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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
201–210 of 668 posts
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#202I agree with the general premise - the risk is we don’t develop juniors (new Alices) anymore, and at some point people are just sloperators gluing together bits of LLM output they do not understand.
I have seen versions of this in the wild where a firm has gone through hard times and internally systems have lost all their original authors, and every subsequent generation of maintainers… being left with people in awe of the machine that hasn’t been maintained in a decade.
I interviewed a guy once that genuinely was proud of himself, volunteering the information to me as he described resolving a segfault in a live trading system by putting kill -9 in a cronjob. Ghastly.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#203Personally, I wrote an essay to my students explaining exactly that the purpose is for them to think better and improve over time, they can use LLMs but, if they stop thinking, they are just failing themselves, not me.
It had great success, now when I propose to them to use some model to do something, they tends to avoid.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#204Thankfully, I am nearing the end of my career with software after 25 years well spent. If I had been born in a different decade, I would be facing the brunt of the AI shift, and I don’t think I would want to continue in the industry. Obviously, this is a personal decision, but we are in a totally different domain now, where, at best, you’re managing an LLM to deliver your product.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
People never cared about delivering Alices; they were an implementation detail. I think the article argues that they're still an important one, but one that isn't produced automatically anymore
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#206This is almost the same as going from making fire with a stick to using a lighter.. sure it is simplified but still not wrong. Humans while still doing grunt work can still make mistakes as does the machine.. the machine will eventually discover it. The same can not be said of the human because of the work needed to do so might be too much. In the end we might not learn as much.. but it will not matter and thus is really not an issue.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#207I'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…
Ask Claude to explain the code in depth for you. It's a language model, it's great at taking in obscure code and writing up explanations of how it works in plain English.
You can do this during the previous change phase of course. Just ask "How would one plan this change to the codebase? Could you explain in depth why?" If you're expected to be thoroughly familiar with that code, it makes no sense to skip that step.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#208Earlier 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…
To me it feels more like learning to cook versus learning how to repair ovens and run a farm. Software engineering isn’t about writing code any more than it’s about writing machine code or designing CPUs. It’s about bringing great software into existence.
Or farming before and after agricultural machines. The principles are the same but the ”tactical” stuff are different.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we're trending towards superintelligence with these AIs The article addresses this, because, well... no we aren't. Maybe we are. But it's far from clear that we're not moving toward a plateau in what these agents can do. > Whether a human does actual work or not isn't particularly exciting to a market. You seem to be convinced these AI agents will continue to improve without bound, so I think this is where the disc…
> But it's far from clear that we're not moving toward a plateau in what these agents can do. It is a debatable topic, and I agree with you that it's unclear whether we will hit the wall or not at some point. But one point I want to mention is that at the time when the AI agents were only conceived and the most popular type of """AI""" was LLM-based chatbot, it also seemed that we're approaching some kind of plateau…
Are agents something special? We already had LLMs that could call tools. Agents are just that, in a loop, right?
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#210I like this article and it reads well, but I have to say, that to me it really reads as something written by an LLM. Probably under supervision by a human that knew what it should say. I don't know if I mind. Example. This paragraph, to me, has a eerily perfect rhythm. The ending sentence perfectly delivers the twist. Like, why would you write in perfect prose an argument piece in the science realm? > Unlike Alice, w…
Or maybe the author is just a competent writer.
Yes. Let's assume so.
My point is the suspicion itself.