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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

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Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#261

Post by vibebased »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130
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…

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

Yeah, that's basically me. (Hold the "expert", substitute with "has a degree, at least.")

findfantasyxviii.com

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#262

Post by lelanthran »

ok_dad wrote: post #238
lelanthran wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, You don't learn by reading, you learn by doing. In this case, simply reading the output of an LLM isn't going to substantially educate you.

You’re not as senior as you think if you think reading code isn’t worth it. Do you think novelists just write novels from nothing? They read books. Software developers need to read software, too. When was the last time you read the code for the best open source software in your industry? I routinely read the libraries I use.

> You’re not as senior as you think

Classy.

> if you think reading code isn’t worth it.

I didn't say that.

With anything you learn, sure, you need to read it, but you haven't actually learned it until you try to do it.

As millions of teenagers find out in high school, it is not possible to "learn" trigonometry or calculus by reading the problems; they actually have to drill problems to pass.

> Do you think novelists just write novels from nothing? They read books.

Excellent example! Even with novelists, and professional authors, they only get better by writing. Face it - millions of people read just as much as (even more) than best selling authors, and yet those millions are unable to produce anything of note.

> When was the last time you read the code for the best open source software in your industry?

All the time; how else would I know that simply reading is not sufficient to learn something?

I'm surprised that this point is even in contention; it is almost common knowledge that you can't learn from reading alone; it's the practice that results in learning, not the reading.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#263

Post by reactordev »

lobf wrote: post #257
reactordev wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the juxtaposition the general public is in. They don’t have advanced tech skills to know any better so they see an output that they can’t produce from their skills and think it’s great. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What does the code look like?

This is where I’m at. I’ve always been a computer tinkerer but a novice coder at best. I work in the film industry, so I don’t need to know how to code. Where I’m at when building personal applications for my home / life is: does the code execute and perform the desired task? If so, what do I care how shitty it is? I’m not publishing these projects (for the most part… I have one joke application up at songshift.reach…

You are ahead of the curve my friend

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#264

Post by lobf »

reactordev wrote: post #263
lobf wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where I’m at. I’ve always been a computer tinkerer but a novice coder at best. I work in the film industry, so I don’t need to know how to code. Where I’m at when building personal applications for my home / life is: does the code execute and perform the desired task? If so, what do I care how shitty it is? I’m not publishing these projects (for the most part… I have one joke application up at songshift.reach…

You are ahead of the curve my friend

How do you mean?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#265

Post by renticulous »

judahmeek wrote: post #230
renticulous wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other axes as well. Companies with AI will move faster than those without. AI itself could subsume what we collectively consider as Engineering Taste. AI is faster at what it does. So even if a junior costs less on his own than AI. Paying extra for AI means gaining first mover advantage.

> AI itself could subsume what we collectively consider as Engineering Taste. Only if AI feeds on more taste than garbage.

Harness Session data will be used for RL and that will inject taste into the models, perhaps??

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#266

Post by keeda »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #232
keeda wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key word is ability , and I fully agree with that. Using GenAI as a teaching aid can supercharge learning, especially as it makes it very easy to learn by doing. The problem is that people use GenAI to do and hence don't learn. (The preliminary research so far supports this: using AI to do the hard assignments produces poor learning outcomes, but using AI as a tutor, or even just for help with the hard as…

> using AI as a tutor, or even just for help with the hard assignments, produces slightly better learning outcomes Source? The few people I’ve seen try to do this wind up with a terrible understanding of the material, with large knowledge gaps and one or two fundamental fuckups. In every case, an introductory textbook would have been better. (It would also have been harder.)

