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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

#151

Post by [deleted] »

asHg19237 wrote: post #141
stavros wrote: post #3

I see this fallacy being committed a lot these days. "Because LLMs, you will no longer need a skill you don't need any more, but which you used to need, and handwaves that's bad". Academia doesn't want to produce astrophysics (or any field) scientists just so the people who became scientists can feel warm and fuzzy inside when looking at the stars, it wants to produce scientists who can produce useful results. Bob pr…

The arguments of the LLM psychosis afflicted get more and more desperate. Astrophysics is about understanding and thinking, this comment paints it as result oriented (whatever that means). The industrialization of academia hasn't even produced more results, it has produced more meaningless papers. Just like LLMs produce the 10.000th note taking app, which for the LLM psychosis afflicted is apparently enough.

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by sd9 »

lelanthran wrote: post #137
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 thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. "Being able to deliver using AI" wasn't the point of the article. If it was the point, your comment would make sense. The point of the program referred to in the article is not to deliver results, but to deliver an Alice. Delivering a Bob is a failure of the program. Whether you think that a Bob+AI delivers the same resul…

I am aware of that - I was adding something along the lines of: I don’t think people care if we deliver Alices any more.

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

#153

Post by danielbln »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #128

But aren't you still going to have to convince other people to let you do it with their money/data/hardware/etc? The understanding necessary to make that argument well is pretty deep and is unaffected by AI. I've been having a lot of fun vibe coding little interactive data visualizations so when I present the feature to stakeholders they can fiddle with it and really understand how it relates to existing data. I saw…

Every AI/agentic thread on HN follows the same tension: builders want to build and solve problems. Code or task completion are implementation details to be done on the path to the actual prize: solving the problem. And then there are the coders, that have honed their mechanical skill of implementation and derive their intellectual fulfillment from that. The latter crowd has a rough time because much of it can be automated now, the former camp is happy because look at all the stuff that can now be built!

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

#154

Post by threatofrain »

jacquesm wrote: post #21
djaro wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. The problem arrises when Bob encounters a problem too complex or unique for agents to solve. To me, it seems a bit like the difference between learning how to cook versus buying microwave dinners. Sure, a good microwave dinner can taste really good, and it will be a lot better than what a beginning cook will make. But imagine aspiring cooks just buying premade…

Precisely. The first 10 rungs of the ladder will be removed, but we still expect you to be able to get to the roof. The AI won't get you there and you won't have the knowledge you'd normally gain on those first 10 rungs to help you move past #10.

But AI might actually get you there in terms of superior pedagogy. Personal Q&A where most individuals wouldn't have afforded it before.

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

#155

Post by DavidPiper »

xandrius wrote: post #113
DavidPiper wrote: post #89

I've just started a new role as a senior SWE after 5 months off. I've been using Claude a bit in my time off; it works really well. But now that I've started using it professionally, I keep running into a specific problem: I have nothing to hold onto in my own mind. How this plays out: I use Claude to write some moderately complex code and raise a PR. Someone asks me to change something. I look at the review and thin…

Then you're using it more towards vibe coding than AI-assisted coding: I use AI to write the stuff the way I want it to be written. I give it information about how to structure files, coding style and the logic flow. Then I spend time to read each file change and give feedback on things I'd do differently. Vastly saves me time and it's very close or even better than what I would have written. If the result is somethi…

I agree that being further along the Vibe end of the spectrum is the issue. Some of the other ways I use Claude don't have the same problems.

> If the result is something you can't explain than slow down and follow the steps it takes as they are taken.

The problem is I can explain it. But it's rote and not malleable. I didn't do the work to prove it to myself. Its primary form is on the page, not in my head, as it were.

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

#156

Post by zozbot234 »

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 mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading.

You're still working on intellectually stimulating programming problems. AI doesn't go all the way with any reliability, it just provides some assistance. You're still ultimately responsible for getting things right, even with key AI help.

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

#157

Post by Lerc »

The problem I see with this argument is that the ship sailed on understanding what you are doing years ago. It seems like it is abstraction layers all the way down.

If an AI is capable of producing an elegant solution with fewer levels of abstraction it could be possible that we end up drifting towards having a better understanding of what's going on.

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

#158

Post by lelanthran »

thepasch wrote: post #112
bakugo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bob can't do things, Bob's AI can do things that Bob asks it to do. And the AI can only do things that have been done before, and only up to a certain level of complexity. Once that level is reached, the AI can't do things anymore, and Bob certainly isn't going to do anything about that, because Bob doesn't know how to do anything himself. One has to question what value Bob himself even brings to the table. But let's…

The question is whether it’s more important to be able to do things, or more important to have a good sense and a keen eye for what to do at any given moment. I personally think both are really important, and I also think AI won’t be able to do both better than any human could for another while, and moreso when it comes to doing both at the same time (though I’m not going to claim it’s never going to). My point is th…

> The question is whether it’s more important to be able to do things, or more important to have a good sense and a keen eye for what to do at any given moment.

Those aren't mutually exclusive.

"People who do things" can do both, and doing the latter is a function of doing the former, so they tend to do the latter sufficiently well.

"People who prompt things" can only do the latter, and they routinely do it poorly.

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

#159

Post by derbOac »

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…

It depends on the program, and even more so, the student and the mentor. It can also vary over time, with more direction early on in a graduate program, and less direction later. Some mentors are very directive, and basically treat students as labor executing tasks they don't have time or want to do. Other times, the student is coming up with all the ideas and the mentor is facilitating it with resources or even nothing but uncertain advice or permissions now and then.

This can lead to a lot of problems as I think in some fields, by some academics, the default assumption is the former, when it's really the latter. This leads to a kind of overattribution of contribution by senior faculty, or conversely, an underappreciation of less senior individuals. The tendency for senior faculty be listed last on papers, and therefore, for the first and last authors to accumulate credit, is a good example of how twisted this logic has become.

It's one tiny example of enormous problems with credit in academics (but also maybe far afield from your question).

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

#160

Post by KronisLV »

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 mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading.

I dread the flip side of this which is dealing with obtuse bullshit like trying to understand why Oracle ADF won’t render forms properly, or how to optimize some codebase with a lot of N+1 calls when there’s looming deadlines and the original devs never made it scalable, or needing to dig into undercommented legacy codebases or needing to work on 3-5 projects in parallel.

Agents iterating until those start working (at least cases that are testable) and taking some of the misery and dread away makes it so that I want to theatrically defenestrate myself less.

Not everyone has the circumstance to enjoy pleasant and mentally stimulating work that’s not a frustrating slog all the time - the projects that I actually like working on are the ones I pick for weekends, I can’t guarantee the same for the 9-5.

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