At $45 per hour … call this a contract job with no taxes or health benefits or anything … thats 200 hours of dev time or 25 8-hour workdays.
You’d almost certainly need at least 3 months (probably more) to lay a solid foundation and get a base level, functional proof of concept, if you had only person, one pretty darn highly skilled low level expert working on this.
So $9000 would produce nothing useable, just another call for fund raising.
And I’m sure you could find many programmers qualified and capable of this task who would call $45 an hour for doing this solo, lowballing them.
Doing a project like this with only humans is certainly possible, and likely would yield a higher quality result, but it would take substantially more time and money, orders of magnitude more.
Sorry, but just being entirely, blanket, always mad at AI/LLMs is stupid.
These things do actually have very sensible use cases, and reverse engineering a giant undocumented black box program is one of the most clear cut of these.
Its also possible to run these things locally… its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn’t funding some corpo datacenter.
99% of the problems that are being caused by LLMs right now are due to idiot humans using them in very obviously stupid ways.
LLMs are tools, like hammers, guns, chainsaws, forklifts, etc. If you don’t know what you’re doing, ita very easy to cause a lot of damage. Also like other human tools, you cannot uninvent them.
This kind of use of an LLM, as a tool assisting in a very complex reverse engineering project, directed and overseen by actual human experts, not just trying to naievely one shot it with a novice in charge… is almost certainly the optimal or most reasonable way to balance the [fast, cheap, good] factors in approaching a project like this.
I’m not saying this random 14 yo is doing this in the best possible way, not even close, but I am saying that if you think just $9000 thrown at a or multiple humans could produce anything even comparable, then you do not understand anything about the actual realities of working in the computer software development field.
Local llms actually have a larger environmental impact than the data centers in power usage/hardware, since they optimize for LLMs. The models are also based off essentially DDOSing half the internet by constantly scraping sites, and being trained off GPL licensed code without permission. This is a “good” use of llm, but it’s more like if the hammer you’re using took 2kw of power and 200ml of water every swing, you’d probably want to avoid using that hammer even if it was very helpful.
Its also possible to run these things locally… its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn’t funding some corpo datacenter.
But it wasn’t done locally, which begs the question: can local models reverse engineer on any kind of reasonable time scale?
I don’t know, by my little ollama GPT OSS is pretty great at merging mods together for games and updating old mods to work with new game versions. under my guidance it’s been pretty effective, I also have been a Software Engineer since 2019.
But again this is under the category of not super difficult and basically tedious stuff I don’t feel like doing anymore (been modding games since Oblivion 2006) and I just want to say this is far more convienent.
Sure there are many bugs still, but I’d say the most useful feature isn’t making something new or reverse engineering it to be implemented different or something else. It’s just altering it enough to better fit my needs, but at the drop of text like during gaming. Usually via merging mods into mod packs and working through the bugs myself.
But I have never let it touch anything real or used for work.
This annoys me a lot with complaints about “vibe coding”. Like, I know how to do it, I just don’t feel like spending 5 hours building and debugging a script I am probably going to run once to convert a bunch of data. I just want the task done so I can move on and do actually enjoyable things.
I get all the arguments against AI “art” and “writing” and “music” etc, actual creative areas. But coding is just tedious boring nonsense 99% of the time. It’s not the same. Get the computer, to translate human words to computer words, and be done.
But coding is just tedious boring nonsense 99% of the time.
To anyone reading this far down, do not let people like this build the narrative that there is no joy in your hobby or profession. These are thieves trying to rob you of your enthusiasm for life.
I think the nuance is, having a computer write “hello world!” Is actually pretty cool when you think about it, and it’s only the beginning. When you get to the point of writing production solutions. Logging can seem pretty tedious, albeit useful.
Look, I normally take a very combative tone in conversations like these, but I want to emphasize, I genuinely, really love writing software. I’ve written my own libraries, libraries that already exist elsewhere, because I want to learn. What AI is doing to my industry makes me very sad.
I mostly enjoy the problem solving and a challenge.
Before LLMs often code wasn’t actually the hard part, it was more just a procedural break I got between the design or trying to figure out the best problem to solve, rather than just solving the obvious one.
So I always was looking to write the library that encoded conventions for the tradeoffs we want once and reuse it instead of writing bespoke code for every product, which seems to be the road more travelled.
So a multiplicative effect, so I can refocus on the hard parts sooner.
LLMs sure don’t help the tendency to solve the obvious problem and writing bespoke code every time though.
$9000?
At $45 per hour … call this a contract job with no taxes or health benefits or anything … thats 200 hours of dev time or 25 8-hour workdays.