For coding specifically (there are many studies out there by now, but I know of these offhand):

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115 -- probably the earliest one of its kind, finds over-reliance degrades critical skills but supplementary use is mostly harmless.

https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2 -- Anthropic's study, same as above except supplementary use (like clarifying concepts) can actually be beneficial.

https://scale.stanford.edu/ai/repository/ai-meets-classroom-... -- "Students who use LLMs as personal tutors by conversing about the topic and asking for explanations benefit from usage. However, learning is impaired for students who excessively rely on LLMs to solve practice exercises for them and thus do not invest sufficient own mental effort." Interestingly, they found simply disabling copy-paste on the chatbot interface resulted in better outcomes!

Beyond coding, I recently came across this new meta-study; largely positive findings (which it admits may be biased) but does highlight evidence of negative effects of over-reliance: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X2...

(Multiple studies find that the outcome depends on how AI is used. Surprisingly, incorrect guidance / unreliability / hallucinations appear to be a bigger problem than over-reliance! That could also explain poor performance in some cases.)

My intuition, supported by these studies, is that as long as students are willing to do the hard cognitive work -- for which there is no substitute, really -- having LLM assistance is a boon. Which makes sense, it's comparable to having a tutor explain difficult concepts. This is why in my mind the real problem is that the incentives to use AI as a crutch are just too strong.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#267

Post by echelon »

customguy wrote: post #248
echelon wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I'm your exact opposite. I've felt like code is 1960's punch card tech my entire career. I've always wanted to do more. So much of coding is plumbing. Or paying attention to tiny little details. Or hunting down stupid bugs. Or changing requirements and refactoring. That shit sucks. All of it. I've never had so much fun with software. I…

"the sand doesn't matter, only the beach does"? Makes no sense. Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away. > In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things Whereas they'll totally admire the hamster wheels in which people shoveled product? Well, I don't care either way. Craftsmanship and care have their own rewards, and shape the person engaging in them for the be…

> Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.

Perfection in glue and plumbing?

That's what 99% of software is. Even active-active distributed systems are glue and exist only to bridge ephemeral infrastructure. Everything will eventually be thrown out and rewritten.

Nobody lauds the half-century old banking code written in COBOL. They want it ripped out and replaced.

Nothing is "perfect". Not even close.

> "the sand doesn't matter, only the beach does"? Makes no sense.

The code isn't the sand, it's the sandcastle.

> > In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things

> Whereas they'll totally admire the hamster wheels in which people shoveled product?

They'll hear about "You Tube" and "Face Book", I'm sure. But none of the code that runs either of those things will likely be running or capable of running.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#268

Post by bartread »

> AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

It also has a multiplying effect on technical deficits.

If you habitually demonstrate poor attention to detail when developing software, AI will amplify that too.

LLMs project who we are back at us, amplified, for good or ill, and I’m starting to wonder exactly how deep that runs.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#269

Post by lobf »

customguy wrote: post #248
echelon wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I'm your exact opposite. I've felt like code is 1960's punch card tech my entire career. I've always wanted to do more. So much of coding is plumbing. Or paying attention to tiny little details. Or hunting down stupid bugs. Or changing requirements and refactoring. That shit sucks. All of it. I've never had so much fun with software. I…

"the sand doesn't matter, only the beach does"? Makes no sense. Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away. > In 100 years people will look at our ephemeral artifacts as silly little things Whereas they'll totally admire the hamster wheels in which people shoveled product? Well, I don't care either way. Craftsmanship and care have their own rewards, and shape the person engaging in them for the be…

>Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.

But using the DNA example- perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good. Our bodies are far from perfect but they’re functional and effective. If the biological imperative was perfect genomes and not functional genomes, there would be no life at all.

I’m not a developer, I’m a consumer of digital products. I couldn’t care less, or even have the ability to notice, if code is perfect. I’m here to achieve a goal through software. If it achieves that goal, what is the problem from my end?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#270

Post by teaearlgraycold »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130
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…

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

I use and like Claude Design, but I’m fully aware I don’t have the means to judge the output as well as a professional designer could. That said, it’s still doing a better job than I would on my own. I find you need to remove a lot of the extra junk it throws in (code generation has the same problem). And really think through the requirements and state them to the model all up front. At the end it’s at least decent.
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