Yes, but that's in psychology. Different fields have their own terms without causing too many issues. Communication breaks down when we reuse terms for different things within the same field.

It just really hurts that I spent well over a decade of my life learning and honing skills to engineer safe, quality software and now it's just, useless.

It can feel that way with all the hype but I very much doubt that is really true. I see an industry that is rapidly dividing into two camps - "move fast and break things" and "this actually needs to work". Writing everything with agents and merging while barely even checking what is in the PR has become standard practice in the former but it will get you laughed out of the room in the latter.

I was fortunate and saved up enough to live frugally and just work on passion/learning projects for a while. I've been considering going back into commercial software development as a solo dev and leveraging AI, but keeping the focus on quality and craftsmanship. In my opinion there's never been a better time to start a new, ambitious project if you're passionate about quality software.

> This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now.

I went nuts for years, until I sold off my interest in my dream partnership.

10 years of heaven. All the benefits and none of the downsides of my internal colleagues. Then 14 years of bureaucracy aimed at predictability over progress, which was infinitely more difficult for me to dodge as an external player.

Compensation for my interest was very objectively valued, with the rate of stalled progress priced in. Which made complete sense, while also being its own madness.

I walked away from so much value, but I don't regret it for a minute.

> and some of them are going nuts now.

Pretty much this. I know it sounds melodramatic but it literally feels like rotting.

I don't solve anything anymore. I don't get any spark of fixing bugs. I don't DO ANYTHING, and it's fucking chipping away at me.

Also I'm fairly sure people are going to realise soon that if they're happy with slop, they don't actually need highly trained engineers anymore.

This whole thread actually prompted me to look into electrician work, especially in renewables that we have here in Norway.

I might fix my burnout and go to school to get my 2 year qualification. AI can't rewire a hydro dam.

You'll find that design matters when token spend starts facing real accounting.

Tech debt is still tech debt, even if there exist models that can wade through, because it's going to require increasingly sophisticated models navigating increasingly large context windows and increasingly speculative workspace operations to keep making progress on it.

Vendors like Anthropic and OpenAI are laying a pit trap when they demonstrate how their models can independently code their whole platform as it becomes increasingly byzantine and inscrutable because not only do they benefit from internal/prerelease models but they have effectively unlimited spend because all that spending acts as a lure to draw you into their trap.

For everybody else, design still matters. People are just working really hard to make you forget.

You can work the way you want to work. In my experience, letting the agent make every decision leads to a big ball of mud that requires touching dozens of files to make a change. More context is needed, it burns through tokens much faster, and the agent takes shortcuts and builds technical debt. So the way I prefer to work is to have changes targeted to a single file or small set of files where I've defined the API. Maybe that will change in the future, I'm not set in stone here.

What still is true for all fields of LLMs: if you can’t tell they do it suboptimally, you are just not that knowledgable in that area.

It still applies to all things LLms can do from law to code to art to ideas.

They can do it - and very acceptably - but only to the untrained eye.

No one at all claimed that, certainly not the person you responded to. They're talking about how to use these tools in a way that gives you insight into what they produce. So, as an engineer, you know the shape of the output, before it's made.

That's it. Maybe you should go re-read?

Why is that so hard to believe? I don't always do this, but I do course-correct Claude on almost every big change. YOLOing it would superficially look fine, until the latent issues catch up with you.

Maybe they are?