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The copilot delusion

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Re: The copilot delusion

#71

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

boxed wrote: post #66
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in an enterprise company where we just recently got access to use cursor, before that copilot. We have literally stood up entire services built practically entirely with AI that are deployed right now and consumers are using. AI does work with competent people behind the wheel. People can't keep hiding behind saying that it always churns out code that doesn't work. We are way past those days. If you don't you…

> AI does work with competent people behind the wheel So does extremely junior devs that are really bad but you code review EVERYTHING. (Except jr programmers can learn, AI models can't really, they can be retrained from scratch by big corporations)

The AI will do it faster and cheaper than the junior does and thats what the company cares about.

Not to mention you should still be code reviewing it anyway. In fact with AI you should be reviewing even more than you were before.

Re: The copilot delusion

#72

Post by gleenn »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #5

This resonates with me, for sure; both the benefits and the drawbacks of copilot. But while I think kids and hackers were artisans, engineers were always just engineers. The amazing technical challenges they had to solve to create some of the foundational technologies we have today, exist because they had to solve those challenges. Looking at only these and saying "that's how things used to be" is survivorship bias.

I feel privileged to be able to say that as a software engineer who's been doing it the hard way for 20+ years, I relish the hard problems. The CRUD app updates are unbearable without the random in-between challenges that bend my mind. The rare recursive algorithm, the application of some esoteric knowledge I actually learned in college, actually having to do big-o estimates. These are the gems of my career that keep me sane. I hope the next flock of AI-driven SWEs appreciates these things even more given the AI can spout off answers which sometimes are right and sometimes are horribly wrong. Challenges like these will always have to have someone who actually knows what to do when the AIs start hallucinating or the context of the situation is beyond the context window.

Re: The copilot delusion

#73

Post by abletonlive »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #65
abletonlive wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail. Have you considered that instead of resisting you should do more to figure out why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? If nothing has changed for you in the past 2 years in your productivity the problem is most likely you. Don't you think it's your responsibility as an engineer to figure out what you're doing wrong when…

Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.

What's more likely

A) all of this money being funneled into tech to build out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, a month over month increasing user base buying subscriptions for these llm services, every company buying seats for LLM because of the value that it provides - these people are wrong

B) yappers on hackernews that claim they derive no productivity boost out of llms while showing absolutely nothing about their workflow or method when the interface is basically a chat box with no guardrails - these people are wrong

Sorry I'm going to be it's B and you just suck at it

Re: The copilot delusion

#74

Post by robocat »

tptacek wrote: post #44

The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with. Gross. Also: you could have said this about the spreadsheet.

> let people in who never wanted the job to begin with

I knew plenty of software developers that hate the job: it's a just paid work for many people and AI doesn't change that

Re: The copilot delusion

#75

Post by sanderjd »

malfist wrote: post #4

I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do. It's like the world has los…

Yeah, I mean, this is just the current phase of the hype cycle. It'll settle down. Some of the tools and techniques will have staying power, most won't. If you can figure out which is which and influence others, you'll be in good shape.

Re: The copilot delusion

#76

Post by groby_b »

Not sure if he talked about photography, Desktop Publishing, spreadsheets, or some other labor-saving invention.

But what I heard over the din of whining was "It was hard for me, it should be hard for you". And... that's not how this or anything works. You get labor-saving stuff, you choose if you want to continue to solve hard problems, or if you want the same problems (which suddenly turned easy).

Yes, it's not perfect. Yes, you need to know how you use it, and misusing it causes horrible disfiguring incidents. Guess what, the same was true about C++. And C before it. And that new-fangled assembly stuff, instead of using blinkenlights like a real programmer. And computers instead of slide rules.

Up the complexity ladder we keep going.

Re: The copilot delusion

#77

Post by sanderjd »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #65
abletonlive wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail. Have you considered that instead of resisting you should do more to figure out why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? If nothing has changed for you in the past 2 years in your productivity the problem is most likely you. Don't you think it's your responsibility as an engineer to figure out what you're doing wrong when…

Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.

People keep saying this kind of thing, but sorry, it's nonsense.

Many of my colleagues that I most admire are benefiting greatly and increasingly from LLM tooling.

Re: The copilot delusion

#78

Post by lyu07282 »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #54
lukan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost all my snobism about that years ago and I do just follow the paradigm, "does it work". But for some reasons, even with AI I ain't on another level. And those reasons are, it all collapses very quickly once the complexity reaches an medium amount. And if I want to rely on things and debug them - I cannot just have a pile of generated garbage, that works as long as the sun is shining. For isolated tasks it works…

Most replies here make the claim that all AI generated code is "garbage". And I can't help but think most of the people who say that do not actually use it in their day to day with the most recent models and actually give it good instructions/requirements. No, it is not always perfect. Yes you will have to manually edit some of the code it generates. But yes it can and will generate good code if you know how to use i…

I think the root of the argument is that the AI critics are worried because they have the assumption that 1) you aren't experienced enough to know what "good code" looks like, and/or 2) you only care if it "works" and don't understand all the implications bad code will have downstream, again because of inexperience.

Re: The copilot delusion

#79

Post by sgarland »

> The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with.

I fully agree. This already happened with the explosion of DevOps bullshit, where people with no understanding of Linux got jobs by memorizing abstractions. “Stop gatekeeping,” they say. “Stop blowing up prod, and read docs” I fire back.

Re: The copilot delusion

#80

Post by EdwardKrayer »

tptacek wrote: post #44

The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with. Gross. Also: you could have said this about the spreadsheet.

I feel this has been the case for 20 years, when a whole generation was shoveled into the Comp Sci dream.
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