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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

381–390 of 656 posts

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#381
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it" But it seems we are heading there. For simple stuff, if I made a very clear spec - I can be almost sure, that every time I give that prompt to a AI, it will work without error, using the same algorithms. So quality of prompt is more valuable, than the generated code So either way, this is what I focus my thin…

your spec is a guideline, not something the LLM has to adhere to. it is definitely not guaranteed to work without error

Are humans guaranteed to work without error?

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#382
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... nobody in the field of "Software Engineering" is actually an Engineer if we go by a strict definitions. This is a pet peeve of mine, so while I understand what you mean, I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering! And since I've had this discussion before, I'll pre-emptively hazard a guess that the argument boils down to "rigor", and point out that a) economic fe…

> I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering! "Structured, mature, legally enforced, physically grounded standards based approach to the construction of repeatable, reliable, verifiable, artifacts under stable (to the degree that matters) external constraints". Some niche software development (e.g. NASA/JPL coding projects with special rules, practices, MISRA etc) can…

This basically makes civil/structural engineers the only real engineers. Maybe people working on medical devices or military kit. 'Stable external constraints' still disqualifies most of those, though. Every single kind of engineering has to deal with the spec changing.

Also, software engineering is ahead of a few other disciplines of engineering on rigor in some dimensions. I feel like most software engineers don't understand how good software tools are at change management compared to pretty much anything else. (and that having good change management is a baseline, as opposed to a decent chance of not having any at all).

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#383
post #357
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true for all automation we do get more comfort. We build systems so that we humans have as little struggle as possible, not realising that struggle is the only reason for existence. By eliminating it, we are erasing ourselves from this world.

Automation is also for reducing drudgery - the work that prevents us from meaningful struggle by taking up resources that can be better applied elsewhere. Not all struggle (or pain) is created equal.

I wouldn’t count on reduced drudgery. The assembly line automated many movements needed for manufacturing. But which work involved more drudgery—-craftsman-style car production or standing on an assembly line at Ford?

With any new technology, subsequent drudgery depends on the technology, its concomitant economics, and the imagination of the people using it.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#384
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least today, it isn't practical for most people to run these models locally- I think adding a dependency on a cloud service is different enough to some local (possibly open source) tool like an IDE.

Self hosting at a reasonable scale is much cheaper than people think. I am running clusters of DGX Spark machines with BiFrost load balancers in our company and for client projects. They work flawlessly! 128 GB unified memory, Nvidia chip and ARM CPU for just around 3k€ net. They easily push ~400 input and ~100 output tokens per second per device on say gpt-oss-120b. With two devices in a cluster, thats enough perfor…

factor in depreciation and energy costs, and a subscription might just be cheaper.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#386
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. Computer Science is not an engineering degree and it is not about programming. That's what Software Engineering degrees are for.

Software engineers graduates I've met are usually much worse at programming than computer science graduates.

I'm gonna strongly +1 on this.

Most of the "Software Engineering" curricula I've seen is catered towards "getting a job as a programmer", and is mostly focused on languages, frameworks and outdated processes.

As an engineer in another discipline, there's no engineering there.

I would rank like this: Computer Science > Self Taught > Software Engineering.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#387
post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

you learn by struggling and slogging through, even as a senior if your shit breaks it's on you to understand why. no LLM will shortcut that process for you (even asking LLMs why something is wrong requires you to actually understand it eventually, aka LEARNING). how that happens is up to the person. i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier…

Understanding something and learning something are not the same things.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#388
Use AI like you would use any other tool: to work for you. There are all sorts of things you can probably do manually that just go a bit faster or more efficient with AI. It's not that different to using an electrical drill vs. a manually operated one. You end up with holes in both cases. But one achieves that a bit faster and neater.

Nobody is going to pay you for your artisanally crafted CSS code or whatever you were coding manually until last year. If you can do it faster/better than the AI, good for you. But it's not a contest and possibly your days of maintaining that lead might be numbered.

In the end, as long as the UI is styled alright, nobody will care that you pieced it together manually for hours and hours. More importantly, people are not going to pay you more for it than they'll pay the next guy getting a similar result in an hour of prompting AIs. They'll want you to move faster and do more.

That's what better tools do, they just cause people to expect more, better, and faster. And their expectations expand until they match the limitations of the new tools.

People seem to have this mental block where somehow the amount of stuff we ship is going to be a constant in the universe and we'll all be out of work and descend in despair. That's something that in the history of our species inventing tools has never really happened. I don't see any reason why AI would change that. Sure, there's a lot more we can do now. And it's a lot cheaper now. So we can now have a bit more of our proverbial cake and eat it. People will push this as far as they can and will want more and more of the good stuff.

And they'll need help getting all that stuff built. One way is a painful process of slowly prompting things together. Most people lack the skills to do that, don't know what to ask for and are in any case busy doing other things. That job, building stuff using tools, is still a job that needs doing. I'm quite busy currently doing that.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#389

The eloquence with which this point gets (repeatedly) made is continuing to improve each next time I read it. However, I still feel like we haven't nailed it. That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse (e.g. "the medium is the message", "you ship your org chart", "9 mothers can't make a baby in a month"), in which the most pointed version of this critique packs a punch in just a few words that r…

I'm using "don't bring a forklift to the gym".

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#390
What about the third group who mostly don't use ai for programming because the results don't seem to be worth it, like to understand their system, and can craft a more compact, succinct, and well organized system by themselves which they enjoy maintaining? If most of your system is boilerplate that can be generated by Claude, then maybe you're doing it wrong? I'd rather read a short story written by a great writer than a trilogy of novels by AI
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