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Engineers who dismiss AI

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#51

Post by furqs »

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…

What's a "Code Refactor Specialist"? Are you implying that in the future we'll have programmers who will just write code using AI and a specialist role whose job it would be to clean up that code? That isn't going to work, you'll need a superhuman for that role. People who write the code using AI have to be the ones who review it and they have to be responsible for the quality of that code.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#52

Post by japhyr »

> I copy from Stack Overflow constantly.

I'm so tired of this kind of reference to Stack Overflow. I used SO for about 15 years, and still visit plenty these days.

I rarely, if ever, copied from Stack Overflow. But I sure learned a great deal from SO.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#53

Post by gum_wobble »

djhope99 wrote: post #15

Ha! I just saw one of these this morning on LinkedIn, an engineer complaining about AI / Vibecoding and thought exactly the same. I find these overreactions amusing. I don’t know why this is so controversial it’s just a tool, you should learn to use it otherwise as the author of this post said you will get left behind but don’t cut yourself on the new tool (lots of people are doing this). I personally love it because…

> I don’t know why this is so controversial it’s just a tool

Do you really "don't know why"? Are you sure?

I believe that ignoring the consequences that commercial LLMs are having on the general public today is just as radical as being totally opposed to them. I can at least understand the ethical concerns, but being completely unaware of the debate on artificial intelligence at this stage is really something that leaves me speechless, let me tell you.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#54

Post by omnicognate »

baq wrote: post #13
plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #6

> The engineers refusing to try aren’t protecting themselves; quite the opposite, they’re falling behind. The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t. For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities? I use AI sparingly because, to be honest, every time I use AI, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber. I fear that excess…

You can’t and that’s the new normal. We’re probably the only generation which was given an opportunity to get properly good at coding. No such luxury will be available in a few years optimistically; pessimistically it’s been taken away with GPT 5.2 and Opus 4.5.

If that's the case (and I'm not convinced it is), shouldn't retaining that skill be the priority for anyone who has already acquired it? I've yet to see any evidence AI can turn someone who can't code into a substitute for someone who can. If the supply of that skill is going to dry up, surely it will only become more valuable. If using AI erodes it, the logical thing would be not to use AI.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#56

Post by zzzeek »

from some of the engineers I've debated this over, I think some of them have just dug their heels in at this point and have decided they're never going to use LLM tools period, and are just clinging to the original arguments without really examining the reality of the situation. In particular this "The LLM is going to hallucinate subtle bugs I can't catch" one. The idea that LLMs make subtle mistakes that are somehow more subtle, insidious and uncatchable compared to any random 25 pull requests you get from humans is simply ridiculous. The LLM makes mistakes that stick out to you like a sore thumb, because they're not your mistakes. The hardest mistakes to catch are your own, because your thinking patterns are what made them in the first place.

The biggest problem with LLMs for code that is ongoing is that they have no ability to express low confidence in solutions where they don't really have an answer, instead they just hallucinate things. Claude will write ten great bash lines for you but then on the eleventh it will completely hallucinate an option on some linux utility you hardly have time to care about, where the correct answer is "these tools don't actually do that and I dont have an easy answer for how you could do that". At this point I am very keen to notice when Claude gets itself into an endless ongoing loop of thought that I'm going about something the wrong way. Someone less experienced would have a very hard time recognizing the difference.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#57

Post by jennyholzer2 »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #6

> The engineers refusing to try aren’t protecting themselves; quite the opposite, they’re falling behind. The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t. For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities? I use AI sparingly because, to be honest, every time I use AI, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber. I fear that excess…

[flagged]

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#58

Post by duskdozer »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #6

> The engineers refusing to try aren’t protecting themselves; quite the opposite, they’re falling behind. The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t. For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities? I use AI sparingly because, to be honest, every time I use AI, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber. I fear that excess…

>For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities?

My cynical view is you can't, and that's the point. How many times before have we seen the pattern of "company operates at staggering losses while eliminating competition or becoming entrenched in enough people's lives, and then clamps down to make massive profits"?

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#59

Post by jennyholzer2 »

nottorp wrote: post #27

Some engineers don't dismiss LLMs. They dismiss the religion like hype machine. You want to market to engineers, stick to provable statements. And address some of their concerns. With something other than "AI is evolving constantly, all your problems will be solved in 6 months, just keep paying us." Oh by the way, what is the OP trying to sell with these FOMO tactics? Yet another ChatGPT frontend?

[flagged]

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#60

Post by hcfman »

bloqs wrote: post #42

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

That's just blatant ageism!

I don't have a beard, but if I did I'm sure it would be white, beyond grey.

It's okay. It's okay to feel annoyed, you have a tough battle ahead of you, you poor things.

I may be labelled a grey beard but at least I get to program computers. By the time you have a grey beard maybe you are only allowed to talk to them. If you are lucky and the billionares that own everything let you...

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