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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#101

Post by glhaynes »

gbear0 wrote: post #87
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I 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…

Why was it a maintenance dead end? It sounds like you were able to iteratively work on it in its current state, but are you going to be the one maintaining the code? I keep asking myself the same questions, and the conclusion I keep coming to is the clean modeled structure we want to see is for humans to maintain and extend, but the AI doesn't need this. There's definitely an efficiency angle here where it's faster f…

Sometimes I think the main value in AI-maintained code being “high quality” is when the structure can enforce invariants. If invalid states aren’t representable, then the AI can’t easily add bugs in the future.

Of course that just leads to: what’s the best way to achieve that goal? Through elegant code or adding lots of tests? Which is a debate from long before LLMs existed.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#102

Post by muldvarp »

zaphar wrote: post #34
worldsayshi wrote: post #9

I 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…

Nearly every argument that hinges on the word "yet" is just an example of over-extrapolation[0] at play. 0: https://www.fallacyfiles.org/overxtra.html

But saying "LLMs are not good at architecture so software engineering has a bright future" is _also_ extrapolation.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#103

Post by njovin »

gbear0 wrote: post #87
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I 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…

Why was it a maintenance dead end? It sounds like you were able to iteratively work on it in its current state, but are you going to be the one maintaining the code? I keep asking myself the same questions, and the conclusion I keep coming to is the clean modeled structure we want to see is for humans to maintain and extend, but the AI doesn't need this. There's definitely an efficiency angle here where it's faster f…

Many of us recognize that the days of nearly-free tokens is quickly drawing to a close, and at some point humans may very well have to dig their keyboards out of cold storage and return once again to the code mines.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#104

Post by jplusequalt »

gbear0 wrote: post #87
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I 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…

Why was it a maintenance dead end? It sounds like you were able to iteratively work on it in its current state, but are you going to be the one maintaining the code? I keep asking myself the same questions, and the conclusion I keep coming to is the clean modeled structure we want to see is for humans to maintain and extend, but the AI doesn't need this. There's definitely an efficiency angle here where it's faster f…

>This just might be the new reality, and we need to stop looking behind the curtain and accept what the wizard presents us.

This is how societies become shittier. People who are ostensibly responsible for doing their jobs not giving a damn about quality.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#105

Post by iwiwk »

sunir wrote: post #50

Humans have hard skills and abilities the ais can’t reproduce yet like real time learning, spatial reasoning, cheap parallelism, Qualia so we can identity QWAN (quality without a name) because we feel in real time what the code is. AIs have skills humans aren’t good at like nerding out on technical details. That’s not a perfect map because I’m spitballing. However there is a symbiosis. I am not sure I am productive a…

The way I think of it is, computer memory is superior to human memory because it can store anything and re-call on demand when requested. This is great for the human because we no longer have to remember every tiny detail - just enough to recall the object and thus opening up room for space in the brain for other stuff.

What is the llm equivalent?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#106

Post by [deleted] »

sarreph wrote: post #18

I agree with the author that -- right now -- we're still in the part of the AI adoption / product development curve that it's an extreme force multiplier. I like to think of it as a normal distribution, the further away a programmer is to the right of the mean, the more their benefit. It's almost like it's their standard deviation squared (σ²). So someone like Matt Perry (as OP mentioned), who is a >99.99% programmer…

[deleted]

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#107

Post by gbear0 »

user34283 wrote: post #45
Waterluvian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point the code becomes a compile target, and then you need a new source of truth. Which I think is perfectly worthy of exploration. Some people want to check in the prompts. Or even better, check in a plan.md or evenest betterest: some set of very well-defined specifications. I'm not sure what the answer will be. Probably some mix of things. But today it is absolutely imperative that the code I write for the…

I don't see the benefit of checking in either prompts or specs. I never tried spec driven development for myself, but if I review other's MRs I am typically exhausted after the first 10 lines. And there are hundreds of lines, nearly always with major inaccuracies. For myself I always found the plan mode to work well. Once the implementation is done, the code is the source of truth. If it works, it works. When I want…

Those checked-in specs become the requirements for the system. So the next time you ask the AI to make a fix, it can use those specs as part of the solution and not break another requirement. Basically the code underneath keeps getting rewritten over and over, but that doesn't matter as long as it hits the required specs.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#109

Post by ediatedia »

semireg wrote: post #56

Is this just an ad for whimsical animations? Seemed like an abrupt change.

Yeah, this couldn't have really gone any better for the author, opinion piece hitting HN with a link for a course in it.

I understand the need to make a living but hard to take this stuff seriously/sincerely with the, "and buy my course!" angle.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#110

Post by jononor »

runarberg wrote: post #58
snide wrote: post #7

I 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…

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant This is a testable hypotheses with severe lack of citations. Intuition would argue the opposite. We learn by using our brains, if we offload the thinking to a machine and copy their output we don‘t learn. A child does not learn multiplication by using a calculator, and a language learner will not learn a new language by…

As a precondition I think we have to assume that the person in question 1) wants to learn and 2) is smart enough to absorb new info and apply it and 3) reflects enough to adjust their approach when hitting bottlenecks or making mistakes 4) has a drive to create. Without these, self driven learning is not viable - and that has very little to do with AI.

For such a person, I believe AI can be very empowering for learning. Like Google, wikipedia and stack overflow, Arxiv before it - AI tools give access to a lot of information. It allows to quickly dig deep into any topic you can imagine. And yes, the quality is variable - so one needs to find ways to filter and synthesize from imperfect info. But that was also the case before. Furthermore AI tools can be used to find holes in arguments or a paper. And by coding one can use it to test out things in practice. These are also powerful (albeit imperfect) learning tools. But they will not apply themselves.

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