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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
331–340 of 668 posts
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#332I'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…
It's a spectrum and we don't have clear notches on the ruler letting us know when we're confidently steering the model and when we've wandered into vibe coding. For me, this position is easy to take when I am feeling well and am not feeling pressured to produce in a fixed (and likely short) time frame.
It also doesn't help that Claude ends every recommendation with "Would you like me to go ahead and do that for you?" Eventually people get tired and it's all to easy to just nod and say "yes".
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that LLMs stop working after a certain point of complexity or specificity, which is very obvious once you try to use it in a field you have deep understanding of. At this point, your own skills should be able to carry you forward, but if you've been using an LLM to do things for you since the start, you won't have the necessary skills. Once they have to solve a novel problem that was not already solved…
This whole argument can be made for why every programmer needs to deeply understand assembly language and computer hardware. At a certain point, higher level languages stop working. Performance, low level control of clocks and interrupts, etc. I’m old enough dropping into assembly to be clever with the 8259 interrupt controller really was required. Programmers today? The vast majority don’t really understand how any…
Teaching how computer hardware works is pretty smart. There is no need to do it in depth though.
Writing assembly is probably completely irrelevant. You should still know how programming language concepts map to basic operations though. Simple things like strict field offsets, calling conventions, function calls, dynamic linking, etc.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#334I 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…
Hard sciences play this crucial and often unseen role in our society : they help train humans to develop critical thinking. Not everyone with PhD in Astrophysics ends up doing Astrophysics in life; it's a discipline, or a training regime for our minds. After that PhD; the result is a human being who can tackle hard problems. We have many other such disciplines (basically any PhD in hard sciences) which produces this outcome.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#335I 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…
Until the LLM is wrong and Bob passes the erroneous result off as accurate, reliable and vetted by a knowledgeable person. At that point Bob is not producing a useful result. Then it becomes a trap other people might get caught in, wasting valuable time and energy.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#336> Schwartz's experiment is the most revealing, and not for the reason he thinks. What he demonstrated is that Claude can, with detailed supervision, produce a technically rigorous physics paper. What he actually demonstrated, if you read carefully, is that the supervision is the physics. Claude produced a complete first draft in three days. It looked professional. The equations seemed right. The plots matched expecta…
Sadly I don’t see how our current social paradigm works for this. There is no history of any sort of long planning like this or long term loyalty (either direction) with employees and employers for this sort of journeyman guild style training. AI execs are basically racing, hoping we won’t need a Schwartz before they are all gone. But what incentives are in place to high a college grad, have them work without llms fo…
> There is no history of any sort of long planning
Sure there is. Its the formal education system that produced the college grad.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#337If this article was written a year ago, I would have agreed. But knowing what I know today, I highly doubt that the outcomes of LLM/non-LLM users will be anywhere close to similar. LLMs are exceptionally good at building prototypes. If the professor needs a month, Bob will be done with the basic prototype of that paper by lunch on the same day, and try out dozens of hypotheses by the end of the day. He will not be ch…
The problem is in most environments Bob won’t spend the rest of the year figuring out what the LLM did, because bob will be busy promoting the LLM for the next deliverable, and the problem is that if all bob has time for us to prompt LLMs, and not understand, there will be a ceiling to Bob’s potential.
This won’t affect everyone equally. Some Bob’s will nerd out and spend their free time learning, but other Bob’s won’t.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#338The 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 need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue.
It’s not for me. Being a middle manager, with all of the liability and none of the agency, is not what I want to do for a living. Telling a robot to generate mediocre web apps and SVGs of penguins on bicycles is a lousy job.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#339I 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…
> why are we bothering with it at all? Because we largely want people who have committed to tens of thousands of dollars of debt to feel sufficiently warm and fuzzy enough to promote the experience so that the business model doesn’t collapse. It’s difficult to think anyone would end up truly regretting doing a course in astrophysics, or any of the liberal arts and sciences if they have a modicum of passion, but it’s…
Even if you land a job in your field, you will encounter that academia is backwards vs industry in some aspects and decades ahead of what is adopted in the industry in other aspects to the point where both of these mean that you won't make much use of the skills you learned in university.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. But to be fair to your specific point, symbolic solving of integrals used to be a huge skill in the engineering education. Nowadays, it is not a focus anymore, because numerical solutions are either sufficiently accurate or, more importantly, the only feasible approach anyway.
There is much more to life than engineering.
Sorry, I should have quoted properly in my reply.
My first sentence ("Yes.") was in general agreement with you, the second sentence was specifically about
> Mathematica has been able to do many integrals for decades and yet we still make students learn all the tricks to integrate by hand
But maybe, integrating by hand is still as big as ever in other parts of academia. Or were you thinking about high school? I'm fairly sure, that symbolic solving of integrals is treated as less important in education these days, than it was before digital computers, but I could be wrong. Mathematica's symbolic solve sure is very useful, but numeric solutions are what really makes the art of finding integrals much less relevant.