SolubleSnake

LLMs in 5 years are going to be like Solidworks and similar CAD packages for the world of physical engineering - useful tools in the hands of a trained engineer, but hardly 'autonomous workers'

No one would value Solidworks at 1.5 trillion. That is the crux of the matter

An ERP system in...LISP? None of the reasons given as to why that would be a good idea are really very convincing or specific to LISP?

The main things you want for ERP are just to simplify database interactions as far as possible and to give you as many and as customizable options as possible for data visualization and curating information for a non techie user. I dont really get why LISP?

Lol. He has fully sold out.

This is a very poor take and based on his education and the things he has done - he surely does not think this....he's pumping LLM based startups his/(others) companies are funding...embarassing for him intellectually but probably quite beneficial financially

Look at some of the shit John Carmack now says for God's sake. Throw enough money at anyone and they turn into an idiot

DJ Shadow was amazing I am going to have to re-listen to a few tracks

My opinions on functional languages in a practical professional setting is that they largely seem like a curiosity and a bit of an oddity when you encounter them in business software at work. I worked at a company migrating a huge amount of engineering data between two different PLM systems (in our case this was data around peristaltic pumps - 3D models, 2D designs, code, electrical schematics etc). We were using model manager for the source system and windchill for the target system and model manager uses Lisp for its automation of data management tasks and despite the fact I'd had to use Miranda (the precursor to Haskell) in my functional programming module at university (UCL) I found using Lisp for something so kind of quotidian didn't really give me the same feeling that 'this is something really special' when using it for something fairly mundane. It didn't really use any of the advantages of functional languages (and their advantages are sort of more around quite academic things anyway).

Going out of your way to use functional languages at work seems a bit like deliberately using a fountain pen and purposefully writing all business communication in a handwritten beautiful cursive style - it's kind of a cute affectation rather than actually of benefit

In the future it will be considered one of the most unusual cultural/social decisions ever, that large financial services firms are as they are in the Western world.

I have never seen a group of people so frantically doing nothing of any value.

I also don't know how this should work and some people's comments on this thread seem really weird to me because it seems really unlikely that someone who was eg a 'senior software developer' somewhere could be so bad that they couldn't write basic code but maybe?

In regards your comment about the Canadian idea of 'Professional Engineers' we have the same thing in the UK but it's called 'chartered engineers' and there are (more in theory than in practice) requirements around ethical and legal issues. This isn't really used in the same way I think it's used in Canada. I have worked with CEng people and I was going to go through the process (you need two sponsors you work with and you need a STEM degree that is recognised and you need 6 years of relevant experience). It's not an easy thing to get but it's not a guarantee someone is a genius or totally reliable but I haven't really seen anyone with that behaving in a way that is completely unreliable.

I wonder if it might be something to do with 'start up culture' where you've got very small teams and they're often young. You can't really tell kids to 'do a degree, get 6 years experience, qualify...then make your 'uber for milkshakes'' (or whatever they are planning to do). If you've got really young applicants you can't really expect that.

to be clear, CEng doesn't even require an exam, although everyone who would be in a position to become CEng has already done a lot of exams.

Perhaps the Leetcode thing must exist if people just refuse to qualify and want to get busy quickly. I think that is totally fine if you're making 'Uber for milkshakes' or similar but if someone is doing something that requires some responsibility then probably better to have people be vetted by accepted peers.

It's one reason I am actually going to continue pursuing the 'physical engineering' side of my career rather than the software development (software 'engineering' side of it).

I studied CS at UCL years ago but worked mostly in teams with electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineers and on projects relating to various things in relation to various different industries as different as pharmaceutical and ship building. During that time I got qualified as a CAD engineer among other things I was required to by my employer(s).

Now, when I look at software jobs and the way software developers are being interviewed...I just can't. You would never ask eg a mechanical engineer in an interview 'so, you say you know SolidWorks? Ok, design me a sphere with a chamfered cylinder extruded from the centre of the top. It should be chamfered at a 46 degree angle to a plane passing through the centre of the sphere. Also, sweep a five pointed star around the sphere at the point that is midway above the plane and the top of the sphere'.

