.org was bought by a private equity

It is meant to offset not knowing why everything degrades and you can't make progress after the first month. Is that OK for you?

No you misunderstand me. I support such a view but cannot hold it because my pace at work is so much fast. And hand coding like this will make personal projects s slow and choreful with no visible progress. Like where is the joy in that?

The bottleneck is very rarely the typing.

Has this been your first hand experience?

And if so, in what work, and have you tried debugging issues with SOTA models?

From my experience it is certainly not the case that you cannot make progress after the first month.

I work on native mobile applications.

I work on mobile native applications.

Without an active harness (eg. Appium) that can end-to-end deterministically verify the changes you make continue to work correctly it is almost impossible to continue to keep the same pace on the app.

Unsupervised LLMs (even fabel) are categorically incapable of running parallel unsupervised mobile app feature development.

That is my personal, first hand experience working in a team in this space.

What you are (I guess?) experiencing is user-in-the-loop light touch LLM development where you can 80% most tasks quite quickly (much faster than without assistance!) with a small number of human developers working on largely unrelated features and manually verifying they are correct and manually fixing the platform specific issues you encounter.

Maintaining a strong appium end-to-end test suite is still extremely challenging with notifications and maps.

Honestly, it blows my mind you could even being to claim that of all things, native apps using obscure languages like swift are suitable for this, compared to the much much easier path of web + react.

You might say “yeah yeah, but one month? Come on!”

…but have you actually seen how much code fabel can write in a month?

Its a lot.

So sure, you say, work at a slower pace. Don't just endlessly run a frontier model in unsupervised feature development mode.

Yes… you see, thats the point. Thats what the op is saying.

Move more slowly, and you can avoid building a spaghetti castle (ok sure! If you dont wanna, maybe don't retype every character by hand, but the point of that practice is not upping your wpm typing speed. :p It is to take the time to think, design and collaborate, not rush rush rush)

I have no idea what "an active harness" is referring to, Appium looks like a cross platform testing framework.

I doubt it brings any advantage over XCUITest here.

What is supposed to be the problem with parallel development? I use worktrees, and it works just fine with five agents in parallel.

Automated end-to-end testing on mobile is notoriously flaky, but that's nothing new, and I think it is now much easier to deal with.

Depends what they're doing... I can crack out a basic UI in a few hours at my job, and I don't use LLMs at all, and I wouldn't class myself as an expert developer or anything

Do you really find your typing speed to be the bottleneck in getting things done? I suppose that's pretty easily fixed, at least.

Anyway the author did address that

> Using LLMs this way allows me to work faster than not using LLMs at all, but I'm still slower than those who are willing to allow the machine to think for them. Instead of being 10x faster, I'm probably only 2x faster. But what I lose out on in terms of speed, I gain in terms of a deeper understanding of my code.

AKA preventing cognitive debt

When it comes to cost per implemeting SPEC, agents are far cheaper than human salary. So, it's not going to go well.

That said thankfully there's no way of measuring a good SPEC yet. If there is that will collapse the SWEs profession.

Quite a few people do believe that a good specification is long, has multiple levels of headings, interspersed bold text, bullet points, and so on. Definitely, this is what they have seen happen throughout their lives: competent people have heaped praise on documentation which has had these signs, so this must be what good documentation looks like.

SQL isn't an allergy. It's time test. Take medicine to fix your allergy.

You are making a wrong assumption that more knowlege leads to more comp, it never has or will.

I’d certainly not say it’s everything, look at all the highly-paid mediocre CEOs. Education has rigorously been shown to lead to higher incomes and wealth on average.

Education is not knowledge either. Today market most directly pays for skilled work that increases revenue/profit. Correlation drops after that. It's a struggle I've been trying to reason for myself too.

True, but high-quality education, whether personal or formally, tends to produce high-quality knowledge.

Yes, companies pay for what’s perceived to create revenue and profit (and yes, skills are a major factor in that).

Has there been anytime, when senior experts in a field, are consistently maintaining this time it's different? You can ignore this at your own peril.

The root cause if of course AI's role in loss of power on compensation (coding as a skill is no longer as valuable), and loss of power in labor vs capital.

It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.

The contrarian bet is that being able to code (by yourself) may be more valuable in the future. It will certainly become rarer.

We shall see. My area of coding for a living is SO specialized and SO far from 'skill at literal coding' that I'm making that bet, because I don't stand to benefit from anything else: if I go for AI it will directly relegate me to sheer vibe-coding as the AI will immediately go for abstractions that are more sophisticated 'code' than I know. It'll do them wrong but I won't know the difference and won't be able to criticize them.

That's so worthless and doomed to failure that there's no point attempting it, so I do the coding my own primitive way and focus on the specialty I do.

I can tell you the risk: any sufficiently motivated AI can go after my userbase by simply lying and claiming it's doing my thing better than I am. There'll be people who can't tell the difference, so if the AI is able to leverage more marketing and resources it may well succeed.

Only defense I have is to continue to do what I do, like some artisanal box-maker able to survive because they're doing exquisite work making something you can get a cardboard version of at Home Depot for a buck seventy-eight. Then when I die, there is ONLY cardboard, assuming there aren't people learning to make artisanal boxes.

The industry should give more security in exchange for reduced pay. We need a social movement for this.

This could have a shot if we also recommend to companies that, they should convert overall pay to ~2/3 for employees, and with the 1/3 extra hire more people. so every company that opts in has no higher people budget, but generates more employment.

This only requires that everyone take a pay cut to help their peer citizens. I would sign up for this. But would the majority - would you? yes/no - and why?