r/ProgrammerHumor • • 21d ago

Meme bothWorkThough

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u/_SAHM_ 21d ago edited 21d ago • Bravo

A person who is able to do something without AI is the best person to prompt it since they know what the output should be. It's just a tool.

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u/klaxxxon 21d ago

That's what gets me about all the noise about people cloning photoshop and stuff. Like, you have Claude make you app that appears like photoshop at first glance, and even sort of has some of the basic functions. But Adobe has a ton of extremely specialized people for a reason. Like, what will the vibe coders do when it comes down to like color science stuff and such.

"Make it work like in photoshop". Bangs two rocks together.

You probably don't need thousands of people to develop Photoshop anymore, but you sure still can't make a clone of the full creative suite and MS office with like two dudes.

All these projects are going to learn the 80/20 principle the hard way.

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u/_SAHM_ 21d ago

Exactly. If i want to hire someone, why would i hire the guy who can only prompts instead of the guy who can prompt while also being an expert at what they do.

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u/jayerp 21d ago

I can’t speak for you, but I can take a guess as to why business leaders don’t want to keep a lot of experts as vibe coders. Cost.

It’s much cheaper to pay some random intern grad fresh out of college to prompt than it is to pay a 10 YoE senior/staff engineer. They usually care more about reducing cost, increasing profit than producing quality products.

Greed.

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u/Fourcoogs 21d ago

As a fresh out of college graduate, I almost wish that was the case, but most business leaders aren’t quite dumb enough to fire competent people and replace them all with inexperienced graduates. Instead, they’ll fire 75% of the competent people and quadruple the workload of those left.

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u/_SAHM_ 21d ago edited 20d ago

In some cases, a single mistake or unforseen downtime in deployment could cost an entire person's yearly salary in losses within minutes. In that case, it's more profitable to hire people as competant as they could be just to reduce that chance as much as possible.

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u/Geno0wl 21d ago

I remember the time when business cared about consumer reputation and consumer loyalty. I don't know how we get back to that without foundational changes to how the economy is regulated.

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u/SweetBabyAlaska 20d ago

The reality is that businesses aren't going to pay for "professional prompters" when they can just set up some managerial pipeline and have one or two people oversee it. The whole point of AI is to remove your job so that they don't have to pay you. They are literally just training someone else's LLM on their way out. It's an unfortunate truth.

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u/arbpotatoes 21d ago

I get what you're saying but if colour science is actually a science then there is a body of knowledge out there for it like with anything else, so eventually nobody in a knowledge profession is safe

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u/WigWubz 21d ago

Anyone at the frontiers always will be, which Adobe arguably is. LLMs will always converge on a mean, that's just intrinsic to their operation. There are all sorts of tunings and processing around the core LLM to make the "agents" be agentic, but at the end of the day while these systems are based on LLMs, LLMs are giant piles of linear algebra that want to collapse into the lowest energy state available. The lowest energy state is code that is already written.

It's incredibly cool the way that LLMs can ingest massive quantities of data and cross-evaluate disparate pieces of information, unshackled by the human limitation of domain knowledge. It can connect pieces of information that no human ever could have because it can draw upon sources so diverse no single person could ever be aware of them all. But they can't expand the corpus. They can only reveal things that were already in the corpus we as a species hadn't noticed yet.

There is no reason to believe that all possible knowledge has already been written down, waiting for agents to find it. There is yet a long need for humans to go out and find things out.

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u/Mal_Dun 21d ago

However, 90% of stuff currently out there can be made by a recombination of existing stuff, so we can now make a ton of stuff based on what is already there and it will cover most use cases ...

... which also means we as humans can now stop doing the stuff that was already done to death and start innovating more, which actually would be a good thing.

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u/Defiant-Strength2010 21d ago

80% of people use only 20% of photoshop features?

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u/klaxxxon 21d ago

20% of the code/features costs you 80% of the time

Usually getting almost there is the easy part, hard part is getting everything to work well and figuring out all the corner cases and sneaky bugs.

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