This is effectively what Leetcode tests etc are asking. It is a waste of everyone's time because they will either do it and think 'ok, that was weird' or they will refuse and think the company is insane.

There should just be accepted certifications for software development AND THEY SHOULD BE HARD. They should be very much failable and you should expect good people still to fail once or twice (like engineering or medical exams). Then just ignore the Leetcode stuff. It serves no-one.

Then all it really comes down to is frameworks etc and if someone is familiar with that particular framework or not. Just let people qualify out of this stupid algorithmic vetting process because it's utterly daft in the context of most jobs.

Argh gawd I hate this!

There are plenty of reasons that a department within a company will prefer spreadsheets. Software is not the answer to everything and also this is the same problem you get when Microsoft introduces those pesky 'Power App' developers etc or previously the Sharepoint 'web parts' etc....essentially someone who kind of feels they are the 'owner' of some information then decides to formalise the process in their own little way.

Now you have a person wasting a bit of time making their little tool but you've also got people complaining that someone's now essentially taken control of it etc. At a former employer our procurement team used spreadsheets to track basically everything but importantly everything on our PCBs - every single component and their suppliers and prices etc (various factories around China usually). This would have been a horrible thing to try and formalise in a web app just because of how often they were all changing their own conventions etc (often suppliers changing what information they gave to them, too). It would have been a wild goose chase to formalise it and more than the trouble it would be worth.

Guessing this has to do with how China tends to turn a blind eye (although increasingly less so) to copyright and more importantly trademark infringement issues of Western intellectual properties...perhaps Unity have tried to get some Chinese developers to remove things like Marvel characters, or Mickey Mouse and it's been ignored.

I think this is actually quite interesting when Unity itself has recently posted a tutorial on using its AI tools for the AI generation of a Nintendo character called Ness (main character in an old Snes game called Earthbound if you're not familiar)...seems a bit of a double standard if the complaint IS in fact in relation to trademark infringements.

There's a big problem that a lot of the people in AI have spent so much time with other PhDs in the AI space and working in these professional AI labs that they've forgotten or never even seen what 'normal' businesses look like.

I saw a podcast where the main guy behind Claude Code, Boris, just casually explained that at Anthropic where there are some software developers using sometimes multiple 6 figure values in dollars PER MONTH on their tokens for running their swarms of Claude agents...that might make you some kind of productivity guru but try going to your CFO and asking for these kinds of figures from each software developer PER MONTH...they will spit coffee out in your face and burst out laughing.

It would be the equivalent of saying 'yeah we want a new CAD and design management package that we basically prompt and it does everything for us'

'How much is it?'

'Well, upwards of 7 figures per year, per design engineer, and we have about 400 design engineers'.

'You want half a billion pounds, per year, so you can all play with your imaginary friends? No...piss off and get back to work'

These were always a disaster. It's essentially trying to 'Uberify' the entire economy. Be your own boss etc...People just end up sitting by the phone waiting for 2 or 3 hours of minimum wage work a day. Maybe this is possible with living with mum and dad as a youngster, or living with a higher earning spouse and looking after children...A normal person could never realistically do them it was a stupid idea to begin with

This is a fairly odd statement given that BOMs are managed in manufacturing systems and for accounting and engineering purposes in multiple different ways. This can be for anything to do with sales data for a client or for guys on the factory floor or for the accountants. There are sales BOMs, manufacturing BOMs procurement BOMs and nested BOMs etc all for different parts of the business process...you would have BOMs within the organisation that were probably nearly 70% etc or those that were 0%!

I am a CAD engineer and software developer who has worked in manufacturing a lot in the UK in various industries - products as big as superyachts and as small as peristaltic pumps. I think if the UK and EU are to try and defend their weakening and shrinking manufacturing sectors (these industries have been disappearing for my entire adult life) then it is possible but difficult...In 10 to 20 years it will be impossible.

