It's really not clear. We might all become unemployable. But as coders become more powerful, they can do more, which makes them more valuable, if they or the businesses empluying them can invent work to do.
If all we can do is compete for the same fixed amount of work, though, it does look bleak.
Even with this strategy, you're not retiring at 45 unless you are frugal, have cheap hobbies, and never have kids or a non-working spouse. Also take care that you don't have any parents, siblings, or extended family that come to rely on you. Also don't forget expect to live anywhere even remotely expensive, unless you like camping.
My wife and I have kids and live on a single income, and we're on track to retire in between ages 45 and 50.
We live in Ohio, and I suppose we would qualify as frugal and having cheap hobbies. But I certainly don't feel like we're missing out on a lot.
We also set aside over $1,000 a month for giving, with some of it going to various individuals and organizations automatically and some of it just waiting for when we see a need.
Do you understand you are very likely in the top 15% of the country in income earners, how do you expect people making less than $80k (of which there are plenty of programmers that make this amount)?
Do you understand that your extreme massive privilege is something very few people will ever able to obtain? What should they do? Work until they're 80 and die on the job?
If you're a programmer in the United States making less than $80k, hell, $100k, step 1 to your retirement plan is start looking for a new job immediately.
You're not wrong, a family is more expensive. But if both parents pull the same (or similar) salary, it is enough to still retire at 45. Requires using more tax-advantaged plans to play for college, and may not work well in expensive cities.
Re: cheap hobbies, I used to date a public school teacher. She would save to go on guided trips to Antarctica, Peru, the Galapagos, New Zealand. You can live an amazing life if you plan for it.
The median household income in the US is $83,730 [1] - half of households are on less than that.
If you earn $100k and are willing to have the median lifestyle, and you can find a spouse that's willing, then the numbers work just fine.
Challenges include lifestyle inflation; housing costs if your six-figure job is in an expensive area; and finding a partner who's willing to be put in what is often a vulnerable and low-status position.
Diversity doesn't make places more dangerous (if i understand the stats). But humans are naturally tribal and fear those who look and act significantly different.
That depends on an arbitrary perception of 'my tribe'. Irish and Italians used to riot against each other. Germans were hated (look up a quote from Benjamin Franklin). Protestants and Catholics used to riot. Every wave of immigrants seems to get the same treatment by some.
Within a few generations, their decendants marry each other.
Because humans are tribal they will also go on to attack and prey on those who are outside their tribe, making diversity more dangerous. Especially when diversity is not merely some people of different ethnic/racial backgrounds living and working together, but a population split into isolated cultures with different circumstances.
Unless there's a big strict enforcer to keep everyone in line of course.
This is something a lot of people seem to believe that is not borne out in the research. Plenty of specific counter examples like Queens NY, a densely populated and exceptionally diverse place with crime rates comparable or better than many much more homogenous places in America. Poverty and income inequality are much better predictors. I felt this reddit comment from a while ago did a pretty good job rolling up sources on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/comments/1jxff...
This distinction seems more arbitrary over time. Growing up I was taught different species couldn’t interbreed. But what about Neanderthal and Sapiens?
I have seen this as well, except the UI ends up all looking similar, because the harness prompt and training data doesn’t change much
The average becomes the same shade of gray. Familiarity breeds contempt. New types of design will emerge that are expensive to copy, because differentiation drives competition
Which is perfectly adequate for 95% of applications. Hell, it’d probably improve most applications if they adopted some proven shade of gray.
Why do people feel that each and every tool they use needs its own unique look and feel? And why are people willing to pay more for that? In some cases, sure. For my smart sprinkler app.. I don’t give a damn if it looks like 1000 other apps.
I’d actually prefer if all of them looked and worked the same, especially useful if you have elderly family members you need to teach how to use app for XYZ. all government websites (especially functional ones that citizens use to do something on) for instance should be exactly the same
Y’all would have much more productive conversations about AI if you were even for a second able to differentiate the aspects of $x that you care about as a craft via which the majority of people care about. HN has truly become the embodiment of the “this is fine” meme.
The important point is that 2 years ago these AI tools were like 20% percentile for UX designers, today it is as good as a junior or normal UI UX Developer, 2 years from now it will be in 90th percentile, etc
Same way you do today; you trust whoever wrote the query.
I do not sell a wrapper on top of some LLM; you can absolutely write your SQL directly. There is an engine, there are iceberg tables. You can just live your best life doing your own SQL by hand.
Now if you couldnt do it before and you have a sensible understanding, you can likely do a bit more with the CLI tooling. And if you know a lot more, you can still do that. The queries are not hidden, or abstracted, If you need them they will be saved - transparently in SQL.
So I dont know what is the answer to the question "how do people do things they don't know how to do" ?
> So I dont know what is the answer to the question "how do people do things they don't know how to do" ?
The statue quo had been to learn SQL or ask a human you trust to check their own work, which hopefully you can reuse.
Now it's ask AIs that are intentionally a bit random, and less likely to (or incapable of) check(ing) their work. Perhaps without seeing the SQL at all, requiring to trust it for every interaction. And in a culture that moves so fast that there is no checking by any(one|thing).
No they don't. To be able to "check one's work", implies that they can be held accountable, that they can tell apart right from wrong, when in reality they're merely text predictors.
If you think an LLMs can check their work, then you are doing a terrible job at writing software. Plain and simple.
They even go as far as "cheating", so tests fail, writing incorrect tests, or straight out leaking code (lol) like the latest Claude Code blunder. Is this the tool the original comment "is using wrong, plain and simple"? Or do you have access to some other model that works in a wildly different way than generating text predictions?
in this case to make a local copy of the db, fill it with a set of records with an expected output of the query, then check to see of the query produces what you want.
you could then have it make queries that check the various assumptions that went into that artificial set of data. if it can find the assumptions broken, add records like that to the test set.
same old agentic programming techniques as ever. use your engineering skill to set up feedback loops. stuff that was painful to do as an engineer for checking your work is now straightforward
Feedback loops require a deterministic metric for success. You are doing the equivalent of using a slot machine to decide whether something is right or wrong.
Maybe limit total number of transfers among all tickets. Because it should be a small minority of legit transfers.
Scalpers should be less likely to take a chance their transfer will be denied, whereas to a legit customer and friend ticket is otherwise worthless and just a best effort anyway.
Or beyond the first X% of transfers you do more rigorous validation. Like asking for the original buyer to call in to confirm in realtime. Something not easily automated.
reply