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

AI: Accelerated Incompetence

slater.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 287 posts

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#31

Post by namaria »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #18
CuriouslyC wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who write AI slop would have written human slop, they're just much faster now, and the people who are really good tend to be so set in their ways that they resist AI when they could quadruple their productivity if they just put half as much time into learning how to use it as they put into their current skillset.

You are omitting a third class: the people who would not have written anything at all but are now writing AI slop because the bar has been lowered.

Pretty much the reason I think electronic music was fantastic right up to the point DAWs became a thing. When everyone with a laptop and some software licenses can just put out slop that sounds like the originators, quality fell off the cliff. 90s and 2010s electronic music are a world apart.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#32

Post by 90s_dev »

bearjaws wrote: post #23

Let's be real, 70% of staff are phoning in their jobs so badly that an AI often is just as good if not better. The real struggle will be, the people phoning it in are still going to be useless, but with AI. The rest will learn and grow with AI.

It's almost like people outsourcing their job to AI are asking to get fired, not only by proving that a computer program can do their job better, but even paving the way for it!

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#33

Post by 90s_dev »

api wrote: post #29
90s_dev wrote: post #27

It's occurred to me more and more that I need to repurpose 90s.dev into a non-AI community, focused on the ancient art of writing software well, and welcoming to all who honed that craft. What would it need to start with? Forum? Mailing list? Aggregate blog from multiple authors like hackernoon? [edit] Makeshift mailing list for those interested: https://github.com/sdegutis/90s.dev/issues/2 (subscribe or comment to "…

Use an OG forum software that's good and powered some of the classic forums of the time. Make it stylishly retro.

Definitely. Honestly I was going to write a custom forum in the style of those perl bboards but with https://90s.dev aesthetics (the website, not the os).

But maybe first and foremost I need a mailing list so people can be notified of things like this when they're announced/released?

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#34

Post by parsley »

I call it fast-food software, but that doesn’t mean everyone holds the tool in the same way, the collaboration and use of an assistant to research or modify specific things is the key value-add.

But many people will use unrestrained tool-enabled agents to do all of their work. And so be it, there’s already bad software out there, always has been. It’s easier to make and distribute software. It’s high calorie and tastes great and is FAST.

But you have to hope it will be more of a tool than a full meal.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#35

Post by bandoti »

sensanaty wrote: post #21

> Input Risk. An LLM does not challenge a prompt which is leading ... (Emphasis mine) This has been the biggest pain point for me, and the frustrating part is that you might not even realize you're leading it a particular way at all. I mean it makes sense with how LLMs work, but a single word used in a vague enough way is enough to skew the results in a bad direction, sometimes contrary to what you actually wanted to…

From my experience so far it is helpful for me to get another opinion on how to solve a problem—and I do the work in the end. Or, I am extremely specific, and give it a relatively small problem to solve, and it solves it—writes the code for me—and then I code review it, and make changes to uphold my standards.

In other words, AI is my assistant, but it is MY responsibility to turn up quality, maintainable work.

However, to put things in perspective for the masses: just consider the humble calculator. It has ruined people’s ability to do mental math. AI is going to do that for writing and communication skills, problem solving skills, etc.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#36

Post by johnecheck »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #11
h1fra wrote: post #2

At first, I was not convinced then I thought I would be replaced, now I'm convinced the AI slop is unstoppable and having the hard skills will quickly be invaluable

The people who write AI slop would have written human slop, they're just much faster now, and the people who are really good tend to be so set in their ways that they resist AI when they could quadruple their productivity if they just put half as much time into learning how to use it as they put into their current skillset.

Great engineers can quadruple their productivity with LMMs? Strong claim.

If their whole job is throwing together disposable demos and 1-use scripts, I could believe 4x. But in the normal case, where the senior engineer's time is mostly spent wrangling a legacy codebase into submission? I just don't see LLMs having that level of effect.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#37

Post by auggierose »

consp wrote: post #22
auggierose wrote: post #10

> The text in this essay was written without any use of AI. That's fine, although I think only native English speakers would be proud of that. I am sure he also didn't use a spell-checker.

> I am sure he also didn't use a spell-checker I'm not sure that would matter with/to most people. I can only speak for myself and I don't care unless I'm reading a text by someone who claims to be either an English teacher or Linguistic subject expert.

Yes, it should not matter. Neither should it matter if an AI was used or not. It should be judged on the quality of the article. After all, nobody can actually check if he used an AI or not. He may just be lying about that.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#38

Post by Etheryte »

EncomLab wrote: post #14

Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody? AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.

This is an easy quip to make, but it's also pretty wrong. 3D printing has been a massive breakthrough in many industries and fundamentally changed the status quo. Aerospace is a good example, much of what SpaceX and other younger upstarts in the space are doing would not be feasible without 3D printed parts. Nozzles, combustion chambers, turbopumps etc are all parts that are often printed.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#39

Post by spacebanana7 »

Using AI effectively is like riding a horse or getting a monkey to do things for you. There's absolutely skill involved in getting them to do what you want, and used incorrectly they can create far more mess than any individual human. But we can also use them to achieve things that'd be almost impossible for us to do alone.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#40

Post by frenchmajesty »

I disagree with the author here. His point can be summarized as "LLMs produce bad code, LLMs lead to the teams's average skills decreasing and they can't maintain large codebases over time".

Yet nowhere he addresses the #1 flaws to his position: rate of improvement of the technology, and its promise to deliver on saved money and gained speed.

In all the companies I've seen engineering leadership hardly really gives a shit about things OP says are important. They just care that customers are happy, the system is stable, and its malleable enough to allow for pivots when need be.

Good discussions & documentation about architecture before starting the work that gets peer-reviewed + A non-stupid engineer putting on good guardrails around the LLM's output + the extensive unit test suites in CD/CI + peer reviews on the PRs = all downsides near eliminated while all upside gained.

This is how we work at my company today (health startup). Google and Meta also boast publicly +30% of new lines of code are AI-generated in their companies today. That the state of *today*; assume in 5 years these AIs are 10x better... I simply cannot foresee a world where LLM-assisted coding is not the de-facto way be a software engineer.

Post reply on HN