[kweingar]

If progress continues at the rate that AI boosters expect, then soon you won't have to use them smartly to get value (all existing workflows will churn and be replaced by newer, smarter workflows within months), and everybody who is behind will immediately catch up the moment they start to use the tool.

[abletonlive]

But if it doesn't and you're not using it now then you're gonna be behind and part of the group getting laid off

the people that are good at using these tools now will be better at it later too. you might have closed the gap quite a bit but you will still be behind

using LLMs are they are now requires a certain type of mindset that takes practice to maintain and sharpen. It's just like a competitive game. The more intentionally do it, the better you get. And the meta changes every 6 months to a year.

That's why I scroll and laugh through all the comments on this thread dismissing it, because I know that the people dismissing it are the problem.

the interface is a chatbox with no instructions or guardrails. the fact that folks think that their experience is universal is hilarious. so much of using LLM right now is context management.

I can't take most of yall in this thread seriously

[kweingar]

If the "meta" changes so quickly, then that sets an upper bound as to how far behind you are, no? Unless you are doing low-autonomy, non-specialized work or are applying to fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants startup jobs, no hiring manager is going to care if you have three months less experience with Codex than the other candidate.[1]

> so much of using LLM right now is context management

That is because the tooling is incredibly immature. Even if raw LLM capabilities end up plateauing, new and more effective tools are going to proliferate. You won't have to obsess over managing context, just like we don't have to do 2023-level tricks like "you are an expert" or "please explain your thought process" anymore. All of the context management tricks will be obsolete very soon... because AI tooling companies are extremely incentivized to solve it.

I find it implausible that the tech is in a state where full-time prompters are gaining a durable advantage over everyone else. J2ME devs probably thought they were building a snowballing advantage over devs who dismissed mobile development. Then the iPhone came out and totally reset the playing field.

[1] Most employers don't distinguish between three months and nine months of experience with JS framework du jour, no matter what it says on the job listing

Edited to add: Claude Code brought the agentic coding trend to the mainstream. It came out three months ago. You talk about how much you're laughing at the naivete of people here, but are you telling me with a straight face that three months is enough to put a talented engineer "behind"? At risk of being unemployable? The engineers who spent the last three months ping-ponging between Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc. can have their experience distilled into like a week of explaining to a newcomer, and I predict that will be true six months from now, or a year from now.