You’d almost certainly need at least 3 months (probably more) to lay a solid foundation and get a base level, functional proof of concept, if you had only person, one pretty darn highly skilled low level expert working on this.
So $9000 would produce nothing useable, just another call for fund raising.
And I’m sure you could find many programmers qualified and capable of this task who would call $45 an hour for doing this solo, lowballing them.
Doing a project like this with only humans is certainly possible, and likely would yield a higher quality result, but it would take substantially more time and money, orders of magnitude more.
Sorry, but just being entirely, blanket, always mad at AI/LLMs is stupid.
These things do actually have very sensible use cases, and reverse engineering a giant undocumented black box program is one of the most clear cut of these.
Its also possible to run these things locally… its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn’t funding some corpo datacenter.
99% of the problems that are being caused by LLMs right now are due to idiot humans using them in very obviously stupid ways.
LLMs are tools, like hammers, guns, chainsaws, forklifts, etc. If you don’t know what you’re doing, ita very easy to cause a lot of damage. Also like other human tools, you cannot uninvent them.
This kind of use of an LLM, as a tool assisting in a very complex reverse engineering project, directed and overseen by actual human experts, not just trying to naievely one shot it with a novice in charge… is almost certainly the optimal or most reasonable way to balance the [fast, cheap, good] factors in approaching a project like this.
I’m not saying this random 14 yo is doing this in the best possible way, not even close, but I am saying that if you think just $9000 thrown at a or multiple humans could produce anything even comparable, then you do not understand anything about the actual realities of working in the computer software development field.
Local llms actually have a larger environmental impact than the data centers in power usage/hardware, since they optimize for LLMs. The models are also based off essentially DDOSing half the internet by constantly scraping sites, and being trained off GPL licensed code without permission. This is a “good” use of llm, but it’s more like if the hammer you’re using took 2kw of power and 200ml of water every swing, you’d probably want to avoid using that hammer even if it was very helpful.
Thank you for a nuanced take in the middle of this generated outrage.
Meanwhile, the persone above you with 24 upvotes advancing estimates with no other source than “trust my gut instinct bro.”
But it wasn’t done locally, which begs the question: can local models reverse engineer on any kind of reasonable time scale?
I don’t know, by my little ollama GPT OSS is pretty great at merging mods together for games and updating old mods to work with new game versions. under my guidance it’s been pretty effective, I also have been a Software Engineer since 2019.
But again this is under the category of not super difficult and basically tedious stuff I don’t feel like doing anymore (been modding games since Oblivion 2006) and I just want to say this is far more convienent.
Sure there are many bugs still, but I’d say the most useful feature isn’t making something new or reverse engineering it to be implemented different or something else. It’s just altering it enough to better fit my needs, but at the drop of text like during gaming. Usually via merging mods into mod packs and working through the bugs myself.
But I have never let it touch anything real or used for work.
This annoys me a lot with complaints about “vibe coding”. Like, I know how to do it, I just don’t feel like spending 5 hours building and debugging a script I am probably going to run once to convert a bunch of data. I just want the task done so I can move on and do actually enjoyable things.
I get all the arguments against AI “art” and “writing” and “music” etc, actual creative areas. But coding is just tedious boring nonsense 99% of the time. It’s not the same. Get the computer, to translate human words to computer words, and be done.
To anyone reading this far down, do not let people like this build the narrative that there is no joy in your hobby or profession. These are thieves trying to rob you of your enthusiasm for life.
I think the nuance is, having a computer write “hello world!” Is actually pretty cool when you think about it, and it’s only the beginning. When you get to the point of writing production solutions. Logging can seem pretty tedious, albeit useful.
I do write production solutions.
Look, I normally take a very combative tone in conversations like these, but I want to emphasize, I genuinely, really love writing software. I’ve written my own libraries, libraries that already exist elsewhere, because I want to learn. What AI is doing to my industry makes me very sad.
Yeah, it’s sucked all the joy out of professional development :(
I mostly enjoy the problem solving and a challenge.
Before LLMs often code wasn’t actually the hard part, it was more just a procedural break I got between the design or trying to figure out the best problem to solve, rather than just solving the obvious one.
So I always was looking to write the library that encoded conventions for the tradeoffs we want once and reuse it instead of writing bespoke code for every product, which seems to be the road more travelled.
So a multiplicative effect, so I can refocus on the hard parts sooner.
LLMs sure don’t help the tendency to solve the obvious problem and writing bespoke code every time though.
That is a genuinely good question!
Which I am currently investigating in my spare time, lol.