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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

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Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#91

Post by sd9 »

jurgenaut23 wrote: post #81
sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

I understand your point, but this is a purely utilitarian view and it doesn’t account for the fact that, even if agents may do everything, it doesn’t mean they should, both in a normative and positive sense. There is a vast range of scenarios in which being more or less independent from agents to perform cognitive tasks will be both desirable and necessary, at the individual, societal and economic level. The question…

The people who pay my bills operate in a largely utilitarian fashion.

They’re not going to pay me to manually program because I find it more enjoyable, when they can get Bob to do twice as much for less.

This is why I say I don’t like it, but it is what it is.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#92

Post by codemonkey5 »

sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

Some people probably enjoyed writing assembly (I am not one of those people, especially when I had to do it on paper in university exams) and code agents probably can do it well - but for the hard tasks, the tasks that are net new, code agents will produce bad results and you still need those people who enjoy writing that to show the path forward.

Code agents are great template generators and modifiers but for net new (innovative! work it‘s often barely usable without a ton of handholding or „non code generation coding“

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#93

Post by theteapot »

I have a vaguely unrelated question re:

> You do what your supervisor did for you, years ago: you give each of them a well-defined project. Something you know is solvable, because other people have solved adjacent versions of it. Something that would take you, personally, about a month or two. You expect it to take each student about a year ...

Is that how PhD projects are supposed to work? The supervisor is a subject matter expert and comes up with a well-defined achievable project for the student?

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#94

Post by rustyhancock »

sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

The whole premise is bad. If the supervisor can do it in 2 months, then they can do it in 2 weeks with AI.

Didn't PhD projects used to be about advancing the state of art?

Maybe we'll get back to that.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#96

Post by ernst_klim »

tonfa wrote: post #39
staindk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't going away but for some they may become prohibitively expensive after all the subsidies end. I do think coding with local agents will keep improving to a good level but if deep thinking cloud tokens become too expensive you'll reach the limits of what your local, limited agent can do much more quickly (i.e. be even less able to do more complex work as other replies mention).

> They aren't going away but for some they may become prohibitively expensive after all the subsidies end. Even if inference was subsidized (afaik it isn't when paying through API calls, subscription plans indeed might have losses for heavy users, but that's how any subscription model typically work, it can still be profitable overall). Models are still improving/getting cheaper, so that seems unlikely.

It probably is still subsidized, just not as much. We won't know if these APIs are profitable unless these companies go public, and till then it's safe to bet these APIs are underpriced to win the market share.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#98

Post by InkCanon »

theteapot wrote: post #93

I have a vaguely unrelated question re: > You do what your supervisor did for you, years ago: you give each of them a well-defined project. Something you know is solvable, because other people have solved adjacent versions of it. Something that would take you, personally, about a month or two. You expect it to take each student about a year ... Is that how PhD projects are supposed to work? The supervisor is a subjec…

Often at the start yes. So the students gets a bit of recognition, a bit of experience and a bit of knowledge.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#99

Post by mattmanser »

plato65 wrote: post #23
sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

> So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I think the key issue is whether Bob develops the ability to choose valuable things to do with agents and to judge whether the output is actually right. That’s the open question to me: how people develop the judgment needed to direct and evaluate that output.

There's a long, detailed, often repeated answer to your open question in the article.

Namely, if you can't do it without the AI, you can't tell when it's given you plausible sounding bullshit.

So Bob just wasted everyone's time and money.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#100

Post by loveparade »

theteapot wrote: post #93

I have a vaguely unrelated question re: > You do what your supervisor did for you, years ago: you give each of them a well-defined project. Something you know is solvable, because other people have solved adjacent versions of it. Something that would take you, personally, about a month or two. You expect it to take each student about a year ... Is that how PhD projects are supposed to work? The supervisor is a subjec…

I think it just really depends. There is no fixed rule to how PhD programs are supposed to work. Sometimes your advisor will suggest projects he finds interesting and wants to see done, he just doesn't have time to do it himself. That's pretty common. Sometimes advisors don't have that and/or want students to come up with their own projects proposals, etc.
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