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Engineers who dismiss AI

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#171

Post by username223 »

pwillia7 wrote: post #138
username223 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which technology did we successfully roll back? Quite a few come to mind: chemical and biological weapons, beanie babies, NFTs, garbage pail kids... Some take real effort to eradicate, some die out when people get bored and move on. Today's version of "AI," i.e. large language models for emitting code, is on the level of fast fashion. It's novel and surprising that you can get a shirt for $5, then you realize that…

Chemical weapons still exist and are used[1] So are beanie babies, NFTs and garbage pail kids -- Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology. I think that's part of the difficulty, how could you roll back knowledge without some Khmer Rouge generational trauma? I think about the original use of steam engines and the industrial revolution -- Steam engines were so inefficient,…

> Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology.

That's true. Ruby still exists, for example, though it's sitting down below COBOL on the Tiobe index. There's probably a community trading garbage pail kids on Facebook Marketplace as well. Ideas rarely die completely.

Burning fossil fuels to turn heat into kinetic energy is genuinely better than using draft animals or human slaves. Creating worse code (or worse clothing) for less money is a tradeoff that only works for some situations.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#172

Post by stemlord »

simonsarris wrote: post #164
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.

I think we have a real inflection point now. I try it a bit every year and was always underwhelmed. Halfway through this year was the first time it really impressed me. I now use Claude Code.

But Claude Code costs money. You really want to introduce a critical dependency into your workflow that will simultaneously atrophy your skills and charge you subscription fees?

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#173

Post by card_zero »

stemlord wrote: post #166
tjchear wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we sees ourselves less as a programmer and more as a software builder, then it doesn’t really matter if our programming skills atrophy in the process of adopting this tool, because it affords us to build at a higher abstraction level), kind of like how a PM does it. This up-leveling in abstractions have happened over and over in software engineering as our tooling improves over time. I’m sure some excellent softwa…

Isn't this the exact reason why modern software is so bloated?

Some termite mounds in Botswana already reach over two meters high, but these traditional engineering termites will be left behind in their careers if they don't start using AI and redefine themselves as mound builders.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#174

Post by stemlord »

pwillia7 wrote: post #95
harimau777 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, luddites have consistently been correct. Technological advancements have consistently been used to benefit the rich at the expense of regular people. The early Industrial Revolution that the original Luddites objected to resulted in horrible working conditions and a power shift from artisans to factory workers. Dadism was a reaction to WWI where the aristocracy's greed and petty squabbling led to 17 million d…

I don't disagree with that, just that there's anything that can be done about it. Which technology did we successfully roll back? Nukes are the closest I think you can get and those are very hard to make and still exist in abundance, we just somewhat controlled who can have them

It's not about "rolling back" technology it's about democratizing its benefit

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#175

Post by tjchear »

stemlord wrote: post #166
tjchear wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we sees ourselves less as a programmer and more as a software builder, then it doesn’t really matter if our programming skills atrophy in the process of adopting this tool, because it affords us to build at a higher abstraction level), kind of like how a PM does it. This up-leveling in abstractions have happened over and over in software engineering as our tooling improves over time. I’m sure some excellent softwa…

Isn't this the exact reason why modern software is so bloated?

I think this question can be answered in so many ways - first of all, piling abstraction doesn’t automatically imply bloating - with proper compile time optimizations you can achieve zero cost abstractions, e.g C++ compilers.

Secondly, bloated comes in so many forms and they all have different reasons. Did you mean bloated as in huge dependency installs like those node modules? Or did you mean an electron app where a browser is bundled? Or perhaps you mean the insane number of FactoryFactoryFactoryBuilder classes that Java programmers have to bear with because of misguided overarchitecting? The 7 layer of network protocols - is that bloating?

These are human decisions - trade-offs between delivering values fast and performance. Foundational layers are usually built with care, and the right abstractions help with correctness and performance. At the app layers, requirements change more quickly and people are more accepting of performance hits, so they pick tech stacks that you would describe as bloated for faster iteration and delivery of value.

So even if I used abstraction as an analogy, I don’t think that automatically implies AI assisted coding will lead to more bloat. If anything it can help guide people to proper engineering principles and fit the code to the task at hand instead of overarchitecting. It’s still early days and we need to learn to work well with it so it can give us what we want.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#176

Post by rssoconnor »

Let me know when AI can create functions for the secp256k1 library that adds a point in jacobian coordinates to another point in jacobian coordinates, both in variable time and in constant time. i.e. add functions

    void secp256k1_gej_add_gej(secp256k1_gej *r, const secp256k1_gej *a, const secp256k1_gej *b);
and

    void secp256k1_gej_add_gej_var(secp256k1_gej *r, const secp256k1_gej *a, const secp256k1_gej *b);
As with the other functions in the library the parameters r and a are allowed to alias.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#177

Post by greenbit »

I've seen some of the dreck that bubbles up on those 'copilot' responses on searches, with glaring inconsistencies on subjects I'm very confident with. If I didn't know better, and used such stuff, debugging would ensue. Frankly, I'd much rather debug my own bugs than those hallucinated by some overly enthusiastic statistical algorithms.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#178

Post by ratrace »

My regular, daily experience with 'AI':

'How do I do [X thing I need to accomplish in codebase]?'

"Here is here how you would do that."

Then I apply the code and it's broken and doesn't work.

'The code you supplied is broken because of [xyz], can you fix it?'

"Of course, you're so right! My apologies. Here is the corrected code."

It still doesn't work. Repeat this about 2-3 more times and throw in me deleting the entire chat window and context and trying again in a new chat with slightly different phrasing of question to maybe get it to output the right answer this time, which it often doesn't.

I hate it. It's awful and terrible. Fundamentally, this technology will never not be terrible, because it is just predicting text tokens based off of probabilistic statistics.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#179

Post by DamnInteresting »

Some of us actually enjoy writing code, and wish to preserve the skill, so we have no motivation to offload the task to an LLM. Do LLM coding evangelists also badger illustrators, asking why they don't just embrace machine learning image generation? Do they tell people they shouldn't have human friends because chatbots exist? Do they insist that musicians slough off their creativity like a molting snake, and just let a computer generate their songs?

There is also a big, uncomfortable truth regarding "AI" coding tools: They are trained on open-source code, yet they ignore the licenses attached to that code. If it's unethical for me to copy-and-paste MIT licensed code without including the license text, then it's unethical to let an LLM do it on my behalf.

LLMs are paving the way to a dystopia where there's no motivation for humans to create, and that world sounds miserable.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#180

Post by jennyholzer2 »

dkdcio wrote: post #165
jennyholzer2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a good faith observation. In my experience, AI users are meaningfully stupider and more gullible than the rest of the population.

In my experience, people who bombard threads with insults based on the technology people use (a specific set of neural networks in this case) are…well, don’t have much better to do in life. you openly advocated for insulting and bullying people in your other comments. don’t back down with this “it’s just an observation” bs, own it! be you! …or change your behavior and be a better person, whatever works btw I’ve been…

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