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

171–180 of 287 posts

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#171

Post by bearjaws »

throw4847285 wrote: post #148
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.

That's an extremely self-serving narrative. I assume you're part of the 30 percent?

Whether I'm in the 30% or not isn't the core issue, is it? The point is about the impact AI will have based on existing work ethics. Many of us have seen colleagues who barely contribute, and AI is a tool that will either be leveraged for growth by the engaged or used as another crutch by those already disengaged.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#172

Post by throw4847285 »

pixl97 wrote: post #169
throw4847285 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extremely self-serving narrative. I assume you're part of the 30 percent?

It's probably better to look at a group from outside. Every company of any size seems to accumulate at least some people that could be replaced with a small shell script. Where I work there are a few people that seem so questionable at their job (even though most are good) I wonder how they keep their positions. I'd rather work with AI for the rest of my life then have to deal with them again.

You can alter a work environment to allow some of those people to thrive (though I'm not naive enough to think that all of them will). But once somebody suited to their environment becomes convinced that their success is totally due to their own overwhelming greatness, they become impossible to work with.

I would rather work in an office entirely staffed by well-meaning people struggling at their jobs than a single person like you.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#173

Post by globnomulous »

> I don't think anyone believes that a computer program is literally their companion

Quoth the makers of Claude:

> AI systems are no longer just specialized research tools: they’re everyday academic companions.

> https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-ho...

To call Anthropic's opener brazen, obnoxious, or euphemistic would be an understatement. I hope it ages like milk, as it deserves, and so embarrasses the company that it eventually requires a corrective foreword or retraction.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#174

Post by fuelled6532 »

Etheryte wrote: post #38
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.

I'd give up my 3D printer long before letting go of my Bridgeport...

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#175

Post by dingnuts »

palmotea wrote: post #155
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…

> So, for MLE, working with AI that isn't always reliable, is a norm. They are accustomed to thinking in terms of probabilities, distributions, and acceptable levels of error. Applying this mindset to a coding assistant that might produce incorrect or unexpected code feels more natural. They might evaluate it like a model: "It gets the code right 80% of the time, saving me effort, and I can catch the 20%." And given…

[flagged]

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#176

Post by MisterTea »

baq wrote: post #86
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.

I have a 3d printer and cadded me some parts, I don't have an injection molding plant.

Because you dont have a need to mass produce.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#177

Post by CuriouslyC »

johnecheck wrote: post #36
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.

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.

Depends on how coupled the codebase is. Heavily coupled code is hard for LLMs to modify, but brownfield work that's not heavily coupled, you can easily refactor and improve coverage at a much higher rate with LLMs.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#178

Post by 0xAFFFF »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #15

> If you're a skilled, experienced engineer and you fear that AI will make you unemployable, adopt a more nuanced view. LLMs can't replace human engineering. I don't think LLMs were ever meant to completely replace human engineering, at least in the way we think of engineering as a craft. But the truth is the world is changing, and with LLMs/AI, the goalposts are changing, too. With massive economies of scale and hug…

> the goal is less and less good engineering and more and more pure output

Code is a liability. Code is expensive to maintain, has bugs, security issues, performance issues. The short-term profitable solutions will have a very narrow window to succeed because they will quickly crumble under their own weight.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#179

Post by MisterTea »

dylan604 wrote: post #153
nssnsjsjsjs wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3d printing will slowly edge its way into more manufacturing. The humble stepping motor really is eating the world. 3dp is one manifestation of it! Back to AI though. I just checked the customer support page of a hyped AI app generator and its what you expect: "doesn't work on complex project" "wastes all my tokens" and "how to get a refund" These things are over promising and a future miracle is required to justify…

> 3d printing will slowly I'm not sure why you continued using words when you summed up 3D printing with those four words. In the time it takes to print 1 object, you could have molded thousands of them. 3D printing has done a lot for manufacturing in terms of prototyping and making the first thing while improving flexibility for iterations. Using them for mass production is just not a sane concept.

[flagged]

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#180

Post by vladde »

> It's still the wrong answer, because the question should have been, "How can I make this code thread-safe?" and whose answer is "Use System.Collections.Concurrent" and 1 line of code.

I often found myself adding "use built-in features if they exists", just because because of this type of scenario.

It unsettles me that some people feel okay always accepting AI code, even when it "works".

Post reply on HN