No, everyone is not using AI for everything - yet.
Not everyone is using AI for everything
61–70 of 565 posts
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you describe yourself as more skilled at frontend engineering or at backend engineering?
Definitely frontend (it's what I do, every day, and I enjoy it), but I have a great deal of experience (over 25 years), writing some pretty robust backend stuff. I just don't enjoy it as much.
I'm nowhere near that level of experience, although I've done both as well. I'm more backend oriented. And my experience has been the opposite. When I ask for backend code, footgun after footgun appears on my screen. With frontend code, much less of an issue, as far as I can tell. Part of me believes this is because I'm less skilled at frontend, and I don't bat an eye when the LLM plops down yet another useMemo (I've since learned that this is rarely needed). But in your case this argument can hardly be made. With 25 years I trust your ability to spot a good design on either end of the stack. So then I don't know where this discrepancy comes from. Maybe my prompting skills leave something to be desired.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would be expected. The corner cases people faced with PHP throughout the decades have been well documented on the internet for eons. Swift, not so much. It's relatively new. Looking at AI's abilities like an engineer's career span scaled about 10-20x of time makes it make a bit more sense. It's going to be worse at newer/niche things, intuitively - which is only going to get worse as it "learns" from garbage out…
Also, I suspect most "production" Swift –the type of stuff written by seasoned experts– (I just had to add em-dashes ;) is behind closed-source walls.
No doubt in my mind, a future Apple model will be the best to use for this purpose. They likely have more swift to train on than anyone else, and would benefit directly from more quality apps, rather than the slop flowing into the App Store (>1k app submissions per hour; they claim)
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#64I've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI added
The real best case scenario is using LLMs to help build deterministic systems. Instead of asking an LLM to do some task that you know will be repeated, instead ask the LLM to build a program (Python script or whatever) to do the task.
Making systems fully deterministic ignores the entire purpose of having agents involved.
IMHO the best of both worlds option is agents working with deterministic CLIs. Where the agent does the reasoning (and text generation) but uses CLIs to carry out all of the actions (issuing refunds, unblocking accounts, or whatever).
It's possible to get very reliable and consistent work out of agents when they're using well written prompts with well designed CLIs.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#65> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing na…
Which LLM though? Models can still be significantly different in their capabilities.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#66> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing na…
This would be expected. The corner cases people faced with PHP throughout the decades have been well documented on the internet for eons. Swift, not so much. It's relatively new. Looking at AI's abilities like an engineer's career span scaled about 10-20x of time makes it make a bit more sense. It's going to be worse at newer/niche things, intuitively - which is only going to get worse as it "learns" from garbage out…
> which is only going to get worse as it "learns" from garbage outputted by other LLMs moving forward
You seem to assume that autoregressive pretraining (and unfiltered behavior cloning, maybe) are the only ways to improve LLM performance.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#67Everyone is using AI, issue is not just everyone recognizes what AI actually is, how broadly it's used.
Looking things up and asking questions was always something for a minority of the population so the language model usage being relatively low isn't a surprise.
Problem arises if the non-AI segment is leveraged to create regulations that impact the AI using segment negatively.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#68> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing na…
Which LLM though? Models can still be significantly different in their capabilities.
That's likely. I generally use ChatGPT (latest), but as a chat interface (not an agent). I suspect that I might get better stuff from Claude (maybe).
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#69Some of the advantages are second order.
For example; ChatGPT is replacing my Google searching. Not necessarily because it's better, or because it's summaries are better than Google (I find them subjectively better but it's not clear cut).
But because the app has a nice history; can ask a relatively complicated question and go do something else and then come back to it, ask a follow up. Etc.
None of that is specifically an AI benefit, but it's a workflow that really helps, well, flow.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a contractor who built a lot of predictive systems and workflows in last three years I can tell you that quite often there is a specific request to put AI into it even when it is not needed and would objectively make the system worse, slower and more expensive. The AI psychosis is a real thing.
Haha, i have a colleague, he is the "AI-is-for-everything-let-me-check-Claude-first": Regardless which task is handed to him, he "discusses" it first with Claude and very often comes back with like "The AI said... X"
I talk to Claude because I'm very talkative but I have nobody to talk to.