Maybe I'm the one who is out of touch here. Maybe AI truly is groundbreaking and earth shattering. But I can't help but read these two above excerpts, and think of a person in 2005 firing up...
When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this.
When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.
Maybe I'm the one who is out of touch here. Maybe AI truly is groundbreaking and earth shattering. But I can't help but read these two above excerpts, and think of a person in 2005 firing up WordPress and thinking they would have paid tens of thousands to have a developer make that website. When they actually would have used geocities or a more basic html template instead. I can't help but think of someone exporting a data set into Excel, running the Filter function, cleaning it up, and thinking they could have charged hundreds of thousands as a consultant for that. It's just a gross misunderstanding of what proper development can actually accomplish, and where you actually get value from hiring a human.
AI isn't going to be able to replace the web development team of a fortune 500. It can't replace the inhouse IT of these companies. If you try to do that, you are going to have huge issues that cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime. What are you going to do when your VPN goes down at 7 am on Monday if you don't have someone who supports it? Or when your sales portal designed by Claude crashes, or refunds all of your customers but keeps shipping orders? What do you do when a bug lists a $1,000 item for $0.10?
The $350k for dataset clean seems absurd, or seems to assume a temp rate billed yearly even though it wasn't. Something like a $175 an hour for top of the line work for a one and done temp job is...
The $350k for dataset clean seems absurd, or seems to assume a temp rate billed yearly even though it wasn't. Something like a $175 an hour for top of the line work for a one and done temp job is believable, but obviously you're not actually charging $350k.
Data cleanup CAN be somewhere where AI could punch above its weight because you might know the correct answer and thus can quickly check if the AI got it right (everything SHOULD sum to X, but it's not), however it's a lot more likely to be one of the worst possible uses? When you can't check the AI's output it's hard to tell if it's actually getting the right result or just getting a result that passes a cursory glance.
In the end without a link to the data (which I know they can't) I feel like I'd default to "and then everyone clapped" energy on it. Could also just be an insane cost of living area (Cali/NY) which is another reason I hate raw numbers thrown out like that without some sort of breakdown as to why they'd make sense.
Feeding an LLM thousands of raw data cells to manually transform is an awful idea that inevitably results in hallucinations somewhere along the way. Using an LLM to create a script or function is...
When you can't check the AI's output it's hard to tell if it's actually getting the right result or just getting a result that passes a cursory glance.
Feeding an LLM thousands of raw data cells to manually transform is an awful idea that inevitably results in hallucinations somewhere along the way. Using an LLM to create a script or function is more reasonable, but it's still not very accessible to someone that has never heard of R or pandas.
I mean you can do it in raw VBA, but this is where we go in the loop of the author supposedly charging 350k for the work. I'm having a hard time seeing work like that EVER only needing in sheet...
I mean you can do it in raw VBA, but this is where we go in the loop of the author supposedly charging 350k for the work. I'm having a hard time seeing work like that EVER only needing in sheet manipulation.
There are businesses that work on high-end websites and also freelancers who build very cheap ones. The people who hire a team of professionals to work for months on a website are an entirely...
There are businesses that work on high-end websites and also freelancers who build very cheap ones. The people who hire a team of professionals to work for months on a website are an entirely different market.
Great, another article trying to convince us that AI is good and the future is now. I guess I better allow them to increase my hydro bill so they can build more data centres! You know you have a...
Great, another article trying to convince us that AI is good and the future is now. I guess I better allow them to increase my hydro bill so they can build more data centres! You know you have a winning product when you have to set endless amounts of money on fire to convince everyone that actually your AI slop is good.
You're in BC I take it then? BC Hydro banned crypto mining, we should either put a higher cost on power for AI data centers or just ban them from using our power as well.
my hydro bill
You're in BC I take it then?
BC Hydro banned crypto mining, we should either put a higher cost on power for AI data centers or just ban them from using our power as well.
From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]
From the article:
November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.
[...]
Personally this all feels premature, but markets aren’t subtle thinkers. And I get it. When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.
That last price is full 2021 retail — it implies a product manager, a designer, two engineers (one senior) and four to six months of design, coding and testing. Plus maintenance. Bespoke software is joltingly expensive. Today, though, when the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month plan.
That’s not an altogether pleasant feeling. The faces of former employees keep flashing before me. All those designers and JavaScript coders. I could not hire the majority of them now, because I would have no idea how to bill for their time. Some companies, including IBM, think A.I. will create tons of new jobs. But no one thinks they’ll be the same as the old jobs.
[...]
Is the software I’m making for myself on my phone as good as handcrafted, bespoke code? No. But it’s immediate and cheap. And the quantities, measured in lines of text, are large. It might fail a company’s quality test, but it would meet every deadline. That is what makes A.I. coding such a shock to the system.
[...]
Except … what if, going forward, it’s not? What if software suddenly wanted to ship? What if all of that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling range of costs that you need to make the computer compute, just goes poof? That doesn’t mean that the software will be good. But most software today is not good. It simply means that products could go to market very quickly.
And for lots of users, that’s going to be fine. People don’t judge A.I. code the same way they judge slop articles or glazed videos. They’re not looking for the human connection of art. They’re looking to achieve a goal. Code just has to work.
[...]
The market keeps convulsing, and I wish we could hit the brakes. But we live in a brakeless era.
No matter where you work, my hunch is this is coming for you. Have you noticed the software you use every day adding “A.I. features”? That’s the top of the slippery slope. Whatever unifying principle equates to ship risk in your industry, people are trying to mitigate it with A.I. Insurance, finance, architecture, manufacturing, textiles, every kind of project management — they want to automate it all through A.I.
[...]
