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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#281

Post by andrekandre »

bragr wrote: post #214
theshrike79 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the irony is that AI usage should make onboarding juniors easier. Before it was "hey $senior_programmer where's the $thing defined in this project?", which either required a dedicated person onboarding or someone's flow was interrupted - an expected cost of bringing up juniors. Now a properly configured AI Agent can answer that question in 60 seconds, unblocking the Junior to work on something. And no, it doesn't…

The problem is that juniors given access to AI don't seem to learn as much. AI just gives them fish over and over instead of learning how to fish.

  > The problem is that juniors given access to AI don't seem to learn as much.
i see this first-hand; they don't even know what they don't know so they circle over and over with ai leading them down rabbit holes and code that breaks in weird ways they cant even guess how to fix... stuff that if you were a real programmer you would have wrote in a few minutes let alone hours or days...

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#282

Post by cindyllm »

trollbridge wrote: post #278
bachmeier wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fairly straightforward but a ton of bitch work. The LLM blasted through it like it was nothing. One might argue that this is a substitute for metaprogramming, not software developers.

It's interesting more people haven't talked about this. A lot of so-called agentic development is really just a very roundabout way to perform metaprogramming. At my own firm, we generally have a rule we do almost everything through metaprogramming.

[dead]

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#283

Post by Tomis02 »

hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #171
doctorwho42 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rel…

And we're still here right? We have more books and knowledge and capabilities than ever. Despite theoretically losing knowledge along the way, we're okay (mostly). Society can replace the systems it relies on. The replacement might not be the best, but it'll probably handle things until we can reinvent a newer, better system. It probably won't be easy, but you can't convince me that humanity suddenly cannot adapt and…

You could have lived 200 years. But instead, people decided they'd rather invest in crypto or LLMs instead.

Maybe humans will still be here in a century. But you won't be. It didn't have to be this way.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#284

Post by Eextra953 »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #268
rglover wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Major or regional? This is alarming beyond words.

Major, big big major, not just me either. How is it alarming beyond words? If I said "Im an emt and I just ask the AI everything" now that would be alarming beyond words.

I have a buddy who is a cop and he tells me that they use AI to write reports and even to check if their reason for pulling someone over will hold up later. As annoying as it is in SW, people using AI outside of SW is much more alarming.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#285

Post by coldtea »

qsera wrote: post #271
coldtea wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Human programmers don't usually hallucinate things out of thin air Oh, you wouldn't believe how much they do that too, or are unreliable in similar ways. Bullshiting, thinking they tested x when they didn't, misremembering things, confidently saying that X is the bottleneck and spending weeks refactoring without measuring (to turn out not to be), the list goes on. > So no, they aren't working the exact same way. Ho…

That is not hallucinating... LLM hallucinating is not an edge case. It is how they generate output 100% time. Mainstream media only calls it "hallucination" when the output is wrong, but from the point of view of a LLM, it is working exactly it is supposed to....

>LLM hallucinating is not an edge case. It is how they generate output 100% time

If enough of the time it matches reality -- which it does, it doesn't matter. Especially in a coding setup, where you can verify the results, have tests you wrote yourself, and the end goal is well defined.

And conversely, if a human is a bullshitter, or ignorant, or liar, or stupid, it doesn't matter if they end up with useless stuff "in a different way" than an LLM hallucinating. The end result regarding the low utility of his output is the same.

Besides, one theory of cognition (pre LLM even) is of the human brain as a prediction machine. In which case, it's not that different than an LLM in principle, even if the scope and design is better.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#286

Post by tenahu »

prplfsh wrote: post #280

I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.

That has been my feeling too. I have completed soo many personal projects (or improvements) that were collecting dust on my 'mental shelf'.

Without AI I would probably never get to them because realistically, I do not have dozens, or hundreds of personal hours to devote to fun, but unnecessary projects.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#287

Post by rglover »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #268
rglover wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Major or regional? This is alarming beyond words.

Major, big big major, not just me either. How is it alarming beyond words? If I said "Im an emt and I just ask the AI everything" now that would be alarming beyond words.

Because it's a bank and apparently a big one.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#288

Post by trollbridge »

moron4hire wrote: post #182
Thanemate wrote: post #84

Funnily enough I saw this post as I was placing my HN account on hiatus, because I'm tired pretending that the quality of discourse is on par with what I've been used to read and participate in. We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone…

There is a lot more "yngmi" and "have fun being poor"-style attitude around here regarding LLM boosterism.

That attitude is particularly galling. Along with the "lock in now or become part of the permanent underclass".

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#289

Post by simoncion »

kstenerud wrote: post #217
simoncion wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's already happened. Agreed. > Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument. As you mentioned, it's not an abstract argument. It's statements of fact. > A vast (and growing) amount of source code is more open... No, not at all. 1) If you honestly believe that major tech companies will permit both copyright- and license-washing of their most important proprietary code simply because someone ran it through…

This is looking at the current situation through the old lens. That ship has sailed. The revolution is happening. We live in a new reality now, one where we're still trying to figure out what rules should even be. And there will be winners and losers, and copyright and patent law will be modified in an attempt to tame the chaos, with mixed results because of all of the powerful players on both ends. You can live on t…

Your set of statements and their surrounding context reminds me very much of the mass grave scene in Kubrick's Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=670Y3ehmU74>

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#290

Post by rafterydj »

ndriscoll wrote: post #257
rafterydj wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this line of thought put out there many times, and I've been thinking: why do people do anything at all? What's the point? If no one at all is even reviewing the output of coding agents, genuinely, what are we doing as a society? I fail to see how we transition society into a positive future without supplying means of verifying systemic integrity. There is a reason that Upton Sinclair became famous: wayward inc…

You could e.g. write specs and only review high level types plus have deterministic validation that no type escapes/"unsafe" hatches were used, or instruct another agent to create adversarial blackbox attempts to break functionality of the primary artifact (which is really just to say "perform QA"). As a simple use-case, I've found LLMs to be much better than me at macro programming, and I don't really need to care a…

I mean, sure, for programming macros. Or programming quick scripts, or type-safe or memory-safe programs. Or web frontends, or a11y, or whatever tasks for which people are using AI.

But if you peel back that layer to the point where you are no longer discussing the code, and just saying "code X that does Y"... how big is X going to get without verifying it? This is a basic, fundamental question that gets deflected by evaluating each case where AI is useful.

When you stop being specific about what the AI is doing, and switch to the general tense, there is a massive and obvious gap that nobody is adequately addressing. I don't think anyone would say that details are irrelevant in the case of life-threatening scenarios, and yet no one is acknowledging where the logical end to this line of thinking goes.

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