Companies that leverage LLMs and AIs to let their employees be more productive will thrive.
Companies that try to replace their employees with LLMs and AIs will fail.
Unfortunately, all that's in the long run. In the near term, some CEOs and management teams will profit from the short term valuations as they squander their companies' future growth on short-sighted staff cuts.
That's really it. These tools are useful as assistants to programmers but do not replace an actual programmer. The right course is to embrace the technology moderately rather than reject it completely or bet on it replacing workers.
> In the near term, some CEOs and management teams will profit from the short term valuations
That's actually really interesting to think about. The idea that doing something counter-productive like trying to replace employees with AI (which will cause problems), may actually benefit the company in terms of valuations in the short run. So in effect, they're hurting and helping the company at the same time.
Hey if the check clears for the bonus they got for hitting 'reduce costs in the IT department', they often bail before things rear their ugly head, or in the ugly case, Reality Distortion Field's the entire org into making the bad anti patterns permanent, even while acknowledging the cost/delivery/quality inefficiencies[0].
This is especially prevalent in waterfall orgs that refuse change. Body shops are more than happy to waste a huge portion of their billable hours on planning meetings and roadmap revisions as the obviousness of the mythical man month comes to bear on the org.
Corners get cut to meet deadlines, because the people who started/perpetuated whatever myth need to save their skins (and hopefully continue to get bonuses.)
The engineers become a scapegoat for the org's management problems (And watch, it very likely will happen at some shops with the 'AI push'). In the nasty cases, the org actively disempowers engineers in the process[0][1].
[0] - At one shop, there was grief we got that we hadn't shipped a feature, but the only reason we hadn't, was IT was not allowed to decide between a set of radio buttons or a drop-down on a screen. Hell I got yelled at for just making the change locally and sending screenshots.
[1] - At more than one shop, FTE devs were responsible for providing support for code written by offshore that they were never even given the opportunity to review. And hell yes myself and others pushed for change, but it's never been a simple change. It almost always is 'GLWT'->'You get to review the final delivery but get 2 days'->'You get to review the set of changes'->'Ok you can review their sprint'->'OK just start reviewing every PR'.
See also: Toys 'R' Us, Seers, which were killed by consultancy groups loading on debt and selling assets for an immediate profit, which helped the immediate shareholders but hurt all of the stakeholders.
Very well said. Using code assistance is going to be table stakes moving forward, not something that can replace people. It’s not like competitors can’t also purchase AI subscriptions.
Honestly, if you're not doing it now, you're behind. The sheer amount of time savings using it smartly can give you to allow you to focus on the parts that actually matter is massive.
If progress continues at the rate that AI boosters expect, then soon you won't have to use them smartly to get value (all existing workflows will churn and be replaced by newer, smarter workflows within months), and everybody who is behind will immediately catch up the moment they start to use the tool.
But if it doesn't and you're not using it now then you're gonna be behind and part of the group getting laid off
the people that are good at using these tools now will be better at it later too. you might have closed the gap quite a bit but you will still be behind
using LLMs are they are now requires a certain type of mindset that takes practice to maintain and sharpen. It's just like a competitive game. The more intentionally do it, the better you get. And the meta changes every 6 months to a year.
That's why I scroll and laugh through all the comments on this thread dismissing it, because I know that the people dismissing it are the problem.
the interface is a chatbox with no instructions or guardrails. the fact that folks think that their experience is universal is hilarious. so much of using LLM right now is context management.
I can't take most of yall in this thread seriously
If the "meta" changes so quickly, then that sets an upper bound as to how far behind you are, no? Unless you are doing low-autonomy, non-specialized work or are applying to fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants startup jobs, no hiring manager is going to care if you have three months less experience with Codex than the other candidate.[1]
> so much of using LLM right now is context management
That is because the tooling is incredibly immature. Even if raw LLM capabilities end up plateauing, new and more effective tools are going to proliferate. You won't have to obsess over managing context, just like we don't have to do 2023-level tricks like "you are an expert" or "please explain your thought process" anymore. All of the context management tricks will be obsolete very soon... because AI tooling companies are extremely incentivized to solve it.
I find it implausible that the tech is in a state where full-time prompters are gaining a durable advantage over everyone else. J2ME devs probably thought they were building a snowballing advantage over devs who dismissed mobile development. Then the iPhone came out and totally reset the playing field.
[1] Most employers don't distinguish between three months and nine months of experience with JS framework du jour, no matter what it says on the job listing
Edited to add: Claude Code brought the agentic coding trend to the mainstream. It came out three months ago. You talk about how much you're laughing at the naivete of people here, but are you telling me with a straight face that three months is enough to put a talented engineer "behind"? At risk of being unemployable? The engineers who spent the last three months ping-ponging between Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc. can have their experience distilled into like a week of explaining to a newcomer, and I predict that will be true six months from now, or a year from now.
> If the "meta" changes so quickly, then that sets an upper bound as to how far behind you are, no?
No, the top players when the meta changes in competitive games remain the top players. They also figure out the new meta faster than the casual players.
This is why devs who started with J2ME are the holy grail of app developers, since they started making apps years before iPhone devs
you sound mad you could be spending this time upskilling instead.
but i'll say it again, when the meta changes the people that were at the top will quickly find themselves at the top again.
listen, the reason why they were in the top in the first place and you aren't is a mindset thing. the top are the curious that are experimenting and refining, sharing with each other techniques developed over time.
the complacent just sit around and lets the world happen to them. they, like you are expressing now, think that when the meta switches the bottom will suddenly find themselves at the top and the top will have nothing.
look around you, that's obviously not how the world works.
but yes, laughing
(I deleted a less productive comment.)
I do use these tools though! I spent some time with AI. I have coworkers who are more heads-down working on their projects and not tinkering with agents, and they're doing fine. I have coworkers who are on the absolute bleeding edge of AI tools, and they're doing fine. When the tooling matures and the churn lessens and the temperature of the discourse is lowered, I'm confident that we will all be doing great things. I just think that the "anybody not using and optimizing Codex or Claude Code today is not gonna make it" attitude is misguided. I could probably wring out some more utility from these tools if I spent more time with them, but I'd rather spend most of my professional development time working on subject matter expertise. I want to deeply understand my domain, and I trust that AI use will (mostly) become relatively easier to pick up and less of a differentiator as time goes on
> when the meta changes the people that were at the top will quickly find themselves at the top again.
I think parent is agreeing with you?
> This is why devs who started with J2ME are the holy grail of app developers, since they started making apps years before iPhone devs
I was being sarcastic there, a bad habit of mine. There are some advantages to being an early adopter (you get to reap some of the benefits now), but it doesn't give you a permanent advantage, and the people who aren't closely following and adopting weeks-old tools aren't doomed to irrelevance.
The iPhone was an equalizer. Existing mobile devs did get a genuine head start on mobile app design, but their advantage was fleeting.
By the time AI hype dies down and hurts the bottom line, AI systems might be good enough to do the jobs.
“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” — Warren Buffett