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With AI you need to think bigger

rodyne.com

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Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#41

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

lordnacho wrote: post #33

This is much like other advances in computing. Being able to write code that compiled into assembly, instead of directly writing assembly, meant you could do more. Which soon meant you had to do more, because now everyone was expecting it. The internet meant you could take advantage of open source to build more complex software. Now, you have to. Cloud meant you could orchestrate complicated apps. Now you can't not k…

Even the example in the post seemed closely related to other advances in consumer-level computing:

  I re-created this system using an RPi5 compute module and a $20 camera sensor plugged into it. Within two hours I wrote my first machine learning [application], using the AI to assist me and got the camera on a RPi board to read levels of wine in wine bottles on my test rig. The original project took me six weeks solid!
Undoubtedly this would have taken longer without AI. But I imagine the Raspberry Pi + camera was easier to set up out-of-the-box than whatever they used 14 years ago, and it's definitely easier to set up a paint-by-numbers ML system in Python.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#42

Post by thierrydamiba »

haswell wrote: post #35
liotier wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, I would be delighted if you published that code... Just yesterday I was thinking that a two-faced Samba share/USB Mass Storage dongle Pi would save me a lot of shuttling audio samples between my desktop and my Akai MPC.

I've been thinking about writing up a blog post about it. Might have to do a Show HN when time allows. This guide was a huge help: https://github.com/thagrol/Guides/blob/main/mass-storage-gad...

Please do-I think this is a great example of how AI can be helpful.

We see so many stories about how terrible AI coding is. We need more practical stories of how it can help.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#43

Post by tqwhite »

Using AI has changed everything for me and made my ambition swell. I despise looking up the details of frameworks and api’s, transmitting a change of strategy through a system, typing the usual stupid loops and processes that are the foundation of all programs. Hell, the amount of time I save on typing errors is worth it.

I have plans for many things I didn’t have the energy for in the past.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#44

Post by wruza »

CosmicShadow wrote: post #26

The exciting thing about AI is it let's you go back to any project or idea you've ever had and they are now possibly doable, even if they seemed impossible or too much work back then. Some of the key pieces missing have become trivial, and even if you don't know how to do something AI will help you figure it out or just let you come up with a solution that may seem dirty, but actually works, whereas before it was imp…

It doesn’t do that for things rarely done before though. And it’s poisoned with opinions from the internet. E.g. you can convince it that we have to remove bullshit layers from programming and make it straightforward. It will even print a few pages of vague bullet points about it, if not yet. But when you ask it to code, it will dump a react form.

I’m not trying to invalidate experiences itt, cause I have a similar one. But it feels futile as we are stuck with our pre-AI bloated and convoluted ways of doing things^W^W making lots of money and securing jobs by writing crap nobody understands why, and there’s no way to undo this or to teach AI to generalize.

I think this novelty is just blindness to how bad things are in the areas you know little about. For example, you may think it solves the job when you ask it to create a button and a route. And it does. But the job wasn’t to create a route, load and validate data and render it on screen in a few pages and files. The job was to take a query and to have it on screen in a couple of lines. Yes it helps writing pages of our nonsense, but it’s still nonsense. It works, but feels like we have fooled ourselves twice now. It also feels like people will soon create AI playbooks for structuring and layering their output, cause ability to code review it will deteriorate in just a few years with less seniors and much more barely-coders who get into it now.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#45

Post by woleium »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #42
haswell wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about writing up a blog post about it. Might have to do a Show HN when time allows. This guide was a huge help: https://github.com/thagrol/Guides/blob/main/mass-storage-gad...

Please do-I think this is a great example of how AI can be helpful. We see so many stories about how terrible AI coding is. We need more practical stories of how it can help.

The tool itself would be of a lot of use in school science and design labs where a bunch of older kit lands from universities and such. I used to put a lot of floppy to usb converters on things like old ir spectrometers that were good enough still for school use.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#46

Post by sunami-ai »

klabb3 wrote: post #13

As a mostly LLM-skeptic I reluctantly agree this is something AI actually does well. When approaching unfamiliar territory, LLMs (1) use simple language (improvement over academia but also much professional intentionally obfuscated literature), (2) use the right abstraction (they seem good at ”zooming out” to big picture of things, and (3) you can move both laterally between topics and ”zoom in” quickly. Another way…

LLMs don't reason the way we do, but there are similarities at the cognitive pre-conscious level.

