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AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

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Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#211

Post by nerdsniper »

nunez wrote: post #203
nerdsniper wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude all point me to a plethora of sources for most of my questions that I can click through and read. They're also pretty good at both basic and weird git issues for me. Not perfect, but pretty good. Also part of the workflow of using AI is accepting that your initial prompts might not get the right answer. It's important to scan the answer like you did and use intuition to know 'this isn't ri…

_I_ know that the answer provided by the prompt isn't quite right because I have enough experience with the Git CLI to know that it wasn't quite right. Someone who doesn't use the Git CLI at all and is relying on an LLM to do it will not know that. There's also no reason for them to search beyond the LLM or use the LLM to go deeper because the answer is "good enough." That's the point of what I'm trying to make. You…

I definitely agree everything you wrote is plausible. My hope is that the young ones learn to at least click the links that the LLMs cite and figure out where some of the good source materials are (like official documentation). Whether the LLM citations help them discover the good documentation or prevents them from being familiar with it is another question.

As is whether most documentation will be LLM generated in the future and what kind of quality that might be in 5-10 years. Right now, formal specs and documentation looks good for the first couple paragraphs and then is garbage.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#212

Post by trod1234 »

gruez wrote: post #50

The blog post has a bunch of charts, which gives it a veneer of objectivity and rigor, but in reality it's just all vibes and conjecture. Meanwhile recent empirical studies actually point in the opposite direction, showing that AI use increases inequality, not decrease it. https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250215_FNC... https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/13/h...

I'm honestly tired of all the misinformation about AI being posted.

You are correct. Its not hard to see why, (AI imposes cost interference), but there are a lot of bots that keep promoting slop, and moderation doesn't seem to be doing anything about it.

I'm tired of seeing a significant percentage of the article posts in the top 300 being slop.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#213

Post by trod1234 »

Flatterer3544 wrote: post #205
EthanHeilman wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has been extremely useful at teaching me things. Granted I needed to already know how to learn and work through the math myself, but when I get stuck it is more helpful than any other resource on the internet. > To become good at something you have to work through the lower rungs and acquire skill. AI does all those lower level jobs, puts the people who need those jobs for experience on the street, and robs us of…

Not everyone have the privelege of learning for free or the time, many needs that lower level job that makes it possible to get paid and learn at the same time.

This is basically the sequential pipeline for any career development.

You get X*5 years of experience doing the job, you know how to do it much better without mistakes. If you can't get experience because AI has blocked that lower run, you basically have a 10 year countdown to deflationary spiral in that factor market; that's a problem for next quarter though.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#214

Post by recursive »

devjab wrote: post #165
recursive wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's exactly emotional attachment. It's the likelihood that I'm going to get an escalated support ticket caused by this particular piece of slop/artisanally-crafted functionality.

In my world that isn't inherently a bad thing. Granted, I belong to the YAGNI crowd of software engineers who put business before tech architecture. I should probably mention that I don't think this means you should skip on safety and quality where necessariy, but I do preach that the point of software is to serve the business as fast as possible. I do this to the extend where I actually think that our BI people who…

I don't really enjoy business or architecture. I like algorithms and data structures. I put up with business to the extent that it's necessary to turn coding into a career.

But this new generation of tool is threatening to remove the part that I actually enjoy.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#215

Post by nerdsniper »

nunez wrote: post #203
nerdsniper wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude all point me to a plethora of sources for most of my questions that I can click through and read. They're also pretty good at both basic and weird git issues for me. Not perfect, but pretty good. Also part of the workflow of using AI is accepting that your initial prompts might not get the right answer. It's important to scan the answer like you did and use intuition to know 'this isn't ri…

_I_ know that the answer provided by the prompt isn't quite right because I have enough experience with the Git CLI to know that it wasn't quite right. Someone who doesn't use the Git CLI at all and is relying on an LLM to do it will not know that. There's also no reason for them to search beyond the LLM or use the LLM to go deeper because the answer is "good enough." That's the point of what I'm trying to make. You…

> The search I used gave me three [^0]

Most of my searches give 20-80 sources. But i tend to use research mode, even to answer basic questions. I lean on the sources a lot.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#217

Post by righthand »

razzmatazmania wrote: post #158
righthand wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know it’s significantly better quality if you don’t know any of the “how”? The quality increase seems relative to the garbage you start with. I guess as long as you impress yourself with the result it doesn’t matter if it’s not actually higher quality.

I don't think "quality" has anything like a universal definition, and when people say that they probably mean an alignment with personal taste. Does it solve the problem? As long as it isn't prohibitively costly in terms of time or resources, then the rest is really just taste. As a user I have no interest whatsoever if your code is "idiomatic" or "modular" or "functional". In other industries "quality" usually means…

> As long as it isn't prohibitively costly in terms of time or resources

Don’t look now but LLMs might be doing this either training or in daily use.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#218

Post by miljanm »

rnaarten wrote: post #192
bane wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course AI increases inequality. It's automated ladder pulling technology. To become good at something you have to work through the lower rungs and acquire skill. AI does all those lower level jobs, puts the people who need those jobs for experience on the street, and robs us of future experts. The people who benefit the most are those who are already up on top of the ladder investing billions to make the ladder ra…

When you have an unfair system, every technology advancement will benefit the few more than the many. So off course AI falls into this realm.

what's fair? how do you measure fairness?
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