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AI Is Making Developers Dumb

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Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#171

Post by elicksaur »

sanswork wrote: post #147
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't create an abstraction. They generate code. If you are thinking about LLMs as a layer of abstraction, you are going to have all kinds of problems.

My C compiler has been generating assembly code for me for 30 years. And people were saying the same thing even earlier about how compilers and HLLs made developers dumb because they couldn't code in asm.

>And people were saying

Source? A quote? Or are we just making up historical strawmen to win arguments against?

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#172

Post by elicksaur »

sanswork wrote: post #161
__loam wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C compilers are deterministic. You don't have to inspect the assembly they produce to know that it did the right thing.

And C compilers have bugs too earlier ones a lot more though thankfully we are now several decades into their development.

Very whataboutism. Do you understanding why the person is making this argument? Or is everything just postmodern deconstructionism?

Everything has some imperfection, so LLMs are just fine... Completely missing the totally valid criticisms people have of the systems.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#173

Post by happytoexplain »

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…

This "it's the same as the past changes" analogy is lazy - everywhere it's reached for, not just AI. It's basically just "something something luddites".

Criticisms of each change are not somehow invalid just because the change is inevitable, like all the changes before it.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#174

Post by elicksaur »

101008 wrote: post #88
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…

> (My favorite use of coding LLMs is to ask them to help me understand code I don't yet understand. Even when it gets the answer wrong, it's often right enough to give me the hints I need to figure it out myself.) Agree, specially useful when you join a new company and you have to navegate a large codebase (or bad-maintained codebase, which is even worse by several orders of magnitude). I had no luck asking LLM to fi…

See this as one of the major selling points.

…but I haven’t joined a new company since LLMs were a thing. How often is this use case necessary to justify $Ts in investment?

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#175

Post by simonw »

keybored wrote: post #168
simonw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaky abstractions is a really appropriate term for LLM-assisted coding. The original "law of leaky abstractions" talked about how the challenge with abstractions is that when they break you now have to develop a mental model of what they were hiding from you in order to fix the problem. (Absolutely classic Joel Spolsky essay from 22 years ago which still feels relevant today: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/1…

[deleted]

Leaky abstractions doesn't imply abstractions are bad.

Using abstractions to trade power for simplicity is a perfectly fine trade-off... but you have to bare in mind that at some point you'll run into a problem that requires you to break through that abstraction.

I read that essay 22 years ago and ever since then I've always looked out for opportunities to learn little extra details about the abstractions I'm using. It pays off all the time.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#176

Post by tpmoney »

layer8 wrote: post #149
tpmoney wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this realization a couple weeks ago that AI and LLMs are the 2025 equivalent of what Wikipedia was in 2002. Everyone is worried about how all the kids are going to just use the “easy button” and get nonsense that’s in-checked and probably wrong and a whole generation of kids are going to grow up not knowing how to research, and trusting unverified sources. And then eventually overall we learned what the limits…

It’s not the same because you can’t ask Wikipedia to do your homework or programming task without even reading the result.

You can't ask an AI to do that either. I mean, you physically can, but it would be the same thing as copying and pasting a wikipedia article verbatim into your essay.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#177

Post by mahoro »

snickerbockers wrote: post #111
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…

I feel your pain. I have my own struggles with switching tasks and what helps to some degree is understanding that that kind of switching and adapting is a skill which could be trained by doing exactly this. At least I feel less like a victim and more like a person who improves himself :)

But it appears I'm in a better position because I don't have to work with clearly stupid GUIs and have no strong emotions to them.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#178

Post by keybored »

simonw wrote: post #175
keybored wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Leaky abstractions doesn't imply abstractions are bad . Using abstractions to trade power for simplicity is a perfectly fine trade-off... but you have to bare in mind that at some point you'll run into a problem that requires you to break through that abstraction. I read that essay 22 years ago and ever since then I've always looked out for opportunities to learn little extra details about the abstractions I'm using.…

> Leaky abstractions doesn't imply abstractions are bad.

No, of course not. I’m saying that the article is bad. Because he’s not saying anything that the term itself isn’t already describing or implying.

No adjectives needed. And certainly no laws.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#179

Post by maratc »

simonw wrote: post #113
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?

I assume that would be seen as creating unnecessary burden, provided that the script works and does what's required. Is it better than the code written by people who have departed, and now no one can explain how it works?

The developer in question has been later promoted to a team lead, and (among other things) this explains why it's "my previous place" :)

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#180

Post by llmoron »

sanswork wrote: post #161
__loam wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C compilers are deterministic. You don't have to inspect the assembly they produce to know that it did the right thing.

And C compilers have bugs too earlier ones a lot more though thankfully we are now several decades into their development.

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