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Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

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Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very funny.

Sorry, your response was so generic, unrelated to the conversation, and unhelpful -- especially given the context of the reply -- I mistook you for a machine with no ability to reason.

I forgive your mid sarcasm as I actually find most of your commentary on HN good. My point remains, so I'll explain it to you to help you out. All those "problems" you listed are symptoms of greater problems, as a sibling suggested, although "late stage capitalism" is now seen as a lazy phrase. The greater problem is that increases in complexity require greater increases in energy to maintain, and as a result, corners are being cut everywhere. In your specific case, UI/UX and subsequent QOL. Hence, these are signs of a predicament, rather than a problem, because removing complexity that has been ossified into a system requires even more effort than maintaining the complexity, with no guarantee of success. I believe it was either Joseph Tainter (Collapse of Complex Societies) or Peter Turchin (End Times) that mentioned the only example he could give of a civilization successfully simplifying itself, at least for a time, was the Byzantine Empire, which of course did not make the resurgence that those simplifying measures were undertaken to facilitate.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#492
post #402

It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage. I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is…

I wish I worked at a place where it’d be enough for me to “understand the problem space” as I pull down seven figures. But those bastards also want me to code, and Copilot at least helps with the boilerplate

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#493
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do they have a place to mail your complaints? Who forces you to use the app? Presumably the building he lives in contracted out laundry service to some third party company, which is in charge of the machines and therefore shitty app. In this situation there really isn't any real choice to vote with your wallet. They can tell you to pound sand and there's nothing you can do. Your only real option is to move out. Mayb…

Most landlords are not complete assholes. They want to do what is reasonable to keep their tenants happy. It's much easier to re-sign a happy tenant than to have to turn over an apartment and spend time and money marketing it and possibly have it vacant for a while. If all the tenants hate the laundry app and let the landlord know (politely, with a list of machines that don't work, dates/times, etc), most likely it w…

I think it depends. If your landlord is a person then yeah my experience hasn't been all that bad. But if you're landlord is a bureaucratic organization, they couldn't care less. There's just such high variance in how much of an asshole a landlord is. And I've never experienced a chill one that is in charge of an apartment complex.

To put something in perspective a few months ago they changed mailing policy so that only the lease holder could pick up packages (citing safety. This is grad student housing, so already need to get your ID scanned to pick up a package or specifically authorize someone. Note that family and children can and do get university IDs -- not just for this). I wrote an email explaining that this was illegal (citing the relevant laws [0]) and explained how this decreases safety since not everyone is living with a responsible or even kind lease holder (luckily I'm the lease holder but I've been in that situation before. Student housing...). I got an annoyed letter back doubling down on the safety issue, so I escalated the issue twice (including reporting to the post office). I assume some lawyer finally saw it and freaked out. Now the policy is anyone in the house can pick up a package ( - _ - ; ). I've had no such success with the laundry app (they took away any other payment[1])

But my overall point is that 95% of these issues could be resolved my people taking a little more time to understand the consequences of their decisions. People will spend more time and energy defending bad decisions than resolving them. We all make mistakes, so that's not an issue. Especially since doing "good" it incredibly hard. But I'm pissed when we deny cracks in the system or that problems exist. I'm even okay with acknowledging it is low priority. But denial and gaslighting is what I more often experience and that's when I get angry.

[0] why my local postman confirmed and even double checked for me

[1] fun fact: they once double charged me. I sent them the logs from the app, a screenshot, and a screenshot from my bank showing the charges. They claimed to have no record. So I issued a clawback. They didn't seem to care and tbh, there's lots of businesses like this because they have such dominance over the market.

I've seen clear illegal behavior from entire industries and reporting it does nothing. If you want an unambiguous example pull up archive and pick a 3d printer manufacturer and read https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B... (hell, I even tried getting this on the radar of YouTubers. No one cares). The false advertising they do is worse than the example the fucking FCC gives (when I emailed a few companies trying to let them know in case they weren't aware they said what they did was legal. My email to then was really just "hey, I noticed this. Figured you didn't know, so maybe this will help so someone doesn't try to sue you". Not asking for anything in return because all I want is to stop playing these stupid games that eat up so much of my time)

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#494
It's very exciting that generative ai lets people get more code written, especially in unfamiliar domains. It feels great to ship loads of code that does a thing. The sure result is an unprecedented increase in the amount of code in products.

A minor drawback to that enthusiasm is that a lot of the code I read didn't need to exist in the first place, even before this wave. Lots of it can be attributed to the path dependence of creation as opposed to what it is trying to do. This should be a rich time to change to security / exploit work - the random search tools are great and the target just keeps getting easier.