I’ve spent my last few years working with a team to build an A.I. software platform, trying to help clients and customers navigate all of these changes. That sounds like the perfect job for the moment, right? It’s not. Every six months, some new A.I. bomb goes off in our industry, and we have to metabolize the change, reset our product, change our strategy and marketing and adapt, at great expense. Our road map keeps getting pushed back as a result of all this “progress.” Everyone is fried.
[...]
All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.
Here is why: I collect stories of software woe. I think of the friend at an immigration nonprofit who needs to click countless times, in mounting frustration, to generate critical reports. Or the small business owners trying to operate everything with email and losing orders as a result. Or my doctor, whose time with patients is eaten up by having to tap furiously into the hospital’s electronic health record system.
[...]
After decades of stories like those, I believe there are millions, maybe billions, of software products that don’t exist but should: Dashboards, reports, apps, project trackers and countless others. People want these things to do their jobs, or to help others, but they can’t find the budget. They make do with spreadsheets and to-do lists.
My industry is famous for saying “no,” or selling you something you don’t need. We have an earned reputation as a lot of really tiresome dudes. But I think if vibe coding gets a little bit better, a little more accessible and a little more reliable, people won’t have to wait on us. They can just watch some how-to videos and learn, and then they can have the power of these tools for themselves. I could teach you now to make a complex web app in a few weeks. In about six months you could do a lot of things that took me 20 years to learn. I’m writing all kinds of code I never could before — but you can too. If we can’t stop the freight train, we could at least hop on for a ride.
This drives me nuts. Yes we can stop. That is the purpose of the Government - it just sucks at being proactive. We should be legislating and non-profiting real guard rails and thinking deeply...
The market keeps convulsing, and I wish we could hit the brakes. But we live in a brakeless era.
No matter where you work, my hunch is this is coming for you. Have you noticed the software you use every day adding “A.I. features”? That’s the top of the slippery slope. Whatever unifying principle equates to ship risk in your industry, people are trying to mitigate it with A.I. Insurance, finance, architecture, manufacturing, textiles, every kind of project management — they want to automate it all through A.I.
This drives me nuts. Yes we can stop. That is the purpose of the Government - it just sucks at being proactive. We should be legislating and non-profiting real guard rails and thinking deeply about what we want to happen. Instead we've let the AI companies push us into some kind of odd determinism that this is our own only possible future.
I’m curious what a regulation to stop using AI would actually look like. No LLMs in particular I guess? Because all the industries mentioned already make copious use of machine learning...
I’m curious what a regulation to stop using AI would actually look like. No LLMs in particular I guess? Because all the industries mentioned already make copious use of machine learning technology, and have for decades.
Maybe I'm the one who is out of touch here. Maybe AI truly is groundbreaking and earth shattering. But I can't help but read these two above excerpts, and think of a person in 2005 firing up WordPress and thinking they would have paid tens of thousands to have a developer make that website. When they actually would have used geocities or a more basic html template instead. I can't help but think of someone exporting a data set into Excel, running the Filter function, cleaning it up, and thinking they could have charged hundreds of thousands as a consultant for that. It's just a gross misunderstanding of what proper development can actually accomplish, and where you actually get value from hiring a human.
AI isn't going to be able to replace the web development team of a fortune 500. It can't replace the inhouse IT of these companies. If you try to do that, you are going to have huge issues that cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime. What are you going to do when your VPN goes down at 7 am on Monday if you don't have someone who supports it? Or when your sales portal designed by Claude crashes, or refunds all of your customers but keeps shipping orders? What do you do when a bug lists a $1,000 item for $0.10?
The $350k for dataset clean seems absurd, or seems to assume a temp rate billed yearly even though it wasn't. Something like a $175 an hour for top of the line work for a one and done temp job is believable, but obviously you're not actually charging $350k.
Data cleanup CAN be somewhere where AI could punch above its weight because you might know the correct answer and thus can quickly check if the AI got it right (everything SHOULD sum to X, but it's not), however it's a lot more likely to be one of the worst possible uses? When you can't check the AI's output it's hard to tell if it's actually getting the right result or just getting a result that passes a cursory glance.
In the end without a link to the data (which I know they can't) I feel like I'd default to "and then everyone clapped" energy on it. Could also just be an insane cost of living area (Cali/NY) which is another reason I hate raw numbers thrown out like that without some sort of breakdown as to why they'd make sense.
Feeding an LLM thousands of raw data cells to manually transform is an awful idea that inevitably results in hallucinations somewhere along the way. Using an LLM to create a script or function is more reasonable, but it's still not very accessible to someone that has never heard of R or pandas.
I mean you can do it in raw VBA, but this is where we go in the loop of the author supposedly charging 350k for the work. I'm having a hard time seeing work like that EVER only needing in sheet manipulation.
There are businesses that work on high-end websites and also freelancers who build very cheap ones. The people who hire a team of professionals to work for months on a website are an entirely different market.
Great, another article trying to convince us that AI is good and the future is now. I guess I better allow them to increase my hydro bill so they can build more data centres! You know you have a winning product when you have to set endless amounts of money on fire to convince everyone that actually your AI slop is good.
You're in BC I take it then?
BC Hydro banned crypto mining, we should either put a higher cost on power for AI data centers or just ban them from using our power as well.
Unsure if it's used elsewhere in Canada, but Ontario refers to it as a hydro bill as well.
Why does this not surprise me?
From the article:
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This drives me nuts. Yes we can stop. That is the purpose of the Government - it just sucks at being proactive. We should be legislating and non-profiting real guard rails and thinking deeply about what we want to happen. Instead we've let the AI companies push us into some kind of odd determinism that this is our own only possible future.
I’m curious what a regulation to stop using AI would actually look like. No LLMs in particular I guess? Because all the industries mentioned already make copious use of machine learning technology, and have for decades.