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AI: Accelerated Incompetence

slater.dev

231–240 of 287 posts

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#231
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Your job will disappear even faster with your head that deep in the sand. At least learning the new tools you can carve out a new role/career for yourself.

Meh, I haven't worked in software in years, so I'm fine.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#232
In principle, mental constructs don’t need to remain in your head. They could be documented. But writing documentation, reading it, and maintaining it takes time.

With LLM assistance, it might become easier to maintain a Markdown file containing the “theory” of a program. But what should be in the file?

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can say that, but when the principle down the hall from you who's got a highly tuned agentic AI workflow is outproducing half your team by himself while leading engineering direction on multiple projects, it's hard to justify that to management.

it's an "if", not a "when"

this outcome is far from certain (unless you're a slopper, in which case it's obviously happening tomorrow)

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#234
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Your stationary plane example highlights a divide I've seen across my work experience in different domains; teams defaulting to ML when fundamental engineering would work better. I'm curious: do you think there's any amount of high-quality data that could make the learning-based approach viable for orientation estimation? Or would it always be solving the wrong problem, regardless of data volume and delivery speed? M…

One opportunity for human-designed systems to excel over machine learning is the case where treating ML as a black box has caused the designers to pose an impossible problem. From the parent comment, it sounds like each additional measurement was being related to a new estimate by the ML system, while the standard technique could integrate measurements over time (that's called filtering).

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#235

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

No, because 3D printing was never going to replace all manufacturing. Anyone who said that didn't even have a basic understanding of manufacturing, and I don't recall any serious claims like that.

3D printing has definitely replaced some manufacturing, and it has had a huge effect on product design.

These anti-AI articles are getting more tedious than the vibe coding articles.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#236
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask the why, but if it provides the wrong approach, just ask to make it what you want it to be. What is wrong with iteration? I frequently have LLM write proposal.MD first and then iterate on that, then have the full solution, iterate on that. It will be interesting to see if it does the proposal like I had in mind and many times it uses tech or ideas that I didn't know about myself, so I am constantly learni…

I might have not been clear in my original reply, I don't have this problem when using an LLM myself, I sometimes notice this when I review code by new joiners that was written with the help of an LLM, the code quality is usually ok unless I want to be pedantic, but sometimes the agent helper make new comers dig themselves deeper in the wrong approach while if they asked a human coworker they would probably have noti…

We had the same worries about StackOverflow years ago. Juniors were going to start copying code from there without any understanding, with unnecessary complexity and without respect for existing project norms.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that doesn't mean the concept of happiness or dog does not exist. That would be a consequence of your position. The person who wrote the article is english. The claim being evaluated here is from the article. The term "concept" is english. The *meaning* of that term isn't english, any more than the meaning of "two" is english. My analysis of "concept" has nothing to do with the english language. "Happy" here st…

Okay maybe I need to make myself more clear, and start from your claim: > It has to do with mental capacities to "bring objects under a concept", partition experience into its conceptual structure ("conceptualise"), simulate scenarios based on compositions of concepts ("the imagination") and so on. These are mental capabilities a wide class of animals possess, who know no language; that LLMs do not possess. Assume it…

I've answered a similar question elsewhere in this thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mjburgess , presently 3rd from the top).

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#238

LLMs are amazing at writing code and terrible at owning it. Every line you accept without understanding is borrowed comprehension, which you’ll repay during maintenance with high interest. It feels like free velocity. But it's probably more like tech debt at ~40 % annual interest. As a tribe, we have to figure out how to use AI to automate typing and NOT thinking.

Depending on the task they are terrible at writing code.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing fundamentally prevents an LLM from achieving this. You can ask an LLM to produce a PR, another LLM to review a PR, and another LLM to critique the review, then another LLM to question the original issue's validity, and so on... The reason LLM is such a big deal is that they are humanity's first tool that is general enough to support recursion (besides humans of course.) If you can use LLM, there's like a 99%…

"Nothing fundamentally prevents an LLM from achieving this" Well yes, LLMs are not teleological, nor inventive.

What are you basing this on? Is there an “inventiveness test” that humans can pass but LLMs don’t? I’m not aware of any.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#240
I wish more people could understand this. Yes, LLMs help me learn faster, brainstorm ideas and so on, but to say that it can generate code and hence you can do complex things easily does not make sense.

For me, writing code has never ever been the challenge. Deciding what to write has always been the challenge.

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