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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

#441

Post by nidnogg »

throwanem wrote: post #77
sd9 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, it’s only since about December that I felt things really start to shift, and February when my job started to become very different. Personally I’m looking at more physical domains, but it’s early days in my exploration. I think if I wanted to stick to remote work (which I have enjoyed since 2020), then the AI story would just keep playing out. I’m also totally open to taking a big pay cut to do somethin…

So recent? I've been on sabbatical (the real kind, self-funded) for eighteen months, and while my sense has been things have not stopped heading downhill since I stepped off the ride back in 2024, to hear of such a sudden step change is somewhat novel. "Very different" just how, if you don't mind my asking? (I'm also looking for local, personally satisfying work, in exchange for a pay cut. Early days, and I am findin…

Don't you feel that sabbaticals kinda get you off the new tech wave anyway? I usually check in on news much more often when bored at slow work days.

On the side, this might not have to do at all with your case, but the reason I personally keep putting off sabbaticals is that I feel it can severely compound my routine wrecking habits and I don't think I'd be too strong-willed to give it meaningful purpose. Not to mention the first point, i.e. it would 100% make my industry pessimism worse. I'd like to not bounce away from tech forever. Rather, figure what scratches the same itch I've been seeking since the start.

I'm all about big road trips, big adventures but I think the couch potato risk is all too real for me.

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

#442

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

silver_silver wrote: post #431
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or even that [AI] can do 100% of coding right now. I don't actually think the article refutes this. But the AI needs to be in the hands of someone who can review the code (or astrophysics paper), notice and understand issues, and tell the AI what changes to make. Rinse, repeat. It's still probably faster than writing all the code yourself (but that doesn't mean you can fire all your engineers). The question is, how…

My boss decreed the other day that we’re all to start maximising our use of agents, and then set an accordingly ambitious deadline for the current project. I explained that being relatively early in my career I’ve been hesitant to use any kind of LLM so I can gain experience myself (to say nothing of other concerns), and yeah in his words I’ve “missed the opportunity”

Interesting, we only have generic 'use AI' in our goals. Though its generic framing probably indicates more company's belief in this tech than anything else.

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

#443

Post by nidnogg »

sd9 wrote: post #83
throwanem wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So recent? I've been on sabbatical (the real kind, self-funded) for eighteen months, and while my sense has been things have not stopped heading downhill since I stepped off the ride back in 2024, to hear of such a sudden step change is somewhat novel. "Very different" just how, if you don't mind my asking? (I'm also looking for local, personally satisfying work, in exchange for a pay cut. Early days, and I am findin…

I feel like the models and harnesses had a step change in capability around December, as somebody who’s been using them daily since early/mid 2025. It’s gone from me doing the majority of the programming, to me doing essentially none, since December. And that change felt quite sudden. The more recent shift after December is mostly explained by people at my company catching up with the events that happened in December…

I can relate to the feeling - this timing tracks for when most, if not all of my friends, all my co-workers (even the few who were resisting to adopt any AI toloing) flocked to just "Claude Code". Similar to how the masses gobbled VS Code a while back.

Company started doling out Claude Code configs, everything is now cli/agentic AI harnessed and news about "90% of this company's code is now AI Generated" pop up every other day.

It seems the last frontier to breach before this was nailing agentic black boxes to not crap out during the first hour of work. After that, it's really been much smoother for those tools.

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

#444

Post by vinceguidry »

adriand wrote: post #436
conception wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These movements are growing in every western nation. The trend has been growing over decades. It would be nice to see it reverse but seems unlikely before calamity.

It’s a deliberate process powered by rightwing and capitalist interests designed to create a dumber, less educated and more distracted population. A war as stupid as the one with Iran would not have been possible three decades ago. As ill-advised as the Iraq war was, Bush at least spent months explaining the rationale and building support for it, successfully. Now that’s not needed. I saw interviews with young Americ…

I was there for that war. Kids weren't listening and didn't care back then either. If anything, Gen Z is the most politically-aware generation we've had since we started keeping track.

Trump doesn't have to justify a single thing because the billionaires behind him know that every last bet is off and their very livelihoods are at risk, and his entire base of support up and down the chain are either complicit or fooled.

