AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster • Hacker News Board

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#71

Post by brookst » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 9:21 PM UTC

Casteil wrote: post #57

brookst wrote: post #37

“Automobiles: a convenient crutch for people who can’t ride horses, or a recipe for disaster?” “Word processors: a convenient crutch for people who can’t type, or a recipe for disaster?” God these headlines are going to be hilarious in ten years. Yes, AI code is primitive today. The first implementations sometimes get basic stuff wrong and often get complicated stuff wrong. But the state of the art is evolving daily.…

>God these headlines are going to be hilarious in ten years. We'll see. I think you're pulling an "apples to oranges" here, comparing the AI situation to the advent of automobiles and computers/word processing. The big difference is the typical application of the technology. By comparison, AI is absolutely RIFE with fraud & lazy get-rich-quick schemes - on an absolutely unprecedented scale & scope. Just like cryptocu…

I understand the concerns, but I think you’re assuming that we are frozen in time. I think this is a brief moment where text is either AI generated or not.

In a year or two, leveling content as AI assisted would be like labeling something “electricity assisted” today; you’d just label everything (California prop 65 style).

Everything will have some level of AI involved. I mean even today we have spell checkers and grammar checkers and automatic summarizations that tons of people use. The gradient from that to text expansion and whole document creation is going to be blurry and gradual.

With you on pre-AI and post-AI epochs. It will be sort of like the way the internet itself caused pre-security and post-security epochs, and we’re still dealing with that.

But I think it’s great. Yes, we have to grow up. Yes, our tools have to get better. But just like the internet’s benefits far outweigh the security pain, I feel pretty good about AI cost/benefit ratios.

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#72

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 9:28 PM UTC

mellavora wrote: post #70

anigbrowl wrote: post #38

I think there's a secret third thing, domain specific fundamentals/boilerplate. I've had good results with code generation for minimal proof-of concept things, like 'show me code for [maze construction algorithm]' or 'visualize this platonic solid in mathplotlib, with numeric labels on every vertex' or 'fetch data from https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/34741898.json and build a pandas dataframe from it'. I'v…

> I've come to prefer it to visiting Stack Overflow when I need to get up to speed on a new thing, I'm certainly guilty of this very same mistake, key word being "mistake." I'd hope for a world where the better way would be to read some good docs which gave an accurate mental model of the thing I want to get up to speed with. You know, organized and structured knowledge. vs a quick answer to a single point without an…

I don't regard this as a mistake. Tools and docs don't necessarily flow from the same source, and even good docs can't anticipate every need or blind spot of every reader - if we have perfect custom documentation, then it too would have to be AI generated. If good mental models were sufficient, there would be no ned for experiment and all great programs would flow from perfectly written specifications and never contain any bugs.

I like to go back and forth between the docs and hacking together little things that do one job to maintain a feel for what I'm doing (also in many other contexts besides programming).

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#73

Post by blackbear_ » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

brookst wrote: post #43

blackbear_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By definition, there's never any data to judge innovations. Obviously some opinions turns out to be wrong, but if everybody just waits for data before doing anything, nothing will ever happen. So if you don't like what they are saying, at least try to provide a counterargument.

“There is no evidence supporting that argument” is a counter argument. Or maybe it’s better to say that hand-wringing is not an argument that merits a counter argument.

That is a pretty common logical fallacy. It is actually a well-eatablished fact that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", i.e., maybe the reason why there is no evidence is that nobody looked for it, or, as is the case here, because something is too new to find any evidence in either direction

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#74

Post by dumpsterdiver » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 10:29 PM UTC

brookst wrote: post #69

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that one side has put actual thought into their argument, while the other side is attempting to invalidate the argument based on the fact that people other than themselves have not put in the work necessary to make a claim one way or the other. Scientific progress doesn't happen by referencing the vast stores of data that we haven't collected.

Thought != data

Indeed. Thought is what makes data useful. When you don't have either then you don't really have much of an argument, do you?

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#75

Post by brookst » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 11:26 PM UTC

blackbear_ wrote: post #73

brookst wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“There is no evidence supporting that argument” is a counter argument. Or maybe it’s better to say that hand-wringing is not an argument that merits a counter argument.

That is a pretty common logical fallacy. It is actually a well-eatablished fact that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", i.e., maybe the reason why there is no evidence is that nobody looked for it, or, as is the case here, because something is too new to find any evidence in either direction

I think you’re mistaking the fallacy. That fallacy is best applied when someone asserts certainty in absence, as in the case of God.

If someone just asserts some random thing, it’s reasonable to ask for evidence. While their lack of evidence does not disprove their point, it’s certainly an argument for being skeptical about their point.

Otherwise I get to assert that every atom is a superintelligence, and your inability to provide contrary evidence is a point in my favor.

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#76

Post by uoaei » Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 11:39 PM UTC

brookst wrote: post #37

“Automobiles: a convenient crutch for people who can’t ride horses, or a recipe for disaster?” “Word processors: a convenient crutch for people who can’t type, or a recipe for disaster?” God these headlines are going to be hilarious in ten years. Yes, AI code is primitive today. The first implementations sometimes get basic stuff wrong and often get complicated stuff wrong. But the state of the art is evolving daily.…

The idea of AI assistants is good. The hype around current AI assistants is bad. You may comfortably assume everyone critical of LLMs' current performance believes this. Begone, straw men.