ivanb's recent activity
-
Comment on I don’t know if my software engineering job will still exist in ten years in ~comp
-
Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
ivanb Link"Working on" is probably an overstatement in my case as I've been stuck in the ideation phase, but I've felt for quite some time now that online communities will shift more and more towards small..."Working on" is probably an overstatement in my case as I've been stuck in the ideation phase, but I've felt for quite some time now that online communities will shift more and more towards small private groups. And while solutions abound for preexisting groups (Discord, Slack, etc), there's no way to find new ones.
For example, I'm very interested in biographies of people who pushed forward our approach to food but are largely forgotten (such as Nicholas Saunders). If I meet someone interested in the same, I would probably like to discuss broader topics with them: restaurant and book recommendations, traditional food from their place, etc. It's these "very specific" interest that often act as strong indicators of broader alignment.
Right now, you have three options:
- Posting on reddit and such, which is obviously pointless
- Starting a Substack / YT channel / etc. on that topic, hoping you catch the attention of people you can then connect to. This seems to work, and many "content creators" claim that this kind of community building has been the main benefit of what they do. But it takes extreme time investment, luck and skill (and very different skills than what you need later when talking to people directly).
- Joining a community around some such creator, if they exist. Problem is that current platforms usually mix "content consumers" and "community members", and by pushing for higher numbers in the former, they often destroy the latter.
Some platforms around community building exist, but are primarily built for courses, and end up getting eaten by self-help/fin bros.
My background being in LLMs, I'm thinking of a simple platform allowing users to describe their interests in detail, then being matched into small groups automatically for introductions. No monetisation (apart from small fees to cover the operating costs), with users incentivized to move their comms to other platforms if they hit off.
If someone wants to build it so I don't have to, please do, as my time is very tight these days - I'd love to share my "plans"!
Why do you think LLMs wouldn't be able to do exactly that in a couple of years?
Regardless, a more important point I think is that people tend to conflate two ways in which AI will disrupt SWE, and then only explain away one of those: AI can write code (which you discuss here), but it can also replace code.
What you described above is "I need to wrote code to make the LLM do X with high enough accuracy". I remember ~4 years ago when a similar contrived setup was necesarry for a rather simple Text-to-SQL tool. These days it just works, without any additional scaffolding.
So the attack is coming on two fronts, and I find it rather optimistic to feel safe both ways: AI might get better at writing the code you desribed, and it might also get good enough that the code you described becomes redundant.