The reason is as you have described. We are getting close to where the numbers of people with practical experience working in, managing, and designing things like the work processes and factory layouts in industries that build physical products are disappearing. We're losing a lot of capable practical engineers with hands on experience. We can keep the universities going teaching the physical subjects but those lecturers wouldn't know even where to begin on designing and building efficient factories unfortunately.

We'd probably end up having to get Chinese and Taiwanese businesses to outsource their 'experts' back to us in order to actually do this and pay them a fortune - basically the reverse of what was happening in the manufacturing sector in the 80s and 90s!

I disagree actually. There certainly are games that I have felt are pretty 'magical' as you put it but they tend to me almost childlike in some of their design choices. Monument Valley for example was amazing. I was so impressed by that game and how it mixed the childishness of magic toyboxes and Escher inspired puzzles with the adult complexity of some of the puzzles and the eeriness of the setting.

i will never stop finding it weird when American software developers/IT people call themselves 'Engineers'. I am actually an 'Engineer' in the UK and it's a very different term here that basically implies someone who works on physical projects, in CAD or by hand. i am also a software developer...but in my experience software developers often make very bad 'engineers' as we would define the term just because they're not very practical/don't have a STEM background etc.

In the UK we even have protected and quite difficult to achieve things like 'chartered engineer' which similar to 'chartered accountant' etc originates from royal charter but it carries with it ethical and legal implications etc. You need a STEM degree and 6 years relevant professional experience before you can even consider applying lol. I am not chartered but have worked with many CEng engineers.

It is easily the weirdest thing about HN that Americans seem to equate writing code/handling infrastructure to designing eg Superyachts or Peristaltic pumps - 2 things I've done as an 'engineer'!

I think this may actually begin to happen anyway with the increased use of coding agents. A lot of the reason people/workers were not in a 'developer' position before was not only because they didn't know how to or want to learn how to code, but because they just didn't know how to or want to learn how to... think.

How many times have you had a coworker/boss/user ask for something totally nonsensical, impossible, or maybe even illegal? These people when they get unleashed on these agents and on large business problems are going to be a menace. They will create walls and heaps and mountains of working but totally stupid code as the AI attempts to work with their malformed attempts at a 'thought' and this will pollute github and the codebase for training...eventually it will outnumber serious, professionally written projects and you will reach an inflection point at which AI coding agents 'peak' and they begin to deteriorate.

Either that or you need to somehow ensure you are not training on AI written code but that too will cause a PR problem for the firms as it becomes obvious that AI cannot in fact replace developers?

Some code has always been the easy part, similar to the way a lot of systems abstract the more complicated pieces of a software project away from you. I am not talking about the relationship between higher and lower level languages but rather the way in which certain large enterprise systems already made the code 'very' easy.

For example, I have worked with SAP a lot...the largest ERP system in the world by some margin and I have used it's internally built tools that extend a small amount of developer functionality to the 'IT department developer' that gives a user with knowledge or .NET and SQL the chance to make little validations or do some bespoke data visualisations pretty quickly. This was trivially easy and pretty sure AI tools will make a developer redundant in this context because the documentation is good and there's a lot of it.

Contrast eg hooking up a system like SAP to an unusual non-standard Ecommerce offering and you have a far more complex problem (that interestingly doesn't require huge amounts of code but does in fact take a long time because of lack of documentation and a certain amount of understanding required). I would also point to programming games, which I enjoy...compare using Unity with some C# scripts for making games, to building your own engine (which will pretty much become redundant soon anyway if it already isn't). AI is very good on the Unity stuff but I suspect would struggle with it's own engine for a specific game.

I think a lot are feeling a bit like this...Also pile in all the web frameworks etc...on top of 'crypto' then 'AI'...then who knows what...

There'll be another overhyped buzzword in a few years and we will all be expected to get excited about it and I just can't anymore. Realistically the actual business value of software has barely changed in about 20 years except for niche things in finance and R&D engineering (and I know because i've worked in R&D engineering with embedded guys).