What our industry really desperately needed was to drive the quality of implementation right down. It's going to be an exciting time to be alive.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#495

Empirical studies like this are hard to conduct... I'm curious though. This study was authored by at least two folks from Microsoft and one of the sample groups in the study was also from Microsoft . The reason this seems to stand out to me as odd is that Microsoft also owns the AI tool being used in the study and would definitely want a favourable conclusion in this paper. Is that a flag we should be watching out fo…

That the paper on gen ai would be marketing of gen ai by the company selling the tool? Yeah, that's a pretty clear conflict of interest.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, your response was so generic, unrelated to the conversation, and unhelpful -- especially given the context of the reply -- I mistook you for a machine with no ability to reason.

I forgive your mid sarcasm as I actually find most of your commentary on HN good. My point remains, so I'll explain it to you to help you out. All those "problems" you listed are symptoms of greater problems, as a sibling suggested, although "late stage capitalism" is now seen as a lazy phrase. The greater problem is that increases in complexity require greater increases in energy to maintain, and as a result, corner…

I appreciate this reply much more and so I'll refrain from further sarcasm.

But to explain the point of frustration, I found the comment indistinguishable from a public intellectual masterbation. I chastised pojzon for this because I believe my op demonstrates that I'm quite aware of the issue and I think a reasonably intelligent person can infer that my understanding is deeper than what can be conveyed in a simple HN comment. I found your responses similar, being short quips.

But if you closely pay attention to my op, you'll find that I'm making a call to other developers to join me in pushing back. To not create the problems in the first place.

The reason I do not take kindly to responses like those is they are defeatist attitudes. Identifying problems is the easy part -- although not always easy themselves. But there's little value in that if that information is not used to pursue a means to resolve them. I appreciate this a bit more -- though I still find it lacking -- as at least you're suggesting references that one may wish to read to understand the issues deeper (though I feel similarly about many of these class of sources).

I don't mind adding comments to help refine understanding, but short quips don't. We can do better than a mic drop. And clearly I'm not shying away from verbosity. In today's age we're too terse to be meaningful. And you truly be terse and effective requires high still and time to refine. It is not the nature of a typical conversation.

And wholeheartedly I actually disagree with baby of these sources (despite agreeing with some points, I find the solutions either non-existent or severely lacking). The problem isn't that we need to remove complexity. That's a false notion. One of the many issues is that we need to recognize that complexity is unavailable. Yes, make things as simple as possible, but no more. It's important to remember that truth and accuracy is bounded by complexity, while lies are not. Shying away from complexity is turning away from growth. Late stage capitalism and socialism have a similar fatal flaw: bureaucrats who believe everything can be understood from numbers on a spreadsheet.

We're people, not machines. The environment evolves with time. Our understanding becomes more nuanced and complex as we grow. But the fuzziness never goes away because we can never measure anything directly, even if it stayed the same. The most important thing stressed in experimental science is understanding your error and limitations of your model (at least that's what I was taught and what I teach my students). Because you only have models, and all models are wrong (though some are better).

There's so much I can say on this topic, and there's so much that has been said before. But no one wants to talk about the (Von Neumann's) elephant in the room.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#497

I've used Copilot and chatGPT to help with algorithms where I'm unsure where to start. Actual case: "Write a performant algorithm to find the number of work days given a future date". It's trickier than you think and makes a great interview question. Both AI tools came back with...garbage. Loops within loops within loops as they iterated through each day to check if the day is a weekend or not, is a leap year and to…

How did you cite / reference the clever division it had copied out of the training set?

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#498
post #402

It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage. I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is…

Copilot isn't particular useful. At best it comes up with small snippets that may or may not be correct, and rarely can I get larger chunks of code that would be working out of the gate. But Claude Sonnet 3.5 w/ Cursor or Continue.dev is a dramatic improvement. When you have discrete control over the context (ie. being able to select 6-7 files to inject), and with the superior ability of Claude, it is an absolute gam…

Which do you prefer Cursor or Continue.dev?

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#499
post #402

It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage. I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is…

I noticed that AI is a bit like having a junior dev in time capsule. He won't solve your problem however he can Google, find stuff and write simple stuff, all you'd be forced to do otherwise. And does it in minutes rather than weeks or months.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#500
post #402

It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage. I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is…

But despite the theory/wish that "if experienced developers use AI well", at the present, inexperienced developers are benefitting more, which is what the study found.
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