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Expertise in the age of AI

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Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#71

Post by evenhash »

ericmcer wrote: post #63
talkingtab wrote: post #46

Here is the fundamental issue. We use the word "intelligence" for different things. Can you follow a recipe for making sour dough bread? Pretty easy. Can you make sour dough bread? Not so easy. Does following a recipe require "intelligence"? Yes. If something can follow a recipe can it also make bread? Not necessarily. And another question, perhaps the most important. Can you determine that a recipe is flawed? In imm…

Reminds me of Moravec's paradox, that it is easy to get computers to ace complex math tests but difficult to teach them to walk. We are very excited that computers have mastered the "know the recipe" step and are underplaying the complexity of actual intelligence required to really replace people. My fear in your above example would be that we offload more and more of the "know the recipe" intelligence to computers a…

I don’t think people are “underplaying” it, it just doesn’t matter. Engineers aren’t hired for their locomotive skills.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#72

Post by okdood64 »

I don't see this discussed often enough but high school and universities need to adapt FAST, like yesterday, to the current reality.

More in-class study and "hands-on" work with proctored in-person exams. There is no incentive for students to go through their courses "the honest way" and build this intuition themselves. Can you blame them?

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#73

Post by mupuff1234 »

okdood64 wrote: post #72

I don't see this discussed often enough but high school and universities need to adapt FAST, like yesterday, to the current reality. More in-class study and "hands-on" work with proctored in-person exams. There is no incentive for students to go through their courses "the honest way" and build this intuition themselves. Can you blame them?

Are proctored in-person exams not the default for most places anyway?

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#74

Post by gedy »

hopelessluca wrote: post #10

Sorry for the off-topic comment, but what happened to the front page? At the time I’m writing this, 11/30 submissions are related to AI. Maybe my comment is cliché too, but I’m honestly tired of all the AI stuff.

Maybe hit this fellow up with a feature request to add a regex filter, etc: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News

Very nice HN client and he was responsive to ideas. I was thinking of same to filter out "Democrat" "Republican" "Trump" and "Musk", partly due to upcoming elections in November.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#75

Post by thr1owaway9621 »

> Currently, the level of computing intuition needed to additively prompt the coding agents sits at roughly 5 years’ experience level. Today’s seniors were lucky enough to get paid to build their computing intuition, but the gap grows as coding agents continue to improve.

I am struggling to interpret what they mean by "gap". Gap between what two things?

The gap between juniors and seniors?

The gap between ${AI + 0 YOE} and ${AI + N YOE}? Where N is the growing "gap"? Eg, as AI gets better, you need more and more YOE to justify throwing a salaried human into the loop?

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#76

Post by warmwaffles »

okdood64 wrote: post #72

I don't see this discussed often enough but high school and universities need to adapt FAST, like yesterday, to the current reality. More in-class study and "hands-on" work with proctored in-person exams. There is no incentive for students to go through their courses "the honest way" and build this intuition themselves. Can you blame them?

Schools have always lagged and can barely keep up. Books once printed on any tech topic is almost always outdated by the time it reaches students. Anecdotally, I went through high school being told over and over that I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket. I think the messaging they conveyed was done poorly, and should have said "you need to understand the fundamentals and why the calculator gave you the answer".

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#77

Post by j_w »

In the section "Everyone should learn some coding":

> I would say that the major unlocks are at:

    1-2 weeks: Basic understanding of what the field is about and what general words to use when asking the AI to do something.
    1-2 months: Basic understanding of how and when to ask the AI something.
    4-6 months: Ability to check the output for correctness (using external sources as needed).
1-2 weeks for enough of an understanding to appropriately use terms? No way. Using Harvard CS50 as a reference, it takes until week 2 to learn about arrays.

4-6 months to check output for correctness? Are we trusting fresh bootcampers in their first week at their first job to do prod code reviews now?

You can learn a LOT in a short period of time, but it would take much more than casual time investment. This is insane advice on the level of telling blue collar workers to just "learn to code."

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#78

Post by NegativeLatency »

okdood64 wrote: post #72

I don't see this discussed often enough but high school and universities need to adapt FAST, like yesterday, to the current reality. More in-class study and "hands-on" work with proctored in-person exams. There is no incentive for students to go through their courses "the honest way" and build this intuition themselves. Can you blame them?

I studied computer science and mathematics, not software engineering

Could've used a better software engineering class but I use the more abstract knowledge regularly and I think it would be a disadvantage to strip that out and just go straight to "here's how to prompt"

Sorry if I'm straw manning your comment, I do think that the abstract stuff is more important than ever, and would also like to see more philosophy and such required for eng/science/math degrees.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#79

Post by bluefirebrand »

j_w wrote: post #77

In the section "Everyone should learn some coding": > I would say that the major unlocks are at: 1-2 weeks: Basic understanding of what the field is about and what general words to use when asking the AI to do something. 1-2 months: Basic understanding of how and when to ask the AI something. 4-6 months: Ability to check the output for correctness (using external sources as needed). 1-2 weeks for enough of an underst…

This reminds me of a "rich people meme". You know, people who are rich enough they never have to look at price tags?

"How much could a bunch of bananas cost. $30?"

This strikes me as someone who has lost touch with how much time and effort that building real expertise takes.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#80

Post by esafak »

xeromal wrote: post #67
ygouzerh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is quite worried of their job. Many of us have made coding/IT our personality, what we were proud of, what the society made us feel valued. It's a big change in life... and there is no solution yet. So everyone feels the needs to talk about it, to either get rid of this anxiety by ranting or trying to prove that it would be an opportunity, or a non-event depending on the point of view, etc

Going off this thought tangent a bit, I think many engineers could be gatekeepers because it's a pretty hard industry to get into and it's just not everybody's cup of tea. Now that AI is assisting people who wouldn't necessarily make it in the old world, it turns out business just cares about results and the gatekeepers don't matter as much anymore. It's creating quite a big split between the old guard and people who…

Welcome to the club, but remember: you break it, you own it. You will be expected to take part in incident response and explain why it broke and how to remediate it in the post-mortem.
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