alt Hacker NewsAs someone who is searching for a new programming contract right now, reading all of the incredible abilities here is pretty intimidating. Especially since I get almost all of my projects from Upwork which is an outsourcing site.
I believe I am competing directly with these frontier models in some circumstances. Like there are a ton of programmers who previously would be outsourcing work to that site, but now they assign that same work to AI agents.
Ever since November 2022 when ChatGPT blew up, I have been focusing on agents in order to try to get ahead of the curve. But I haven't managed to get an agent business off the ground and have been doing poorly paid agentic projects from that site instead.
But now everyone is building agents, and this crazy list of accomplishments makes it look like we are close to the point where the agents are building agents.
In fact the next time I get an Upwork contract for another agent, I actually should run it through my agent and see how far it can get. What I'm seeing a lot of now is requests to automate as much of a business as possible.
Anyway the point is these models are just about capable of doing the entire job of analyzing a small business and building out all the agents and iterating on them with the business owner.
That's actually what I should build is a SaaS that does that. Which I would if I wasn't basically desperate to get another contract this week.
And I know Upwork is bad but I have not had much success with other options on short notice.
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> Anyway the point is these models are just about capable of doing the entire job of analyzing a small business and building out all the agents and iterating on them with the business owner.
If you search for LLM benchmarks focused on real-world tasks, you'll quickly learn this ain't the case. No point in telling business owners about that though, they need to see/learn by themselves.
Im sorry to hear about your situation. Have you blogged about it? I’m curious about how the volume of your type of work has been changing over the past 2-3 years.
As someone else who is an IT consultant.
You need to run away from any client who thinks your primary purpose is to write code. You must run away from the business if YOU think your primary purpose is to write code.
You should be able to write code and do it well, But the AIs, and I'm not even talking about the ones on the frontier, have been able to write code faster than I have for quite some time.
What you need to explain to your customers is all the things around writing code: software architecture, performance, and so on. Also make sure you have some understanding of the customers business, so you can suggest additional ways to make their lives better/make more money.
Software developers have a chance. Code monkeys? None.
I thought this comment was going to be about leveraging agents in ways your existing clientele demographic cannot or will not (yet|ever),
but then you totally jumped the shark!
To say that you're building agents, is based on a way of viewing things that isn't at all pervasive. Some might say you're building a customer support chatbot. To talk of building agents as a common activity makes sense if you use LangChain I guess, where its title is "Open Source AI Agent Framework | Build Agents Faster". But for instance, YC just released qm, and in its README it talks about customizing the agent, which is quite a bit different from just casually dropping the phrase "I'm building an agent". https://github.com/yc-software/qm
Suppose I wanted you or someone else on Upwork or Fiverr to port a Rails 4 app to Rails 8 (or React or HTMX or anything up to date and maintainable).
Assume the business logic and all edge cases work in the legacy app. The app is "done", just too old to work on or run on modern hosts. Hence the project.
Would/could you use AI to deliver the project at 10x the speed? Or at 1/10 the price? Or charge the same amount as ever?
I have a feeling the lowest-cost developers on freelance marketplaces are not very good at using the AI tools (and whatever related acumen) and need a lot of hand-holding, the same amount of effort almost as if I decided to guide AI to do it myself.
IMO, there's value you can sell in being someone that (even developers) can hand off a project to, to do end to end, if it's fully specified. Even though the buyer could do it themselves, the developer would be taking on managing it and having AI do it until it's correct, and all the little things, few as they may be.
AI should be giving contract developers superpowers. If it's not, then the limited set of contractors with the AI superpowers will be able to charge 10x as much for their time, and the actual cost of the project remains the same even if it's done 10x as fast/easily.
Curious if you see/feel this, or if there's a marketplace for "please vibe code this for me, make sure it works and is what I want".