I made a challenge to various lawyers and the Stanford Codex (no one took the bait yet) to find critical mistakes in the "reasoning" of our Legal AI. One former attorney general told us that he likes how it balances the intent of the law. Sample output (scroll and click on stats and the donuts on the second slide):

Samples: https://labs.sunami.ai/feed

I built the AI using an inference-time=scaling approach that I evolved over a year's time, and it is based on Llama for now, but could be replace with any major foundational model.

Presentation: https://prezi.com/view/g2CZCqnn56NAKKbyO3P5/ 8-minute long video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rib4gU1HW8&t=233s

info sunami ai

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#47

Post by tqwhite »

whartung wrote: post #37
keeptrying wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. LLMs are the perfect learning assistant. You can now do literally anything. Literally. Going to take a while for everyone to figure this out but they will given time.

> You can now do literally anything. Literally. In theory. In practice, not so much. Not in my experience. I have a drive littered with failed AI projects. And by that I mean projects I have diligently tried to work with the AI (ChatGP, mostly in my case) to get something accomplished, and after hours over days of work, the projects don’t work. I shelve them and treat them like cryogenic heads. “Sometime in the futur…

First, rote work is the kind I hate most and so having AI do it is a huge win. It’s also really good for finding bugs, albeit with guidance. It follows complicated logic like a boss.

Maybe you are running into the problem I did early. I told it what I wanted. Now I tell it what I want done. I use Claude Code and have it do its things one at a time and for each, I tell it the goal and then the steps I want it to take. I treat it as if it was a high-level programming language. Since I was more procedural with it, I get pretty good results.

I hope that helps.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#48

Post by 8373746439 »

lordnacho wrote: post #33

This is much like other advances in computing. Being able to write code that compiled into assembly, instead of directly writing assembly, meant you could do more. Which soon meant you had to do more, because now everyone was expecting it. The internet meant you could take advantage of open source to build more complex software. Now, you have to. Cloud meant you could orchestrate complicated apps. Now you can't not k…

> LLMs will be the same. At the moment people are still mostly playing with it, but pretty soon it will be "hey why are you writing our REST API consumer by hand? LLM can do that for you!"

Not everyone wants to be a "prompt engineer", or let their skills rust and be replaced with a dependency on a proprietary service. Not to mention the potentially detrimental cognitive effects of relegating all your thinking to LLMs in the long term.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#49

Post by tqwhite »

101008 wrote: post #32

> I am now at a real impasse, towards the end of my career and knowing I could happily start it all again with a new insight and much bigger visions for what I could take on. It feels like wining the lottery two weeks before you die I envy this optimistic. I am not the opposite (im a sr engineer with more than 15 years of experience), but I am scared about my future. I invested too much time in learning concepts, the…

I could not disagree more. Those concepts, theories and all that knowledge is what makes it so powerful. I feel successful with AI because I know what to do (I’m older than you by a lot). I talk to younger people and they don’t know how to think about a big system or have the ability to communicate their strategies. You do. I’m 72 and was bored. Now that Claude will do the drudgery, I am inspired.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#50

Post by wruza »

101008 wrote: post #40
boznz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT is never static. I have had to take several forks in my career with languages and technologies often leading to dead-ends and re-training. It is amazing how much you learn doing one thing directly translates to another, it can often lead to you not having a specific/narrow mindset too. Having an LLM next to you means there is never a stupid question, I ask the AI the same stupid questions repeatedly until I get it…

I'm worried about being replaced by LLM. If it keeps evolving to the point where a CTO can ask LLM to do something and deploy it, why he would pay for a team of engineers? Forking to different technologies and languages is one thing (I've been there, I started with PHP and I haven't touch it for almost a decade now), but being replaced by a new tech is something different. I don't see how I could pivot to still be us…

I see it more as “if an LLM can do that, why would I need an employer?”

This coin has two sides. If a CTO can live without you, you can live without an expensive buffer between you and your clients. He’s now just a guy like you, and adds little value compared to everyone else.

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