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AI Is Making Developers Dumb

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Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#191

Post by 101008 »

elicksaur wrote: post #174
101008 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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?

No ieda about that, those are amounts of money I can't even consider because I couldn't tell the different of T vs B or even a hundred millions (as someone who never had more than 100k).

It's something I would cosnider paying for the first months when joining a new company (specially with a good salary), but not more than that, to be honest.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#192

Post by lurking_swe »

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.

except we can guarantee (with tests) that the generated instructions from the compiler are bug free 99% of the time. Pretty big difference there.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#193

Post by lurking_swe »

elicksaur wrote: post #172
sanswork wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

critical thinking is hard i guess

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#194

Post by tracerbulletx »

If you want AI to make you less dumb, instead of using it like stack overflow, you can go on a road trip and have a deep conversation about a topic or field you want to learn more about, you can have it quiz you, do mock interviews, ask questions, have a chat, its incredible at that. As long as its not something where the documentation is less than a year or two old.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#195

Post by sshine »

elicksaur wrote: post #171
sanswork wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've heard from people older than me that this is how people felt about compilers.

https://vivekhaldar.com/articles/when-compilers-were-the--ai...

He provides some sources (7) at the bottom of the article.

To pick one, the following has a video interview with one of the founders of Fortran:

https://www.ibm.com/history/fortran#:~:text=Fortran%20was%20...

So we're not making up stuff, this perspective was ubiquitous among assembly programmers of the 1950s. In 1958 (as the first article I link to mentions), half of programs were written in Fortran. Which means half of people still thought writing assembly by hand was the way to go.

I've personally written assembly by hand for money on an obscure architecture, and I've also written a non-optimizing compiler for a subset of Rust to avoid the assembly. There is great joy in playing stack tetris, but changing code requires a lot of effort. Imagine if there weren't great alternatives, you'd just get good at it.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#196

Post by tyre »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #45
tyre wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like to build things, the faster the better. what's the largest (traffic, revenue) product you've built? quantity >>>> quality of code is a great trade-off for hacking things together but doesn't lend itself to maintainable systems, in my experience. Have you seen it work to the long term?

Sure, but the vast majority of the time in greenfield applications situations, it's entirely unclear if what is being built is useful, even when people think otherwise. So the question of "maintainable" or not is frequently not the right consideration.

right, which is why I asked about the largest project.

If they've never worked on something post-PMF, I get it. They might be mostly right.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#197

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

elicksaur wrote: post #171
sanswork wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No quote or source, but I can corroborate. I've even heard the same argument when C++ was getting popular and C was still the "standard."

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#198

Post by sys64739 »

It ruined my friend's startup. Junior dev "wrote" WAY too much code with no ability to support it after the fact. Glitches in production would result in the kid disappearing for weeks at a time because he had no idea how anything actually worked under the hood. Friend was _so_ confident of his codebase before shit hit the fan - the junior dev misrepresented the state of the world, b/c he simply didn't know what he didn't know.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#199

Post by mikethemerry »

SirMaster wrote: post #11
popularrecluse wrote: post #2

"Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them." I've tolerated writing my own code for decades. Sometimes I'm pleased with it. Mostly it's the abstraction standing between me and my idea. I like to build things, the faster the better. As I have the ideas, I like to see them implemented as efficie…

This is something that I struggle with for AI programming. I actually like writing the code myself. Like how someone might enjoy knitting or model building or painting or some other "tedious" activity. Using AI to generate my code just takes all the fun out of it for me.

There were seamstresses who enjoyed sewing prior to the industrial revolution, and continued doing so afterwards. We still have people with those skills now, but it's often in very different contexts. But the ability to create a completely new garment industry was possible because of the scale that was then possible. Similarly for most artesanal crafts.

The industry will change drastically, but you can still enjoy your individual pleasures. And there will be value in unique, one-off and very different pieces that only an artesan can create (though there will now be a vast number of "unique" screen printed tees on the market as well)

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#200

Post by dragonwriter »

gtsop wrote: post #150
dragonwriter wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Abstractions don't properly surface the underlying causes when they break. "Abstractions" in the abstract neither do nor do not do this, as it is orthogonal to what an abstraction is; concrete implementations of abstractions can either swallow or wrap information about the underlying cause when they break, both are valid approaches. > but their current level of working isn't exposing those details directly so they…

> They absolutely can gain experience Not sure where you are getting with this. Yes, literally speaking they can, but what matters is if they actually do, in general, in the real world. My admitedly biassed opinion, based on personaly observating other colleagues, shows that in general, they don't learn and they give up. Have you noticed an other trend in your circles?

> Not sure where you are getting with this. Yes, literally speaking they can, but what matters is if they actually do,

And, despite the fairly consistent bias people used to working at lower levels of abstraction have against people who usually work at higher levels, we all work with some level of abstraction, and most people gain experience at lower levels by dealing with problems that emerge, and those that don't don't fail to do so because they can't but because they choose not to bother either because they have other people that they can rely on for lower-level problems, or because they aren't interested and are doing things where they can afford to simply change what they are doing in response to those problems.

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