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"People who don't use AI will be left behind"

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Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#251

Post by intended »

jjav wrote: post #234
bergie wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person [citation needed] I try LLMs for something every couple of months, and I have yet to see them produce anything actually correct. Calling non-existing library methods, confabulations, etc. But sure, they produce a lot of stuff in a short while. The utility of any of that another question.

> I try LLMs for something every couple of months, and I have yet to see them produce anything actually correct. Calling non-existing library methods, confabulations, etc. That's too pessimistic, the productivity gains are real and substantial. OTOH, the hype train is out of control. It is nowhere near perfect and requires a lot of handholding and guardrails to avoid going sideways. You need to adopt it to stay relev…

> That's too pessimistic, the productivity gains are real and substantial.

Source, please.

Even if its self reported, its useful to know.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#252

Post by intended »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #212
sdevonoes wrote: post #62

Any engineer (any person actually) can “learn to use AI” in a couple of days. It’s not rocket science; there’s no chance of left behind. If you haven’t use LLMs at all, a weekend would be enough to be on par with everyone else in the industry

Others are disagreeing with you here, and I do too. The difference is profound, and takes more than a couple of days to get your head around the implications. I'd summarise it as: "if you give a computer the same input it always produces the same output, but if you give a model the same input it always produces different output". Add to that the output is often wrong and it can't reliably follow instructions, and the…

> The reward ... is it can be far smarter than you.... and they know far more than you

I think this solidified an idea for me. A tool being smarter than me but inconsistent, is useless.

I can work with people who are smarter than me, because I can trust them, and I can trust them to own up or be held accountable for screw ups.

For a calculator, I can only hold myself accountable. However I cannot hold myself accountable for not knowing something I dont know.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#253

Post by raxxorraxor »

benterix wrote: post #243
znpy wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A huge part of what attracted me to programming was how free and open it was. The fact that literally anyone with a computer could install Python/Javascript/etc for free and create virtually any software they wanted, limited only by their own abilities and determination, was wildly exciting to me. but you can still do that, AI is not preventing you from doing any of that in any way.

True, but this is like saying 10 years ago: you don't need to learn React, you can continue coding in Angular. People do want to learn and use new tech but instead what is promoted is an access to a proprietary and (increasingly more) expensive API.

React is really a bad example because you really don't need it. I am no web dev, but I think React is an abomination. The reason I can confidently say it without knowing every detail there is to it is simply that there aren't impressive websites that show it. There should be some that by now. The number of reused components is probably quite analogous to reused classes in OO. It can make sense, but sometimes it also sometimes doesn't.

Some suggested it could become web standard and I just hope it doesn't. React is beyond opinionated. It certainly has a raison d'être for some applications, but the problem is simply that it didn't put our less buggy or generally better sites.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#254

Post by raxxorraxor »

cmiles74 wrote: post #185
buffalobuffalo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been. The fact of the matter is, a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person. It makes research faster. It makes experimentation faster. It makes output cleaner. And this is true across many disciplines, not just tech. Also, it is a skill. Yes, anyone…

Are they? I remember when heavyweight IDEs where all the rage, there was a similar sentiment that if you weren't using one of them then you would eventually be so much slower that you'd be out of a job. It only took maybe five years until people started asking themselves if the dependency on a big IDE (and cost) was worth it. I don't think anyone would look at someone who prefers a stripped down text editor today and…

It can put out code much faster than any software dev. And if you are careful with your prompts and demands, it is good quality code as well.

Especially for visualising data, to just get a quick look at, it can now be done in lightning speed and I am quite familiar with "manual data processing" in a few languages.

AI use me decently outcompetes manual me. Sometimes there are also stupid tasks. Data must be serialised in a certain way for some stupid reason. You prepare the info to be digested and the busywork can be done by agents with little oversight, which otherwise would have taken you a few hours. There simply is a limit in how fast you can read, look up field names, etc... If you outsource these critical paths to AI, you can gain productivity.

I also start way more side projects now and I like manual coding a lot.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#256

Post by beastman82 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #161
beastman82 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. I think I'm ready to accept it. I guess I should have given up when everyone was bragging about writing rust and go.

Oh, so you're excited about some technologies, but not those ones.

I love python and go, not sure what you're inferring. I'm not excited that people wrote their widget with it.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#257

Post by simonw »

arcxi wrote: post #231
simonw wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firmly disagree. Learning how to use these tools effectively is unintuitively difficult. They're great at some stuff and terrible at other stuff in ways that are very hard to predict. I'm figuring out new and better ways to use them in a daily basis, and I've been an almost daily user for nearly three years.

can you share any examples of these "new and better ways to use them"? because the only way I've used LLM and seen other people use it is to literally just talk to it, which doesn't require any skills beyond basic conversational abilities.

I'm taking about coding agents, not chatbots.

With coding agents you need to think very carefully about how you design the agentic loop such that the agent has the right tools and information available to it to compete the goal.

I've been writing a lot more about that here: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#258

Post by JKCalhoun »

intended wrote: post #250
btschaegg wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural o…

I WANT to be excited by LLMs. But it has been so frustrating to listen to the hype and then contend with the actual results. How bizarre is this tool, that I have been forced to conduct interviews across all domains, to see where people are having actual productivity gains? I never had to do this with the iPhone, or with word, excel or any number of cool technological inventions. The early internet empowered people,…

I have been treating LLMs as a research assistant (and sometimes tutor) as I have explored analog computing for a hobbyist project that I have been working on for 6 months now.

To my mind, saying the AI will cause me to forget how to learn is equivalent to suggesting that going to school for instruction will cause me to forget how to learn.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#259

Post by croon »

btschaegg wrote: post #180
jerhewet wrote: post #87

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it. IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and re…

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural o…

It's not so much the technologies that are good/bad, but IMHO that the pipeline between invention of and abuse of technology is increasingly short.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#260

Post by croon »

simonw wrote: post #210
ASalazarMX wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're difficult and hard to predict because they're still primitive, despite what their companies say. When (or if) they get advanced enough to deliver consistently, there will be no chance of being left behind, because even a kid will be able to use them effectively. Right now they're still at the gimmick level, although a very impressive one.

If the models get to a point of total consistency there's still a LOT that we need to figure out and learn about how to use them. Let's say models can exactly and correctly write any code you ask of them. - How do you break down a project into a sequence of requests to models? - How can you most effectively parallelize the work - models will never be instant, so there will always be benefits in working out how best t…

I don't mean to be dismissive, but aren't you describing simply working on projects with a finite amount of human hours/capital, but substituting finite amount of tokens? I recognize all of those problems as project problems long before LLMs, so I'm not sure it addresses GPs point.
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