Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Engineers who dismiss AI

terriblesoftware.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 256 posts

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#41

Post by martinald »

alexpotato wrote: post #9

I work in crypto (L1 chain) as a DevOps engineer (LOTS of baremetal, LOTS of CI/CD etc) and it's been amazing to see what Claude can do in this space too. e.g. had an issue with connecting to AWS S3, gave Claude some of the code to connect and it diagnosed a CREDENTIALS issue without seeing the credentials file nor seeing the error itself. It can even find issues like "oh, you have an extra space in front of the buil…

Yes I remember a while ago it fixing a pipeline problem because I had managed to copy and paste an IP with one of the digits missing at the end. Spent about an hour before that looking at everything else (all the other steps succeeded, but the last one 'timed out', because I copy and pasted it wrong at the end). Took it <30secs as you said to instantly diagnose the problem.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#42

Post by bloqs »

They will get on board when its good enough

I can't imagine being so eager to socially virtue signal. Presumably some greybeard told him it was a waste of time and it upset him

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#44

Post by amrocha »

yunwal wrote: post #8
harimau777 wrote: post #4

What worries me is how AI impacts neurodivergent programmers. I have ADHD and it simply doesn't work for me to constantly be switching context between the code I'm writing and the AI chat. I am terrified that I will be forced out of the industry if I can't keep up with people who are able to use AI.

I find that any additional overhead caused by the separate AI chat is saved 20x over by basically never having to use a browser to look at documentation and S/O while coding.

And studies find that that 20x is actually a 0.8x

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#45

Post by kksweet »

> If you’ve actually tried modern tools and they didn’t work for you, that’s a conversation worth having. But “I tried ChatGPT in 2022” isn’t that conversation.

How many people are actually saying this? Also how does one use modern coding tools in heavily regulated contexts, especially in Europe?

I can't disagree with the article and say that AI has gotten worse because it truly hasn't, but it still requires a lot of hand holding. This is especially true when you're 'not allowed' to send the full context of a specific task (like in health care). For now at least.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#46

Post by croes »

> The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t.

Let‘s wait with the evaluation until the honeymoon phase is over. At the moment there are plenty of companies that offer cheap AI tools. It will not stay that way. At the moment most of their training data is man made and not AI made which makes AIs worse if used for training. It will not stay that way.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#47

Post by pwillia7 »

Just normal Luddite things, which attracts those most threatened in their personal identity by the new technology.

You see it obviously with the artists and image/video generators too.

We did this with Dadaism and Impressionism and photography before this too with art.

Ultimately, it's just more abstraction that we have to get used to -- art is stuff people create with their human expression.

It is funny to see everyone argue so vehemently without any interest in the same arguments that happened in the past.

Exit through the giftshop is a good movie that explores that topic too, though with near-plagiarized mass production, not LLMs, but I guess that's pretty similar too!

https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqVXThss1z4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#48

Post by TGower »

sothatsit wrote: post #29
TGower wrote: post #7

"AI coding is so much better now that any skepticism from 6 months ago is invalid" has been the refrain for the last 3 years. After the first few cycles of checking it out and realizing that it's still not meeting your quality bar, it's pretty reasonable to dismiss the AI hype crowd.

A year ago I could get o1-mini to write tests some of the time that I would then need to fix. Now I can get Opus 4.5 to do fairly complicated refactors with no mistakes. These tools are seriously starting to become actually useful, and I’m sorry but people aren’t lying when they say things have changed a lot over the last year.

It might even be true this time, but there is no real mystery why many aren't inclined to invest more time figuring it out for themselves every few months. No need for the author of the original article to reach for "they are protecting their fragile egos" style of explanation.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#49

Post by [deleted] »

TGower wrote: post #7

"AI coding is so much better now that any skepticism from 6 months ago is invalid" has been the refrain for the last 3 years. After the first few cycles of checking it out and realizing that it's still not meeting your quality bar, it's pretty reasonable to dismiss the AI hype crowd.

[deleted]

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#50

Post by fluxusars »

As someone whose stance is to be extremely skeptical of AI, I threw Claude at a complex feature request in a codebase I wasn't very familiar with, and it managed to come up with a solution that was 99% acceptable. I was very impressed, so I started using it more.

But it's really a mixed bag, because for the subsequent 3-4 tasks in a codebase that I was familiar with, Claude managed to produce over-commented, over-engineered slop that didn't do what I asked for and took shortcuts in implementing the requirements.

I definitely wouldn't dismiss AI at this point because it occasionally astounds me and does things I would never in my life have imagined possible. But at other times, it's still like an ignorant new junior developer. Check back again in 6 months I guess.

Post reply on HN