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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#121

Post by aduwah »

Supermancho wrote: post #91
simonw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

Hard same over 20 years

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#122

Post by doctorwho42 »

hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #93
titzer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is bui…

>But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us. That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. People will tinker with those things as hobbies and they'll broadcast that out too. Worst case we hobble along until we get better at it. And if we have to hobble along and it's i…

Because they may have studied history... There are countless examples of eras of lost technology due to a stumble in society. Where those societies were never able to recover the lost "secrets" of the past. Ultimately, yes, humans can rediscover/reinvent how to do things we know are possible. But it is a very real and understandable concern that we could build a society that slowly crumbles without the ability to relearn the way to maintain the systems it relies upon, fast enough to stop it from continued degradation.

Like, yeah, you have the resources right now to boot strap your knowledge of most coding languages. But that is predicated on so many previous skills learn through out your life, adulthood and childhood. Many of which we take for granted. And ultimately AI/LLM's aren't just affecting developers, they are infecting all strata of education. So it is quite possible that we build a society that is entirely dependent on these LLM's to function, because we have offloaded the knowledge from societies collective mind... And getting it back is not as simple as sitting down with a book.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#123

Post by bdangubic »

Supermancho wrote: post #91
simonw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

This percentage is probably right on the money!

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#124

Post by draxil »

mday-edamame wrote: post #42
EdgeNRoots wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on the over-reliance part, but I don’t think it’s AI itself .It’s how people choose to use it. Most people are outsourcing thinking instead of using it to go deeper. The tools aren’t the problem, the default behavior is.

True, but the tools make the default behavior so tempting. I have a friend who uses Google Maps to find places, then memorizes the route there and closes the app to navigate because he wants to build a better mental map of our city. Meanwhile, I just check the app every five seconds like a dummy, and my hippocampus stays small.

This is a good parallel. In the 90s when I learned to drive I was quite good at navigating. Now google maps is on a screen in my car telling me where to go whenever I drive beyond my most common routes.

Really all the research telling us about AI skills atrophy.. We should have guessed from previous experience.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#125

Post by mmustapic »

kstenerud wrote: post #83
mmustapic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the free software movement wants that the source code of the software you use be available to you to modify it if you wish. AI does not necessarily do that.

AI makes the entirety of the software engineering profession available to you. All you have to do is ask the right way, and you can build in days what once took months or years. Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. Closed source is no longer the moat it was, an…

But I can't have the weights of the LLM model I'm using for this.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#126

Post by catlifeonmars »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #85
simonw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.

Every company I worked for didn’t give a shit about my skills. They just wanted to solve the problem in front of them and if they couldn’t then they would hire someone in with the right skills. Improving my skills was seen as a risk as I might leave.

I’ve had both experiences, sometimes at the exact same company.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#127

Post by askafriend »

colechristensen wrote: post #118
qsera wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. Frankly I don't think so. The AI using LLMs is the perpetual motion mechanism scam of our time. But it is cloaked in unimaginable complexity, and thus it is the perfect scam. But even the most elaborately hidden power source in a perpetual motion machine cannot fool nature and should come to a complete stop as it runs out.

This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself. I am still necessary 1% of the time for debug, design, and direction and those of not at all a shallow skill. I have some graduate algebra texts on the way my math friend is guiding me through because I have found a publishable result and need to shore up my background before writing the paper... It's not perpetual motion, it's very…

You can see their ego trying to protect itself.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#128

Post by [deleted] »

tuvang wrote: post #97
titzer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is bui…

There is a deadly game of chicken going on. Junior recruiting already stopped for the most part. Only way this doesn’t end in a catastrophe is if AI becomes genuinely as good as the most skilled developers before we run out of them. Which I doubt very much but don’t find completely impossible.

[deleted]

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#129

Post by flir »

tuvang wrote: post #97
titzer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is bui…

There is a deadly game of chicken going on. Junior recruiting already stopped for the most part. Only way this doesn’t end in a catastrophe is if AI becomes genuinely as good as the most skilled developers before we run out of them. Which I doubt very much but don’t find completely impossible.

Or if code quality stops mattering, in a kind of "ok, the old codebase is irretrievably sphagettified. Lets just have the chatbot extract all the requirements from it, and build a clean room version" kind of way. It's also not impossible we go that route.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#130

Post by guzfip »

draxil wrote: post #124
mday-edamame wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but the tools make the default behavior so tempting. I have a friend who uses Google Maps to find places, then memorizes the route there and closes the app to navigate because he wants to build a better mental map of our city. Meanwhile, I just check the app every five seconds like a dummy, and my hippocampus stays small.

This is a good parallel. In the 90s when I learned to drive I was quite good at navigating. Now google maps is on a screen in my car telling me where to go whenever I drive beyond my most common routes. Really all the research telling us about AI skills atrophy.. We should have guessed from previous experience.

Old people my entire life have made fun of younger people for “not being able to read maps” or something.

But I’ve never seen anyone follow a GPS so religiously into so many obvious dead ends than elderly Uber drivers.

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