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AI Is Making Developers Dumb

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Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#221

Post by jaredklewis »

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…

I think it’s usually helpful if your knowledge extends a little deeper than the level you usually work at. You need to know a lot about the layer you work in, a good amount about the surrounding layers, and maybe just a little bit about more distant layers.

If you are writing SQL, it’s helpful to understand how database engines manage storage and optimize queries. If you write database engine code, it’s helpful to understand (among many other things of course) how memory is managed by the operating system. If you write OS code, it’s helpful to understand how memory hardware works. And so on. But you can write great SQL without knowing much of anything about memory hardware.

The reverse is also true in that it’s good to know what is going on one level above you as well.

Anyway my experience has been that knowledge of the adjacent stack layers is highly beneficial and I don’t think exaggerated.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#222

Post by agumonkey »

bobxmax wrote: post #27
agumonkey wrote: post #14

It's also making the sleazy and lazy one thrive a bit more, which is quite painful when passionated devs which are also great colleagues don't gain any real leverage from chatgpt.

Humble craftsmen have long been getting replaced by automation and technology. Devs are resisting the same way as everyone else did before them but it's futile. It's just especially poignant/painful because developers are being hoisted by their own petard, so to speak.

Yeah, there's a cynical paradox.

I'm leaning more engineering to maybe pivot.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#223

Post by sshine »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #203
sshine wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Yeah, before high-level languages, programming was mostly done by mathematicians and electrical engineers who felt adventurous.

I also had BlueJay on my first semester. But fortunately I had machine architecture, compilers and operating systems later.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#224

Post by penguin_booze »

yubblegum wrote: post #145
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…

> I've tolerated writing my own code for decades. The only reason I got suckd into this field was because I enjoyed writing code. What I "tolerated" (professionally) was having to work on other people's code. And LLM code is other people's code.

It's probably worse: the 'other' is faceless with no accountability.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#225

Post by optimalsolver »

falcor84 wrote: post #208
layer8 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What? Bugs in the test code are what lead to bugs in production code.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#227

Post by falcor84 »

optimalsolver wrote: post #225
falcor84 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What? Bugs in the test code are what lead to bugs in production code.

That is exactly it. A bug in test code may or may not lead to a bug in production code, while a bug in production code IS a bug in production code

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#228

Post by mlhpdx »

bee_rider wrote: post #60
mlhpdx wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. It might be that the “industry” continues on without good code, slowly dying.

If bad code could kill the software industry, it would be long dead by now.

Definitely a fair point. But I observe that dS/dt may not be positive already.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#230

Post by palmotea »

bee_rider wrote: post #59
palmotea wrote: post #8

That's probably the mechanism by which AI will take over many jobs: 1. Skilled people do a good job, AI does a not-so-good job. 2. AI users get dumbed down so they can't do any better. Mediocrity normalized. 3. Replace the AI users with AI.

It’s always been very weird that little hobbyist open source projects produce much better software than billions dollar companies. But I guess it will be even more notable now that the billion dollar garbage shoveling companies are getting self-operating shovels.

> It’s always been very weird that little hobbyist open source projects produce much better software than billions dollar companies.

Kinda sorta. Little hobbyist projects can do better on relatively small and focused stuff, where the passion of a couple part-time people can cut through the crap that would be created by a thousand half-ass mythical man-month producers.

However, for a lot of stuff, only a "billion dollar company" (or other organization) can do it. Stuff with a lot of unavoidable but unrewarding scut work (e.g. web scraper maintenance) or stuff that requires more focus and effort than a couple of passionate part-time people can provide.

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