You cannot hold a computer liable for any of those reasons. You can, however, sue the human that built or used the AI. So those concerns shoudn't be any different with or without AI. The same problems will be here either way. If you really care about those problems, you would demand your representatives in government actually enshrine those things in law, with some teeth, to ensure companies prevent problems with them. If you don't do something about those problems (with or without AI), then it's clear by your actions that ethical/environmental/safety concerns aren't actually that important to you.
AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
31–40 of 344 posts
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#32Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#33I've found I can prevent the LLM, in many cases, from thrashing on a bug/feature for long periods of time by switching into plan mode and, even in the middle of a conversation, having it reassess the structure around the problem, first. If you keep prompting about the same bug, it may keep producing variations of the problem code. But forcing it to stop and 'think' for a bit, has yielded much better results.
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#34I see two points: 1. AIs aren't yet good at architecture. 2. AIs aren't yet good at imagining technically exciting stuff to build. And I agree that there's still space there to build a career in the short to medium term (plus Jevons Paradox). When both those points are no longer true we are certainly much closer to, dear I say it, agi. I suspect that (1) will be solved for somewhat limited domains in the near future…
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#35I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification. What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI…
I’m not seeing this. And based on what we’re seeing at the university level, I’m not expecting to.
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#36> I think AI tools are more like Iron Man's suit. There's an interesting repository with 63600 stars on GitHub (1). The developer of the repository is No 1 at the GitHub's trending contributors list (2). However, it seems like the application isn't what it's described to be (3), and the developers, on their end, are unable to clearly answer whether this is real or not, as it's just messy LLM output. Proof that the su…
the whole thing is creepy. The ruvnet, has multiple projects.. its just AI. A lot of AI. It floods GH infra.. Kind of easy to understand why GH struggles.
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#37I don't agree, LLMs/AI does definitely have agency. Maybe not the same agency you would expect from a human being, but if you put them in a ralph loop they can go far, far away, and mostly because on how we build our world in the pre-llm era: do you need to order something (or you want to hire a hitman)? -> you can go do it on a web site or via whatsapp or by calling some API.
The point is they mostly wind up somewhere stupid, and it takes expertise to spot and correct that. (Maybe that changes with further development.)
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#38The fact that AI currently requires some human supervision to produce valuable results is not a good predictor that it will stay this way sadly. LLMs were basically unable to reason two years ago. They are now better at many reasoning tasks than most people. If there is even a remote chance that LLMs will make your job obsolete I would pivot as fast as I could. This includes first and foremost software engineering.
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#39I used to be a PM and am technically literate enough but can only very minimally write code. I have been using LLMs to build (or try to, at least) internal tools for my business since GPT-4.
In the early days, I'd get a little ways, then the LLM would start breaking things, and I'd try but fail to get it to fix things. But over successive generations, I was increasingly able to get it unstuck by offering suggestions on where it may have gone wrong. With Opus 4.7, I don't even really have to do that - if something isn't working it's usually sufficient to just tell it what's broken. It can figure out how to fix it without my input. And of course fewer things are broken in the first place.
So I think I'm very well positioned to understand how these things are improving - better able to get the LLM to do what I want than the post OP quoted from /vibecoding (though I am 99% sure that post is actually AI slop), but less so than most of the people posting in this thread. As they've improved, whatever ability I have to guess at the causes of problems based on my experience having seen things go wrong with products I've PMed has become less necessary to getting the right outcome.
I expect that trend to continue - increasingly the LLM won't need the guidance of people with a great deal of technical expertise. I basically no longer have to attempt to diagnose problems in order to get them fixed, though with the caveat that I am building internal tools for which I am the only user, so certainly much simpler in scope than the stuff OP is talking about.
> Without guidance, LLMs tend to paint themselves into a corner, because they’re generating code to solve individual prompts, not thinking holistically about an application’s architecture.
The crux of what I'm trying to say here is that I absolutely believe that this line is 100% true today, but I would be deeply cautious about assuming that it will continue to be true given the improvements in LLMs over the past few years.
Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
#40I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…
> The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly a maintenance dead end. In the Tailwind thread the other day I was explicitly told that the intended experience of many frameworks is "write-only code" so maybe this is just the way of the future that we have to learn to embrace. Don't worry how it's all hooked u…
Which is probably why so many random buttons in microsoft/apple/spotify just stop working once you get off the beaten path or load the app in some state which is slightly off base