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The copilot delusion

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Re: The copilot delusion

#111

Post by lamename »

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…

> AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job.

This is a well considered point that not enough of us admit. Yes many jobs are rote or repetitive, but many more jobs, of all flavors, done well have subtleties that will be lost when things are automated. And no I do not think that some "80% done by AI is good enough" because errors propagate through a system (even if that system is a company or society), AND the people evaluating that "good enough" are not necessarily going to be those experienced in that same domain.

Re: The copilot delusion

#112

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

abletonlive wrote: post #73
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nothin…

Just like the trillions poured into blockchain have revolutionized the internet.

All the jaw dropping ICOs, million dollar NFTs, and cryptocurrency price surges. Surely that proves its value in our daily lives.

Re: The copilot delusion

#113

Post by lamename »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #39
lamename wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will demand use of AI tools for "productivity" and then complain when there are bugs in prod without realizing the root cause.

They won't blame the AI as the root cause. They will blame you. This is why I mention you need to be competent enough to understand what is being generated or they will find someone else who does. There's no 2 ways around it. AI is here to stay.

Yes I agree. They will and should blame the human. That's a problem when the human isnt given enough time to complete projects because "AI is SO productive"

Re: The copilot delusion

#114

Post by nkrisc »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #19

As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take. A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp. Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no cl…

Then who fixes it when it stops working? Or do you just par each other on the back and fold the company?

Re: The copilot delusion

#115

Post by sumeno »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #33
boxed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean code is nice. Working code is a requirement. You missed the point. AI slop doesn't just fail on point 1. It fails on point 2.

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…

Let us know how those services are doing in 2 years

Re: The copilot delusion

#116

Post by yencabulator »

focusgroup0 wrote: post #16

Adapt or die. Keep up on industry trends and learn how to (responsibly) use the tools to be a better programmer, or be unnaturally selected out.

More like embrace the crap quality (and become a worse programmer) or move to a field that cares about quality.

Re: The copilot delusion

#117

Post by jboggan »

This is the crux of the piece to me:

"We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software—and the idea of squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, or building something lean and wild and precise, will sound like folklore."

This somewhat lines up with my concerns about libraries and patterns before 2023 getting frozen in stone once we pass over the event horizon where most new code to train on is generated by LLMs. We aren't innovating, we are going to forever reinforce the screwed up dependency stack and terrible kludges of the last 30 years of development. Javascript is going to live forever.

Re: The copilot delusion

#118

Post by quantadev »

Despite that this post/blog about AI has some valid points, the truth of the matter is that a good experienced developer _can_ extract the power out of a Coding Agent to get 6 months worth of work done in 3 weeks, and even do it in a language he's never coded in before. AI just isn't AGI yet, so comparing it to a human developer doesn't make any sense, to me. On the other hand, I'd also say AI Coding Agents are "Superhuman" in their vast knowledge and code-writing abilities. This indeed does sound like a contradiction, but the world is nuanced enough for it not to be a contradiction, but just two things that are true in a nuanced way.

Re: The copilot delusion

#119

Post by yencabulator »

-__---____-ZXyw wrote: post #8

I wonder if we'll look back on this period in a couple of years and feel a nostalgic fondness as we think of the fateful moment when people working in software were forced to pull the wool from their eyes and look at the fact that businesses really, really, really dislike losing huge amounts of money paying people to make the software their businesses completely depend on. I mean, I'm guessing that's true. It'd make…

Businesses really, really, really would like to just have profit without any expenses. Ideally all of the money in the world as profit, please. And no taxes either. Just skip straight to splitting all the money in the world between the shareholders.

If you think running the output of an LLM as a serverless function in some cloud is a good way to differentiate your business, build a moat, and make a profit, good luck!

Re: The copilot delusion

#120

Post by bangertho »

sgarland wrote: post #79

> 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.

This already happened with Linux where people with no understanding of electrical engineering got jobs memorizing abstractions.

I look forward to a data driven system future where a few functions transform the machines electromagnetic geometry to solve a task based upon the most efficient energy model for solving a task as we continue to compress from the model all the non-essential syntax sugar of modern software.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668

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