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

111–120 of 287 posts

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#111

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

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.

Honestly there are good reasons to resist AI even as a senior. If prompting an LLM cannot be easily integrated into your existing workflow or demands a huge change in tooling, it's just distracting or crippling. I don't think we need to have a long discussion as to why distractions and context switches are counterproductive.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#112

Post by baazaa »

One thing that I've noticed is that AI has made it even more abundantly obvious that the low IQs of middle-managers are the main problem.

They have a great faith in AI (which is understandable), but they're constantly realising that:

a) they don't understand any of the problems enough to even being prompting for a solution

b) the AI can explain our code but the manager still won't understand

c) the AI can rephrase our explanations and they still won't understand.

Traditionally middle-managers probably consoled themselves with the idea that the nerds can't communicate well and coding is a dumb arcane discipline anyway. But now that their machine god isn't doing a better job than we are of ELI5ing it, I think even they're starting to doubt themselves.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#113

Post by zhivota »

nyrikki wrote: post #48
monero-xmr wrote: post #9

I use LLMs for annoying shit that used to take an inordinate amount of time. For example an analyst gives me a CSV, it has some data clean up issues, eventually it needs to become a series of SQL inserts. What was a day of script writing becomes 15 minutes of prompt engineering to clean up the CSV and convert it into the proper statements. Massive time savings! I believe one can vibe code a basic app or script. Like…

Honest question, what type of CSV to SQL code are you doing whre correctness doesn't count? Perhaps my few decades in the industry have been in areas whree it is always the details, correctness, and fitness for purpose that tends to make those problems hard, not the work itself. I do see a use case for throw away spikes, or part of a red-green-refactor, etc.. but if accuracy and correctness aren't critical, data clea…

In my experience the difficulty in this kind of task is reading the docs of a bunch of packages I haven't used in months/years and probably won't use again anytime soon, testing things manually and creating all the little harnesses to make that work without running for minutes at a time, etc.

Sure for someone who does ETL type work all day, or often enough anyway, they'd scoff, and true LLM won't really save them time. But for me who does it once in a blue moon, LLMs are great. It's still on me to determine correctness, I am simply no longer contending with the bootstrap problem of learning new packages and their syntax and common usage.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#114

Post by pornel »

api wrote: post #30
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.

For large companies this is true, and this may be the best AI coding take I have read. It's similar with full self drive. FSD is better than a bad, drunk, or texting human driver, and that's a lot of the drivers on the road.

FSD in principle could be, but the overpromised misnomer we have right now isn't. Being better than a drunk driver isn't good enough when it's also worse than a sober driver. The stats of crashes per mile are skewed by FSD being mainly used in easy conditions, and not for all driving.

There are real safety improvements from ADAS. For safety you only need crash avoidance, not a full-time chauffeur.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#115

Post by jvanderbot »

Artgor wrote: post #65

You know, sometimes I feel that all this discourse about AI for coding reflects the difference between software engineers and data scientists / machine learning engineers. Both often work with unclear requirements, and sometimes may face floating bugs which are hard to fix, but in most cases, SWE create software that is expected to always behave in a certain way. It is reproducible, can pass tests, and the tooling is…

This has been about 50% of the time my experience as well. There are very good SWE who know how to use ML in real systems, and then there are the others who believe through and through it will replace well understood systems developed by subdomain experts.

As a concrete example, when I worked at Amazon, there were several really good ML-based solutions for very real problems that didn't have classical approaches to lean on. Motion prediction from grid maps, for example, or classification from imagery or grid maps in general. Very useful and well integrated in a classical estimation and control pipeline to produce meaningful results.

OTOH, when I worked at a startup I won't name, I was berated over and over by a low-level manager for daring to question a learning-based approach for, of all things, estimating orientation of a stationary plane over time. The entire control pipeline for the vehicle was being fed flickering, jumping, adhoc rotating estimate for a stationary object because the entire team had never learned anything fundamental about mapping or filtering, and was just assuming more data would solve the problem.

This divide is very real, and I wish there was a way to tease it out better in interviewing.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#116

Post by anthk »

90s_dev wrote: post #16
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

Is AI perhaps an opportunity for years of paid cleanup and re-design work that those of us who have dedicated decades to learning the craft of software engineering will be able to cash in on?

Yeah I was thinking there's gonna be a lot of work for us in a couple years when AI makes a giant mess and corporations come crawling back to us with their tails between their legs. Now I really need to jumpstart repurposing 90s.dev to become essentially a community of the people you're describing. What would we need to start with? Mailing list? bboard? [edit] posted a top level comment with this question

Usenet and IRC groups ;)

No, seriously. If you have the skills to join, yo should be able to handle the proper way of programming with no AI at all.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#117

Post by jvanderbot »

This subject has become such a Rorschach Blot. Some blame their middle managers, some blame their coworkers, some blame folks from this field or that. I'm guessing that's not a new thing to complain about, it's just a new reason.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#118

Post by lherron »

furyofantares wrote: post #60

I'm quite big on using LLMs in coding, and aside from the inflammatory graphic at the top and the comment about loss of joy (I haven't lost my joy at all personally), I agree with the entire rest of the post completely. (For context I've been programming for 30 years now and still love it.) I'm still trying to figure out how to produce a codebase using LLMs and end up as a expert in the system at the end of it while…

This is my experience as well. I do not view the first shot LLM generated code as the end result. It’s more like a blob of clay I can continue to shape (with the LLM) until it meets my standards.

I also had a similar typed language experience, switching from untyped to type hinted python made the outputs much easier to understand and assess.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#119

Post by mellosouls »

The text in this essay was written without any use of AI

Stated with pride? Given the proofreading and critiquing abilities of AI this dubious boast is a useful signal for the head-in-sand arguments of the essay.

AI is a profound step change in our workflow abilities, a revolution already. Wise to be wary of it, but this reads as shouting at clouds.

The landscape has changed, we have to change with it.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#120

Post by viraptor »

> it doesn't reason about ideas, diagrams, or requirements specifications. (...) How often have you witnessed an LLM reduce the complexity of a piece of code?

> Only humans can decrease or resist complexity.

It's funny how often there's a genuine concept behind posts like these, but then lots of specific claims are plainly false. This is trivial to do: ask for simpler code. I'm using that quite often to get a second opinion and get great results. If you don't query the model, you don't get any answer - neither complex or simple. If you query with default options, it's still a choice, not something inherent to the idea of LLM.

I'm also having a great time converting code into ideas and diagrams and vice versa. Why make the strong claims that people contradict in practice every day now?

Post reply on HN