I am just not interested in learning to deploy largely pointless AI chatbots or learn yet another web framework to make largely the same ERP or PLM etc related stuff I've done before in the 'framework d'hier'

I now see groups of people just meandering between buzzwords and sort of calling it a career. Honestly I know people who were 'crypto developers' 3 years ago who are now 'senior AI implementation architects' and similar..and they have a 'bootcamp' etc....I am a software engineer who qualified in cs but after working around engineering and manufacturing a lot I'm also qualified in CAD...thinking to get into more physical engineering and become a chartered engineer finally and just get away from the bandwagon boosterism. Or become a nurse or teacher.

i'm enjoying making games on the side and I'd like to monetize one soon, but I look at 'tech' careers and I just rapidly lose the will to live now. 30 minutes on linkedin is enough to make most people feel nauseous and need to lie down.

Hi I'm a big surfer (or have been most of my life but doing less now at 40!) also building a mobile game in Unity/C# right now although it's not surf related like yours it's actually based on Chinese Wuxia cinema from 5 years spent in China. I considered building a surf one and was looking at potentially trying to 'gamify' a slightly different element of the 'surfing' experience which was to focus on predicting/catching and then staying on a wave at a busy break...so top down early GTA style graphics initially waves would come almost breaking in random spots in relation to previoius waves/sets, but never identical, and you'd have to kind of 'guess' ahead of other AI controlled surfers where to place yourself then paddle for position then try to dodge others on the way in....I thought it could be kind of fun in an arcadey way and not require so much of the physics you're describing, which is no doubt really hard to code...I'd love to see your game though!

I'm going to be controversial and say that this is an interesting spectacle but it is not even remotely comparable to the difficulty of what was going on in Free Solo. This is a circus trick by comparison to that.

For example I think a lot of 'good' climbers with several multi pitch climbs behind them could do this building fairly comfortably with ropes and really the only thing interesting about this is he did it without safety equipment which is frankly just a bit daft.

(I have climbed pretty extensively in the UK and also in Yangshuo China). I was kind of 'intermediate/good' at one point.

The Tao Te Ching is sort of impossible to translate into modern English. I don't really understand it but I can speak and read Chinese and it doesn't make much sense to Chinese people either. It is the weirdest thing that it has become famous.

This is kind of how it translates in English:

'Light light moon green grass mountain snow sun together'

For an entire book. It's totally nonsensical but the writing in Chinese at that time was just a bit like that. Classical Chinese sort of seems to have been written more like the way rappers put together their battling rhymes sometimes - you aren't meant to understand it

I love Aphex Twin but my only issue is he keeps saying in interviews how he hates surfers?!

Being a proud Cornish surfer and one of his earlier fans this saddens me. We were his first fans!

There used to be raves in Cornwall like the one in cult UK surfing classic 'Blue Juice'. They were 'lush' (i've noticed Aphex regularly says 'lush' too so is clearly from a surfer-adjacent group of friends and maybe he's just p1ssing about).

I agree that the term 'Engineer' has lost all meaning in the software/IT world. I studied CS at a UK uni which was a subject in the engineering school. I then worked with engineers on multidisciplinary projects (mechanical, electrical, chemical) and am a qualified CAD engineer.

When people start advertising for roles my 'mobile engineer' for someone who makes iphone apps it just makes me feel a bit sad. It genuinely cheapens the term.

I imagine 'architects' also get p1ssed off for the same reason tbh. There's probably loads of real architects who see an 'architect' and say 'he's not a bloody architect! I went to architecture school for SEVEN YEARS!!! He's an idiot with a 1 month AWS certificate!'

Why is IT so bad at trying to steal others' glory!?

Linkedin is verging on unusable/not fit for purpose...

Example, how can I see job adverts with very very niche requirements in quite unusual roles (one of which I do actually know about eg data 'migration projects for large companies that specialize in peristaltic pumps').

I‘ve seen a job advert for that kind of thing with literally hundreds of applicants. I would be surprised, given the fact that is a niche area that only a handful of companies even operate in, and companies very rarely migrate to new systems, if there are even hundreds of people in the world who have even done something like that! That is terrible for both the recruiter and the applicant. How are you even supposed to demonstrate you have done that kind of thing before in a literal crowd of people?!

