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The copilot delusion

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Re: The copilot delusion

#141

Post by queenkjuul »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #55
padolsey wrote: post #36

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new und…

I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI…

I got slightly LLM vibes for the first few paragraphs ngl. It became very clear it wasn't very fast, though.

Re: The copilot delusion

#142

Post by icedchai »

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…

I had AI do some tedious work, like migrating to new APIs, upgrading deprecated calls, fixing warnings in old C code. It worked great. Faster than I could do it myself.

Re: The copilot delusion

#143

Post by queenkjuul »

padolsey wrote: post #36

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new und…

Fundamentally, mission critical low level code isn't the kind of software i want to write anyway. I don't find AI tools super useful for most of the same reasons as the author, but i do kind of get tired of the idea that if you're not writing systems in C you're not really programming.

I like writing front end code. I'm probably never going to have a job where i need or would even want to write a low level graphics library from scratch. Fine, I'm not red-eyed 3am hacker brained, but I'm passionate and good at what i do. I don't think a world where every person working in software has the author's mentality is realistic or desirable.

Re: The copilot delusion

#144

Post by icedchai »

Supermancho wrote: post #90
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The AI will do it faster and cheaper than the junior does and thats what the company cares about. Short term. Not long term. The AI will never become a staff developer. Shifting review on to the senior developers is shifting responsibility and workload, which will have the expected outcome. Slower development cycles as you have to consider every footgun. Especially when the AI can't explain the reasoning for esoter…

I’ve had AI generate code in a few hours that would take some juniors I’ve worked with weeks. Yes, the code was not the best (very long methods) and it took some iteration, but everything has trade offs.

Re: The copilot delusion

#145

Post by queenkjuul »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #134
ivape wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny because I made a few funny clips (to my taste) on Google Whisk and figured, hey why not, let’s make a TikTok. Did you know that all of TikTok is full of millions of ai generated stuff or other people just copying each others stuff? I really thought there was something to this “original creation” stuff. We are all so simply reproducible. No one’s making anything special, anywhere, for the most part. If we a…

There's literally genocide and war going on, solve that

Don't encourage them. They'll just build an AI to do the genocide faster.

Re: The copilot delusion

#146

Post by sgarland »

binary132 wrote: post #138
sgarland wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, I was a Nuclear Electronics Technician, and have a decent understanding – though admittedly not to the level of an EE – of how computers work at a very low level. I also worked for a chip fab for a couple of years, and literally made silicon wafers. I also rewrote the US Navy’s microprocessor training course for Nuke ETs, updating it from the Motorola 68000 to the Intel 386. I make no claims that I fully un…

It’s actually kinda terrifying the more you find out how incompetent most of the people writing most of the software most of the world runs on are

Much like how the more you know about how computers work, the more mind-boggling it is that they work. The Internet? Magic. CDMA? Wizardry. EUV? Sorcery.

Re: The copilot delusion

#147

Post by sgarland »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #140
sgarland wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, I was a Nuclear Electronics Technician, and have a decent understanding – though admittedly not to the level of an EE – of how computers work at a very low level. I also worked for a chip fab for a couple of years, and literally made silicon wafers. I also rewrote the US Navy’s microprocessor training course for Nuke ETs, updating it from the Motorola 68000 to the Intel 386. I make no claims that I fully un…

> More generally, I’ve been playing with Linux and computers in general for over 20 years, and when I finally got a job in tech about five years ago, I was stunned at how little people knew about how computers work. I don’t expect (nor do I think it’s helpful) anyone to know how a bus arbitration cycle works, but I assumed that things like IOPS and throughput would be generally understood. My expertise is only in sle…

AWS: “We’ve separated compute and storage by a large physical distance, which makes relational databases better.”

People who knew better: wild laughter.

Re: The copilot delusion

#148

Post by jgraettinger1 »

anon7000 wrote: post #85
padolsey wrote: post #36

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new und…

Yeah, and the article talks about those ways in which AI is useful. Overall, the author doesn’t have a problem with experts using AI to help them. The main argument is that we’re calling AI a copilot, and many newbies may be trusting it or leaning on it too much, when in reality, it’s still a shitty coworker half the time. Real copilots are actually your peers and experts at what they do. > Now? We’re building a worl…

> On the other hand, one could argue that AI is just another abstraction

I, as a user of a library abstraction, get a well defined boundary and interface contract — plus assurance it’s been put through paces by others. I can be pretty confident it will honor that contract, freeing me up to not have to know the details myself or second guess the author.

Re: The copilot delusion

#149

Post by queenkjuul »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #50
bluefirebrand wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail. I really think we need to figure out how to cut back on management so we can get back to the business of actually doing work

Well how hard would it be to replace management with AI? Perhaps a developer could use AI to recreate the other tasks of the company without all of the overhead of actual people.

Yeah i can't wait to discuss product with a sycophantic chatbot instead of the people who actually have a stake in the product.

Management can and usually does suck but i can reason with a person, for now. And sadly only the product people actually know what they want, usually right when you've built it the way they used to want it lol.

Re: The copilot delusion

#150

Post by chrismorgan »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #55
padolsey wrote: post #36

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new und…

I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI…

Yeah, it feels a very different style of unhinged to LLMs. I can’t yet imagine an LLM producing such a beautiful and contextually-appropriate sentence as “They’ll be out there trying to duct-tape horses to an engine block, wondering why it doesn’t fly.”
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