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AI Is Making Developers Dumb

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Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#111

Post by snickerbockers »

mahoro wrote: post #38

> There is a concept called “Copilot Lag”. It refers to a state where after each action, an engineer pauses, waiting for something to prompt them what to do next. I've been experiencing this for 10-15 years. I type something and then wait for IDE to complete function names, class methods etc. From this perspective, LLM won't hurt too much because I'm already dumb enough.

It's really interesting how minor changes in your workflow can completely wreck productivity. When I'm at work I spend at least 90% of my time in emacs, but there are some programs I'm forced to use that are only available via Win32 GUI apps, or cursed webapps. Being forced to abandon my keybinds and move the mouse around hunting for buttons to click and then moving my hand from the mouse to the keyboard then back to the mouse really fucks me up. My coworkers all use MSVC and they don't seem to mind it all because they're used to moving the mouse around all the time; conversely a few of them actually seem to hate command-driven programs the same way I hate GUI-driven programs.

As I get older, it feels like every time I have to use a GUI I get stuck in a sort of daze because my mind has become optimized for the specific work I usually do at the expense of the work I usually don't do. I feel like I'm smarter and faster than I've ever been at any prior point in my life, but only for a limited class of work and anything outside of that turns me into a senile old man. This often manifests in me getting distracted by youtube, windows solitaire, etc because it's almost painful to try to remember how to move the mouse around though all these stupid menus with a million poorly-documented buttons that all have misleading labels.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#112

Post by notTooFarGone »

dfabulich wrote: post #67

We've seen this happen over and over again, when a new leaky layer of abstraction is developed that makes it easier to develop working code without understanding the lower layer. It's almost always a leaky abstraction, because sometimes you do need to know how the lower layer really works. Every time this happens, developers who have invested a lot of time and emotional energy in understanding the lower level claim t…

If we just talk in analogies: a cup is also leaky because fluid is escaping via vapours. It's not the same as a cup with a hole in it.

Llms currently have tiny holes and we don't know if we can fix them. Established abstractions are more like cups that may leak but only in certain conditions (when it's hot)

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#113

Post by simonw »

maratc wrote: post #75

A personal anecdote from my previous place: A junior developer was tasked with writing a script that would produce a list of branches that haven't been touched for a while. I've got the review request. The big chunk of it was written in awk -- even though many awk scripts are one-liners, they don't have to be -- and that chunk was kinda impressive, making some clever use of associative arrays, auto-vivification, and…

I wonder if it would work to introduce a company policy that says you should never commit consensus aren't able to explain how it works?

I've been using that as my own personal policy for AI-assisted code and I am finding it works well for me, but would it work as a company company policy thing?

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#114

Post by ToucanLoucan »

bakugo wrote: post #101
dfabulich wrote: post #67

We've seen this happen over and over again, when a new leaky layer of abstraction is developed that makes it easier to develop working code without understanding the lower layer. It's almost always a leaky abstraction, because sometimes you do need to know how the lower layer really works. Every time this happens, developers who have invested a lot of time and emotional energy in understanding the lower level claim t…

Those aren't the same thing at all, and you already mentioned why in your comment: leakiness. The higher up you go on the abstraction chain, the leakier the abstractions become, and the less viable it is to produce quality software without understanding the layer(s) below. You can generally trust that transistors won't randomly malfunction and give you wrong results. You can generally trust that your compiler won't g…

> But once you reach a certain level of abstraction (usually 1 level above programming language), you'll start running into more and more issues resulting from abstraction leaks that require understanding the layer below to properly fix. Probably the most blatant example of this nowadays are "React developers" who don't know JS/CSS/HTML and WILL constantly be running into issues that they can't properly solve as a result, and are forced to either give up or write the most deranged workarounds imaginable that consist of hundreds of lines of unintelligible spaghetti.

I want to frame this. I am sick to death of every other website and application needing a gig of RAM and making my damn phone hot in my hand.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#115

Post by simonw »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #105
TrackerFF wrote: post #76

Wonder if we'll have this discussion in 20 years. Or will traditional programmers be some niche "artisanal" group of workers, akin to what bootmakers and bespoke tailors are today.

I'm pretty sure I saw the word "programming" being used as a synonym for webdev.

Webdev is a large, impactful and challenging field within programming as a whole.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#116

Post by layer8 »

nextts wrote: post #49
jtwaleson wrote: post #40

Plato, in the Phaedrus, 370BC: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

Good job he wrote that down.

Plato deliberately did not put some of his teachings into writing and only taught them orally, because he found written text unfit for the purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#117

Post by gtsop »

dfabulich wrote: post #67

We've seen this happen over and over again, when a new leaky layer of abstraction is developed that makes it easier to develop working code without understanding the lower layer. It's almost always a leaky abstraction, because sometimes you do need to know how the lower layer really works. Every time this happens, developers who have invested a lot of time and emotional energy in understanding the lower level claim t…

> But you don't have to understand lower layers to provide value to your customers, and developers who now find themselves overinvested in low-level knowledge don't want to believe that.

This is the weakest point which breaks your whole argument.

I see it happening ALL the time: newer web developers enter the field from an angle of high abstraction, whenever these abstractions don't work well, then they are completelly unable to proceed. They wouldn't be in that place if they knew the low-level and it DOES prevent them from delivering "value" to their customers.

What is even worse than that, since these developers don't understand exactly why some problen manifests, and the don't even understand exactly what their abstraction trully solves, they wrongly proceed to solve a problem using the wrong (high level) tools.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#118

Post by tarkin2 »

mindcrime wrote: post #95
tarkin2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And our memory has declined. He was right

That's not really the question though. The question is, would we be better off if we didn't have "[the] means of external marks"? I'm sure somebody out there would argue that the answer is yes, but personally I have my doubts.

I think the question is that were Plato's fears unfounded. I don't think the question is "is writing bad", although it is framed as that to justify a carefree adoption of LLMs in daily life.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#119

Post by Etheryte »

jas39 wrote: post #109
Etheryte wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the main question in this context would be whether the decisions are better informed or they just feel better informed. I regularly get LLMs to lie to me in my areas of expertise, but there I have the benefit that I can usually sniff out the lie. In topics I'm not that familiar with, I can't tell whether the LLM is confidently correct or confidently incorrect.

Well, AI does make errors, and never says "I don't know". That is also true of Wikipedia though. I've seen much improvement in accuracy from 3.5 to 4.5. Hallucinations can often be hashed out by a dialogue.

Wikipedia has multiple ways it tells you it doesn't know or it doesn't know for certain. Tags such as clarify, explain, confusing (all of which expand into phrases such as clarification needed etc) are abundant, and if an article doesn't meet the bar for the standard, it's either clearly annotated at the top of the article or the article is removed altogether.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#120

Post by tokinonagare »

jll29 wrote: post #3

LLMs also take away the motivation from students to properly concentrate and deeply understand a technical problem (including but not limited to coding problems); instead, they copy, paste and move on without understanding. The electronic calculator analogy might be appropriate: it's a tool appropriate once you have learned how to do the calculations by hand. In an experiment (six months long, twice repeated, so a on…

I'm giving a programming class and students uses LLMs all the time. I see it as a big problem because:

- it puts focus on syntax instead of the big picture. Instead of finding articles or posts on Stack explaining things beyond how to write them. AI give them the "how" so they don't think of the "why"

- students almost don't ask questions anymore. Why would they when an AI give them code?

- AI output contains notions, syntax and API not seen in class, adding to the confusion

Even the best students have a difficult time answering basic questions about what have been seen on the last (3 hours) class.

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