Live data from Hacker News

AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

491–500 of 656 posts

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#491

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…

AI to write code makes more sense because the grammar is almost infinitesimally smaller and of all the practical repercussions that come with that.

Think, yes, verifiability, but also tone, terseness etc. and how big those "problem spaces" are in written language versus programming language.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#492

I feel like these articles are just a reasurance for people who don't want to accept that AI will automate their jobs. It becomes easier to focus on a lesser group of AI users and feel superior than to confront the reality of things.

Even if AI does automate some jobs (or even most of them) then people doing them will just do something else. It's not like the world has a limited demand of computer code.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#493
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.…

Software is blueprint. Can you really become a decent civil engineer if you never created a buleprint for anything?

Will large scale construction projects ever be started with AI made blueprints?

There's probably more to the whole engineering discipline, soft- and hardware, than you give it credit for here.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the analogy (and it is not to be taken literally) is that of "commoditized processes".

Nowadays we don't build bridges to suit the site, we choose sites to accommodate bridges that we basically build identically via a few designs.

Connecting back to s/w AI can do the standard stuff ok as long as you test around the outside of it, so you might want to hone your judgment about how you build systems so it uses the stuff AI can do well, vs "building for the site". The gains are productivity. The losses are efficiency (the problem must go through some extra steps to meet the process where it works). Same as any engineering problem at scale.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#495

The way I use AI now feels more exhausting than the programming I did for the last 20 years. I pose a problem, then evaluate proposals, then pick the one I think is the "right one"(tm), then see the AI propose a bunch of weird shit, then call it out, refine the proposal until it feels just about right (this is the exhausting part), then let it code the proposal. The coding will then run for 1-5 hours and produce some…

Just to offer a counter-example, using AI makes programming bearable again for me. Most of programming comes down to a short - edit: not quit so short but you may understand the figure of speech.. - list of things which are repeated ad infinitum in myriad variations.

I don't have to slog through yet _another_ way to sort, split, combine a list, open a file, show a UI component, handle events, logging, make data flow through some type of "database", serialize and deserialize endless things, implement yet another protocol in $whateverishotnow, managing authn, authz, the list is endless.

The interesting part of programming, for me, is deciding on and capturing the domain in a tight, surprisingly simple yet powerful architecture. This is hard - for me - and actually has very little to do with "programming" per se, meaning it has nothing to do with wrangling syntax/low-level semantics of whatever platform I'm on and fighting package managers to name just two highly depressing parts of my job. I don't like typing code. I am doing it my entire life and I still don't like it.

I like coming up with invariants and ways of guarding them. To find simple decompositions that turn a hairy, ungodly blob of a problem into a manageable almost trivial network of not-so-complicated things. The not-so-complicated things themselves.. I don't care in the slightest about them. Opening files, managing database connections, forms, the mechanics of i18n, typing the word "class", you name it. I find it exceedingly boring.

Perhaps I am more of the architect type, but I find managing a bunch of AIs and making sure they don't stray from My Path is easy on the mind. Programming works on my level of abstraction finally.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you think engineers in the second half got there? By writing tons and tons of code to "build those reps" and gain that experience. It's not by writing syntax that you get there. It's by creating software and gaining the experience of seeing it go wrong. "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." AI just shortens the cycle without needing to type out syntax, so you get even m…

> It's not by writing syntax that you get there. Writing syntax is still an important part of the experience. It is valuable because it requires you to spend time immersed in the nuts and bolts that hold software together. I'd compare it to cooking, if you have an assistant or a machine do everything and you never actually touch a knife or stir a pot, you'll lose your touch. But there is also something valuable about…

Totally! I mean, the same could be said of painstakingly hand coding assembly language - that today's developers haven't done so is what leads us to bloated electron apps, so there is something lost!

But the larger scale system design is stronger than ever. Today, distributed systems, version control, including branching, stacked PRs etc., VMs/containers, idempotency, multimaster ACID databases, all of these things were probably never achievable in the world when the best devs had to spend their time poring over assembly language every day. Losing that skill allowed them more time to build other ones!

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#498
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.

"struggle is the only reason for existence" That is a bold and frankly unsupportable claim.

Humans don’t tend towards idle quiescence.

We seem to be insatiable inquisitive.

Curiosity doth struggle many cats.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See my comment in this thread for what jumped out the most to me.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#500
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Capitalism doesn’t care about that.

Capitalism does eventually care about efficient allocation of money to produce capital though. Competition takes care of that; see china vs USA.

Post reply on HN