quantum, I’d only really want to explore quantum or networking in reality. But quantum is something you typically need PhDs for otherwise it’s gonna be a bit grunty. OSS may bring up engineers for some of these roles, but in practice the majority of OSS projects don’t reach the level of complexity that I’ve worked at – the ones that do aren’t community projects they’re corporate ones.
Very few people can step into my shoes, most principal engineers I’ve met average out at a large project where they implemented a strangler once or twice. The system currently has a hard time reproducing me, if the bottom falls out it’s gonna be good game. I’m happy that LLMs are helping you rediscover your passion, but the kind of stuff you’re talking about are toys. Personally they’re not fun, they’re mostly boring, I enjoy building large technical systems in complex problem spaces in a high level reproducible way. Everything else gets stale quickly. I’ve built out systems where if you blow on the code the tests turn red without test maintenance and creation being a burden. The goal was high value test in 5 minutes in that system. The future I see is that everything is just shittier because the skill that is hard to find and is dying is understanding the essential complexity at the 10,000 ft view, the 100 ft view, the 1 ft view, and the 1 micrometer view. I can barely find developers who can innately understand essential complexity at one of those view points. I’ve met about 20 who can do all 4 and I’ve met maybe like 400-ish devs in my life.
The only passion project I wanted to start I basically decided to call off because if successful it would be bad for the world. I wanted to build a high level persona management software that could build swarms in the tens of thousands without being discovered.
If LLM removes programming as a job, might be nice, but in practice it’s just gonna mean more people on the struggle bus.
The US has far bigger problems than LLMs to worry about in the near future. Personally, I’d be far more worried about the rate of deindustrialization in the states, lack of people who know trades, engineers, farmers, and so on. All of that is far more crucial than the software industry. Meanwhile, even if people started losing this expertise, it’s not like it can’t be learned again if needed. The whole software industry has only existed for a handful of decades, and society got on just fine before it appeared. This is just complete hyperbole I’m afraid.
What I think is most likely to happen with serious engineering going forward is that the human aspect of the work will shift towards writing formal specifications that encode the desired constraints for the system, including things like memory usage, runtime complexity, and so on, and then having LLMs figure out how to generate code that passes the spec.
Incidentally, you can do this stuff without LLMs as well, for example Barliman is a program synthesis engine that is able to take a signature for a function and figure out an implementation, it can even compose functions it already wrote to solve more complex problems. Combining something like that with LLMs could be very effective.
I see this is as a similar advancement as creation of high level languages. Plenty of people moaned that nobody learned assembly anymore when C showed up, and making very similar arguments to the ones you’re making. Then people started moaning about garbage collection, and how you weren’t a real programmer if you weren’t managing memory by hand. Every time a new technology comes around that makes programming easier and more accessible, there are inevitably people screaming that the sky is falling. LLMs is just the latest iteration of this phenomenon.
And more people struggling on the bus because we have more automation is a result of capitalist relations. That’s where the ire should be directed.