What the world does when they finally realize Democrats and Republicans are simply two sides of the vast apparatus suppressing the will of the people by any means necessary will be... spectacular.

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

#445

Post by bluefirebrand »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #386
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we'll get there. We need to get at least some AI bust going first though. It's impossible to talk sense into people who think AI is about to completely replace engineers, or even those who think that, while it might not replace engineers, it's going to be doing 100% of all coding within a year. Or even that it can do 100% of coding right now. There's a couple unfortunate truths going on all at the same time:…

> Or even that [AI] can do 100% of coding right now. I don't actually think the article refutes this. But the AI needs to be in the hands of someone who can review the code (or astrophysics paper), notice and understand issues, and tell the AI what changes to make. Rinse, repeat. It's still probably faster than writing all the code yourself (but that doesn't mean you can fire all your engineers). The question is, how…

> The question is, how do you become the person who can effectively review AI code without actually writing code without an AI? I'd argue you basically can't.

I agree, and I'd go a step further:

You can be the absolute best coder in the world, the fastest and most accurate code reviewer ever to live, and AI still produces bad code so much faster than you can review that it will become a liability eventually no matter what

There is no amount of "LLM in a loop" "use a swarm of agents" or any other current trickery that fixes this because eventually some human needs to read and understand the code. All of it.

Any attempt to avoid reading and understanding the code means you have absolutely left the realm of quality software, no exceptions

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

#446

Post by wongarsu »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #356
wongarsu wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good calculator will however do this correctly (as in: the way anyone would expect). Small cheap calculators revert to confusing syntax, but if you pay $30 for a decent handheld calculator or use something decent like wolframalpha on your phone/laptop/desktop you won't run into precision issues for reasonable numbers.

He’s not talking about order of operations, he’s talking about floating point error, which will accumulate in different ways in each case, because floating point is an imperfect representation of real numbers

I didn't consider it an order of operations issue. Order of operations doesn't matter in the above example unless you have bad precision. What I was trying to say is that good calculators have plenty of precision.

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

#447

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

thePhytochemist wrote: post #421
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #227

> 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…

I totally agree - the article misses this point in a very conspicuous way. It suggests that Alice and Bob will both graduate at the same level. What may well happen instead is that Bob publishes two papers. He then outcompetes Alice based on the insistence that others have on "publish or perish". Alice becomes unemployed and struggles, having been pushed out. The person who puts the time and effort in doesn't just si…

This, I think, may be the more interesting bit. Steve Jobs anecdotally did caligraphy in school, which some would consider a waste of time, but Steve credited some of the stylistic choices to.

The question then becomes whether it will become an issue now or later. Having seen some of the output, I have no doubt that a lot can now be built by non-programmers ( including myself; I suppose I belong in the adjacent category ). The building blocks exist and as long as the problem was part of the initial training, odds are, LLM will help you build what you want.

It may not be perfect, safe, or optimized, but it may still be exactly what the user wanted to do. Now, the problems will start when those will, inevitably, move into production at big corps. In a sense, we have seen some interesting results of that in the past few weeks ( including accidental claude code release ).

In a grand scheme of things, not much is changing... except for speed of change. But are we quite ready for this?

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

#448

Post by Henchman21 »

grey-area wrote: post #438
Henchman21 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is no appreciable difference between outputs. Most of the work that most of us do isn't important. It's busywork byproducts of making widgets that most people don't even need. So if your job is already pointless why not make it easier using LLMs?

Sounds a little sad. I think I’d rather find another job.

So very many of us are underemployed and do meaningless work. IMO these jobs exist to prevent societal upheaval aka revolt

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

#449

Post by foxglacier »

mchaver wrote: post #229
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. Following the model of how startups have worked for the last 20 years or so, I expect agents to eventually be locked-down/nerfed/ad-infested for higher payments. We are enjoying the fruits of VC money at the moment and they are getting everyone addicted to agents. Eventually they need to turn a profit. Not sure how this p…

Even when they're profitable, the premium ad-free service will still be cheaper than humans, so those skills will still be mostly useless.

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

#450

Post by Serberus »

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…

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