Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 656 posts

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#481

Post by vasco »

pydry wrote: post #451
erdaniels wrote: post #443

This feels AI written as the post goes on. Either way, I'd like for us to stop fetishizing how we can use AI to make us stronger, better, and more valuable engineers. It's exhausting and doesn't consider other ways to use it. I've only been using it lately for tasks that are a step or two above google. Having it write code for me has just been a slippery, unfulfilling slope.

I wish people would stop pretending that agentic coding and elevated thinking arent mutually exclusive. Theres way too much money on this hype train now though to point out the emperor isnt wearing any clothes and way too many people who always did think that "boilerplate spew" (the one thing AI really does well) is a valid form of programming rather than a shortcut to tech debt.

> I don't know how to do something so nobody else knows either

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#482

Post by y-curious »

koshyjohn wrote: post #480
crakhamster01 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pasted it into Pangram AI and it classified the article as 100% AI generated, so take that as you will...

Ironically making the case for the thesis of the piece - what happens when you let A.I. do all the thinking instead of exercising competent judgement. Disclaimers and leaving real thought to others do not make it much better. Pangram is confidently wrong here.

Then why is the title photo very obviously AI? I feel like you get people on alert off the bat

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#483

Post by deadbabe »

iewj wrote: post #478
pydry wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people would stop pretending that agentic coding and elevated thinking arent mutually exclusive. Theres way too much money on this hype train now though to point out the emperor isnt wearing any clothes and way too many people who always did think that "boilerplate spew" (the one thing AI really does well) is a valid form of programming rather than a shortcut to tech debt.

All this stuff is proving to me one thing: we don’t need to get better at producing stuff faster. We need to get better at producing the right stuff. Right stuff meaning getting better at project selection. I guarantee a firm that is really good at project selection with hand written code will annihilate a firm that is full of agentic engineers. And frankly I hope the outcome is that all those who went all in on agen…

Faster faster faster, everything faster except for fixing the climate, sheltering the poor, healing the sick, reducing inequality. Until we are planning to do these things with the same speed and enthusiasm as pushing out more crap for people to buy, the only thing we are moving faster toward is our own doom.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#484

Post by StrauXX »

byzantinegene wrote: post #384
StrauXX wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is definetly cheaper now. What I want to say with this, is that token costs rising so dramatically that AI usage becomes uneconomical is not a high probability future. Even if AI subscriptions were sold heavily below cost (which is also unlikely, after R&D).

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#485

Post by boesboes »

koshyjohn wrote: post #454
gjuggler wrote: post #406

I was surprised not to see any discussion on whether the author used AI to help write this post. As many people say, writing is thinking. I started getting that "I'm reading another AI-written blog post" feeling around 1/3 of the way through, but I don't consider myself super calibrated on this. Pangram seems pretty confident it's AI ( https://www.pangram.com/history/e9f6eb77-86f9-46d0-a6c1-e57c... ). But I know thes…

Great question! I had A.I. critique what I wrote and wherever it gave me suggestions like “this sentence runs too long”, “this can be more punchy”, etc., I considered what it would tell me and chose to change direction if I thought it was warranted. But, notably, I typed out what I thought in my head to counter specific criticisms if I thought them valid instead of taking the LLM’s direct suggestion. I’d then ask it…

Don't do it man. just stop. you loose something of yourself when you turn to AI

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#486

Post by tarsinge »

nunez wrote: 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…

I dont understand why software engineers insist on keeping the craftsmanship aspect of writing code. Compare to other engineering disciplines, like civil engineering. Engineering was never about going in the field yourself to build things with your own hands. You can become a great civil engineer without building bridges that fail yourself. To me it doesn’t matter that the thing I design is built with a crane or AI. I can design quality control processes too to ensure the thing is built up to standard, I don’t have to build the thing myself to be sure. There is nothing wrong with artisanal code crafting, I appreciate this too, but professionally that’s not engineering. It seems AI is just forcing us to clear the confusion the hard way.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#487

Post by erfgh »

falcor84 wrote: post #418
breve wrote: post #332

People are lazy. AI will replace thinking for many people. Augmentation always leads to atrophy.

> Augmentation always leads to atrophy. That's a very bold claim. As a small example let's look at calculators - I remember a lot of claims that having access to calculators would make people's brains atrophy and they'll never be able to do actual math, but what I'm seeing in myself and most people around me is that we're using calculators (and more mathematical software) to tackle significantly more complex problems…

If the complexity of your mathematical problems was down to arithmetic then your problems were not at all complex.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#488

Post by Jtarii »

falcor84 wrote: post #418
breve wrote: post #332

People are lazy. AI will replace thinking for many people. Augmentation always leads to atrophy.

> Augmentation always leads to atrophy. That's a very bold claim. As a small example let's look at calculators - I remember a lot of claims that having access to calculators would make people's brains atrophy and they'll never be able to do actual math, but what I'm seeing in myself and most people around me is that we're using calculators (and more mathematical software) to tackle significantly more complex problems…

Writing atrophied our memory, calculators atrohpied our mental arithmetic, GPS nagivation atrophied our navigation ability, LLMs are atrophying our ability to program.

When you externalise part of your brain in a new tool, like a calculator, that part of your brain is no longer needed and atrophies.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#489

Post by madibo3156 »

tarsinge wrote: post #486
nunez wrote: 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…

I dont understand why software engineers insist on keeping the craftsmanship aspect of writing code. Compare to other engineering disciplines, like civil engineering. Engineering was never about going in the field yourself to build things with your own hands. You can become a great civil engineer without building bridges that fail yourself. To me it doesn’t matter that the thing I design is built with a crane or AI.…

Yes, let's build a bridge with AI

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#490

Post by pgwhalen »

lateral_cloud wrote: post #461
koshyjohn wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question! I had A.I. critique what I wrote and wherever it gave me suggestions like “this sentence runs too long”, “this can be more punchy”, etc., I considered what it would tell me and chose to change direction if I thought it was warranted. But, notably, I typed out what I thought in my head to counter specific criticisms if I thought them valid instead of taking the LLM’s direct suggestion. I’d then ask it…

Sorry but it's very obvious you used an LLM for more than just suggestions. Ironic given the point of the article.

Can you explain why? I'm getting better at detecting some kinds of AI writing, but I constantly seem comments like this on HN for things I'm much less suspicious of, and I want to understand why people make them.
Post reply on HN