There are a lot of sensible comments on this thread but seems not a very strong consensus. I can see why! ERP is an extremely complicated space...

There was a thread a while ago about ERPs on a post about future start up ideas....i'll copy what I wrote there which you may find interesting...you may find that whole thread interesting:

'Ah ok. I'm an interested in this as a topic and would like to take a stab at this as I think it's an almost impossible project. I would like to caveat any opinion first by saying these: I have a great deal of experience customizing and creating little bits of bespoke functionality for various ERP systems (SAP obviously but also some of the smaller ones aimed at niche markets eg construction). I also have similar experience with similarly complicated and sprawling PLM systems. I've spent basically my entire software career around ERP and PLM systems and systems that break out pieces of ERP functionality and try to often do it elsewhere (usually badly), and then usually have to somehow bring everything back into an ERP system anyway, either manually or with at least some level of (but rarely complete) automation. I am a CS graduate from a 'famous' UK university (UCL). I'm also a qualified CAD engineer, project manager within agile (DSDM agile etc)...ITIL qualified etc. i.e I've spent a lot of time across these kinds of many tentacled systems that really do reach across the entirety of any large business. I've worked with these systems from FTSE 50 businesses to small 50 person manufacturing startups.

I've also been involved in the migration between PLM systems (horrible from a data perspective - all those CAD files etc) and also ERP systems (horrible but largely just the mapping between two different Entity Relationship Diagrams almost incomprehensible to any living human in terms of complexity).

It would be an incredibly ambitious undertaking to compete with one of the major players in either of these spaces. It is not something you could really even do at the scale of a start-up the likes of which YC and the media understand as 'start-up'. You would need so many not just 'early stage' founders with wildly different skillsets, you would need effectively an entire large manufacturing business, from end to end, in terms of personnel because your 'domain expert' essentially includes 'every business function you can imagine'. That's before you could even begin to think about software. It's a fascinating idea but think about it - procurement/purchasing, warehousing and logistics, engineering and design, sales and marketing, finance (very important here), HR, operations, R&D, Q&A...and these are just the ones I can think of that I have come across in my dealings with these systems. They really do touch every department.

The length of time to market would also be such that this kind of project would not really be appropriate to describe as a 'start up'. You'd essentially be creating a 'Unicorn Killer' and that unicorn killer would need insane resources to even have a chance at market success. The number and requirement for specialist migration tools into your new system from existing clients would be a 'massive' undertaking also.

It's such a bold idea but I think to describe an undertaking of that size 'start-up' would be to completely stretch the meaning of the term 'start-up' so far beyond its usage that the term would lose all meaning.'

Here is the original thread:

'https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39371805'

Good luck! I can't imagine trying this kind of project as a small team. You are very brave!

Location: Travelling SE Asia but I am British (Cornish)

Remote: No preference. Worked remotely during COVID and a lot since. Most of my career has been office based.

Willing to relocate： Yes

Technologies: .NET, SQL Server, Angular for frontend. Although I did java and MySQL at university (UCL). Play around with Unity. Also a qualified CAD engineer (Creo).

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-jermy-26a5446b/

Email: [email protected]

As others have mentioned this is an extremely odd thing to expect to work....

I'll give an example. I worked for a FTSE 100 company using a very old Product Lifecycle Management system (model manager - based actually on pre-DOS technology)....we had to upgrade it to a new fancy one.

Therefore we had to migrate all data relating to the company, and group companies engineering designs...everything to do with 2D drawings, 3D designs...any important connections etc....all electrical designs....excel sheets related to these containing lists of PCBs and their component parts in Bills Of Materials etc...There is absolutely no way in hell I would trust AI with almost any of that, to get it right....or even to attempt a load without almost immediately erroring.

If you are at all interested in getting into game development in Unity (so C#) then this is a great course - and free.

Make a full game over a 10 hour youtube video (obviously not in one sitting!).

I've been doing it and am at 5 hours 31 minutes and I think it's absolutely brilliant. I've been a developer for about 10 years and am confident with C# but had never used Unity or made a game outside of little prototypes in eg javascript that would just work in the browser.