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I don't care how well your "AI" works

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Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#241

Post by BarryMilo »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #221
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

This just happened to me this week. I work on the platform everyone builds on top of. A change here can subtlety break any feature, no matter how distant. AI just can't cope with this yet. So my team has been told that we are too slow. Meanwhile, earlier this week we halted a roll out because if a bug introduced by AI, as it worked around a privacy feature by just allow listing the behavior it wanted, instead of chan…

As it was foretold since the beginning, IA use is breaking security wantonly.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#242

Post by scld »

abbadadda wrote: post #33

I really enjoyed how your words made me _feel._ They encouraged me to "keep fighting the good fight" when it comes to avoiding social media, et. al. I do Vibe Code occasionally, Claude did a decent job with Terraform and SaltStack recently, but the words ring true in my head about how AI weakens my thinking, especially when it comes to Python or any programming language. Tread carefully indeed. And reading a book doe…

Doesn't Python weaken your thinking about how computers actually work?

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#243

Post by syllogism »

TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

I think LLMs are net helpful if used well, but there's also a big problem with them in workplaces that needs to be called out.

It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. If all your coworkers use LLMs and you don't you're gonna get eaten alive. LLMs are unreasonably effective at generating large volumes of stuff that resembles diligent work on the surface.

The other thing is, tools change trade-offs. If you're in a team that's decided to lean into static analysis, and you don't use type checking in your editor, you're getting all the costs and less of the benefits. Or if you're in a team that's decided to go dynamic, writing good types for just your module is mostly a waste of time.

LLMs are like this too. If you're using a very different workflow from everyone else on your team, you're going to end up constantly arguing for different trade-offs, and ultimately you're going to cause a bunch of pointless friction. If you don't want to work the same way as the rest of the team just join a different team, it's really better for everyone.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#244

Post by easterncalculus »

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles.

That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture.

I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away" from superintelligence for the forseeable future. All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#245

Post by Razengan »

IAmBroom wrote: post #206
Razengan wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People broadly are short term thinkers. I wonder how much of that is "nature vs. nurture"? Like the Tolkienesque elves in fantasy worlds, would humans be more chill too if our natural lifespans were counted in centuries instead of decades? Or is it the pace of society , our civilization, that always keeps us on edge? I mean I'm not sure if we're born with a biological sense of mortality, an hourglass of doom encode…

I've wondered about this a lot, and I think it's genetic and optimized for survival in general. Dogs barely set food aside; they prefer gorging, which is a good survival technique when your food spoils and can be stolen. Bees, at the other end of the spectrum, spend their lives storing food (or "canning", if you will - storing prepared food). We first evolved in areas that were storage-adverse (Africa), and more rece…

Yes, and it's barely been 100 years, probably closer to 50, since we have had enough technology to make the daily lives of most (or half the) humans in the world comfortable enough that they can safely take 1-2 days off every week.

For the first time in human history most people don't have to worry about famine, wars, disasters, or disease upending their lives; they can just wait it out in their homes.

Will that eventually translate to a more relaxed "instinct"?

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#247

Post by enraged_camel »

danaris wrote: post #145
grumbel wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just not happening anywhere around me. Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. AI is brand new bleeding edge technology right now, and adaption always takes time, especially when the integration with IDEs and such is even more bleeding edge than the underlying AI systems themselves. And speaking about the future, I wouldn't just worry about it replacing the programme…

> Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. And where will it be in 5-10 years? Because right now, the trajectory looks like "right about where it is today, with maybe some better integrations". Yes, LLMs experienced a period of explosive growth over the past 5-8 years or so. But then they hit diminishing returns , and they hit them hard. Right now, it looks like a veritable pla…

I use LLMs all day every day. There is no plateau. Every generation of models has resulted in substantial gains in capability. The types of tasks (both in complexity and scope) that I can assign to an LLM with high confidence is frankly absurd, and I could not even dream of it eight months ago.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#248

Post by afro88 »

fileeditview wrote: post #203
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over. The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse. edit…

I think you'll be waiting a while for the "crashing down". I was a kid when manufacturing went off shore and mass production went into overdrive. I remember my parents complaining about how low quality a lot of mass produced things were. Yet for decades most of what we buy is mass produced, comparatively low quality goods. We got used to it, the benefits outweighed the negatives. What we thought mattered didn't in the face of a lot of previously unaffordable goods now broadly available and affordable.

You can still buy high goods made with care when it matters to you, but that's the exception. It will be the same with software. A lot of what we use will be mass produced with AI, and even produced in realtime on the fly (in 5 years maybe?). There will be some things where we'll pay a premium for software crafted with care, but for most it won't matter because of the benefits of rapidly produced software.

We've got a glimpse of this with things like Claude Artifacts. I now have a piece of software quite unique to my needs that simply wouldn't have existed otherwise. I don't care that it's one big js file. It works and it's what I need and I got it pretty much for free. The capability of things like Artifacts will continue to grow and we'll care less and less that it wasn't human produced with care.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#249

Post by zwnow »

Aurornis wrote: post #234
zwnow wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. If it doesn't, yay refactoring prompts instead of tackling the actual problem. Also I can wri…

> I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. You don’t have to let the LLM write code for you. They’re very useful as a smart search engine for your code base, a smart refactoring tool, a suggestion generator, and many other ways. I rarely have LLMs write code for me from scratch that I have t…

> But you have to actually learn how to use them.

This probably is the issue for me, I am simply not willing to do so. To me the whole AI thing is extremely dystopian so even on a professional level I feel repulsed by it.

We had an AWS and a Cloudflare outage recently, which has shown that maybe it isn't a great idea to rely on a few companies for a single _thing_. Integrating LLMs and using all these tools is just another bridge people depend on at some point.

I want to write software that works, preferably even offline. I want tools that do not spy on me (referring to that new Google editor, forgot the name). Call me once these tools work offline on my 8GB RAM laptop with a crusty CPU and I might put in the effort to learn them.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#250

Post by j4coh »

swatcoder wrote: post #167
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

The "devaluation" they mention is just the correction against the absurd ZIRP bump, that lured would-be doctors and lawyers into tech jobs at FAANG and FAANG-alike firms with the promise of upper middle class lifestyles for trivially weaving together API calls and jockeying JIRA tickets. You didn't have to spend years more in grad school, you didn't have to be a diligent engineer. You just had to had to have a knack…

I don't believe companies can reliably tell expert and non-expert developers apart, to sort them so efficiently to play out like you say.
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