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I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#81

Post by ai_critic »

oytis wrote: post #39
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

Do you think your CEO has no sense of accomplishment when your team ships a product feature?

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#82

Post by toponijo »

aidenn0 wrote: post #60

I first encountered the following concept in one of Oxide's publications; good chance it didn't originate there though: There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited. I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was…

Given this, you can conclude that writers should be putting in at least at much effort as readers, whether or not they use an LLM. What really seems to be the problem is writers that don't at least check their own work, and pass that burden onto the readers. This is easier than ever with LLMs.

This is toxic behavior that unfortunately rewards a selfish writer. I'm worried the AI push incentivizes this too much, to where in corporate situations a reader can't say no to doing work for a selfish writer.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#83

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #53
john_strinlai wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there a list somewhere that i can check what i am allowed to be proud of and what i am not allowed to be proud of? edit: if anyone wants to enlighten me, why do you care if someone is proud of something? does it hurt you somehow?

No, but come on. If you insert a computer into your brain and wake up tomorrow speaking German, would you be proud you could speak German? Wouldn't you rather work diligently to learn the language and be proud of that effort?

Depends on why the person is wanting to be able to speak German.

If you only want to speak German for its own sake, then maybe it does seem silly to be proud of what the brain computer did for you.

But there are many other reasons to want to be able to speak German. Thanks to his brain computer, a French cheese maker could travel to Germany to promote his cheeses in a new market to great success without having to rely on the German speaking skills of expensive to hire people, and without wasting years to learn German on his own when all he wanted to do was to make cheeses and grow his customer base for his cheese. German in and of itself was never a goal to him.

Just like computer programming is not a goal in and of itself to a lot of people, and who would otherwise have to spend time to learn programming instead of doing the thing they want to do, or having to hire software engineers that might cost more than they could ever hope to afford.

And even though the computer is doing something for the person, they are leveraging that for something that they feel pride and accomplishment in. Such as for example to use German (done by the computer) to expand your cheese customer base into Germany (your own accomplishment that was only possible thanks to the existence of the German speaking skills of the computer).

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#84

Post by skydhash »

hext wrote: post #63
fantasizr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the analogy would be that your LLM/agent has a pass at a Spielberg script and peppers his inbox with inane production notes. A system like that would be untenable for all involved.

I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source projects for years.

Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review, discuss, and accept your changes.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#85

Post by rpdillon »

oytis wrote: post #39
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

I think there's a spectrum between simply writing a prompt and generating slop and using AI in a loop over many hours/days/weeks to produce something that works the way you want it to. I get a great sense of accomplishment from doing the second, and I pretty much refuse to do the first, except only in the most ephemeral of cases.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#86

Post by collingreen »

oytis wrote: post #39
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

I'm a professional software engineer and even I get excited about having an ai vibe out some throwaway software for me (two recent examples - a personal recipe site I never made time for and a video game skill tree build tool that isn't worth the time it would have taken to build).

As another commenter said, for a ton of people this is the first taste of the computer working for them and being able to dream something up then have it exist. This is very cool!

That in no way invalidates the concern of amateur slop going to maintainers! I think the problem here is we as society haven't caught up to this new idea of personal software vs community (architected, maintained) software. We're so early in this space we haven't even figured out the good ways to do such a split - even the totally new to software folks are bleeding edge early adopters.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#87

Post by tekne »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #53
john_strinlai wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there a list somewhere that i can check what i am allowed to be proud of and what i am not allowed to be proud of? edit: if anyone wants to enlighten me, why do you care if someone is proud of something? does it hurt you somehow?

No, but come on. If you insert a computer into your brain and wake up tomorrow speaking German, would you be proud you could speak German? Wouldn't you rather work diligently to learn the language and be proud of that effort?

Absolutely -- why on earth would I spend more time and effort than I have to?

Now I can focus on the reason why I wanted to learn German in the first place, like appreciating German culture or talking to German people.

Note this is not saying "why learn the language at all there's a translator" since learning a language lets you experience the culture more intimately and communicate better -- lots of things are "untranslatable". But if somehow the implant gave you that necessary context, why not?

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#88

Post by hext »

fantasizr wrote: post #68
hext wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source projects for years.

Agree that even prior to LLMs those projects weren't terribly welcoming as per Linus' famous email comments (chalk it up to cultural communication differences :) )

I don’t know if it’s just me, and these days I do understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but I’ve always detested the idea that I need to reach out and have a conversation with the maintainer before opening a PR. Especially (mainly) when the PR is simply addressing an approved GH issue.

I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront.

On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s fair to want to hold on tightly to that level of control, but to me it's just always felt antithetical to the entire idea of open source.

Makes me feel like I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#90

Post by rpdillon »

janalsncm wrote: post #19
ctoth wrote: post #3

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

What is the kind of person who would use such software? What you’re describing is the need for a two sided market where really only one side exists. A user would have to be someone who doesn’t have access to an LLM to make bespoke software themselves, and isn’t able to use existing software. I think that’s a vanishingly small segment of people.

You're assuming that everybody will be equally skilled in using an LLM to create software. I don't think anything in my experience indicates that this is true.
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