Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI Is Making Developers Dumb

eli.cx

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 234 posts

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#201

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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?

Not quite what the OP claims but see for example the Story of Mel:

  I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler
  for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
  Mel didn't approve of compilers.

  ``If a program can't rewrite its own code'',
  he asked, ``what good is it?''
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3008/pg3008-images.html...

Though to be fair The Story of Mel supports rather than refute the argument against compilers.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#202

Post by tokinonagare »

fullstackwife wrote: post #155
tokinonagare wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Job market will verify those students, but the outcome may be potentially disheartening for you, because those guys may actually succeed one way or another. Think punched cards: they are gone along with the mindset of "need to implement it correctly on first try".

> but the outcome may be potentially disheartening for you, because those guys may actually succeed one way or another

Your sentence is very contradictory to say the least! I'll be very glad for each of them to succeed in any way.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#203

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

sshine wrote: post #195
elicksaur wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 am…

I imagine if there weren't compilers (or interpreter) I would never have learned how to code. My generation of programmers was taught with Java and in my university course we did all our homework in the first year using BlueJay, a program that made it _even easier_ to get up and running with a bit of Java code.

(just to save some face: I learned Prolog in my second year).

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#204

Post by intelVISA »

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…

Abstraction is fine, it allows you to work faster, or easier. Reliance that becomes dependency is the problem - when abstraction supersedes fundamentals you're no longer able to reason about the leaks and they become blindspots.

Don't confuse low-level tedium with CS basics, if you're arguing that knowing how computers work is not relevant to working as a SWE then sure, but why would a company want a software dev that doesn't seem to know software? Usually your irreplaceable value as a developer is knowing and mitigating the leaks so they don't wind up threatening the business.

This is where the industry most suffers from not having a standardized-ish hierarchy, you're right that most shops don't need a trauma surgeon on-call for treating headaches but there's still many medical options before resorting to random grifter who simply "watched some Grey's Anatomy" as "medschool was a barrier for providing value to customers".

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#205

Post by vunderba »

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 call this the "house scrabble rule" because I used to play regularly with a group who imposed a rule that said you couldn't play a word without being able to define it.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#206

Post by colonelspace »

sys64739 wrote: post #198

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 di…

Sounds like your friend ruined his own startup by employing only a junior dev?

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#207

Post by Veserv »

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.

I like to call that “unary thinking”. Nothing is “perfect”, therefore everything is “imperfect”, so everything is the “same”. One category for everything, unary.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#208

Post by falcor84 »

layer8 wrote: post #136
deadbabe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t enjoy writing unit tests but fortunately this is one task LLMs seem to be very good at and isn’t high stakes, they can exhaustively create test cases for all kinds of conditions, and can torture test your code without mercy. This is the only true improvement LLMs have made to my enjoyment.

Saying that writing unit tests isn’t high stakes is a dubious statement. The very purpose of unit tests is to make sure that programming errors are caught that may very well be high stakes.

However high the stakes are, a bug in test code is not as much of an issue as a bug in the production code.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#209

Post by sanswork »

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?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use...

The joke story is mocking the common arguments/beliefs at the time.

If you expect me to source you a collection of comments about "real programmers" from over 30 years ago though that is too much of an ask but I was there, I read it often and I started fairly late on the scene in the 90s.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#210

Post by falcor84 »

> As they’re notorious for making crap up because, well, that’s how LLMs work by design, it means that they’re probably making up nonsense half the time.

I found this to be such a silly statement. I find arguments generated by AI to significantly more solid than this.

Post reply on HN