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Not everyone is using AI for everything

gabrielweinberg.com

101–110 of 565 posts

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just write it yourself?

If you already know what the inputs/outputs are, why should you spend days or weeks of your life typing it out rather than giving it in a well-specified and tested form to an LLM to get it done a hundred times faster?

This is a truth that many are having a hard time accepting. Getting shoved into the light so fast is blinding.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#102
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because typing “code” takes time and significant amounts of it. We are slowly waking up to the fact, which was always true, that “coding” is just a fanciful preparatory task in order to appease the spirits properly so that we may invoke the spirit of what we are actually after: a live, running process that does useful things. Code is completely useless when separated from that fact. Typing it is a complete waste of t…

The typing was never the bottleneck.

Based on what I'm using AI for these days, seems like it always was.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just write it yourself?

If you already know what the inputs/outputs are, why should you spend days or weeks of your life typing it out rather than giving it in a well-specified and tested form to an LLM to get it done a hundred times faster?

Because the LLM version will have countless number of bugs and security holes, which means you will spend weeks or months of your life fixing them.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#104
post #69

Some 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 specifica…

That's funny, Google Gemini and AI mode in search has replaced my ChatGPT prompting, because I know Gemini will correctly cite sources (as of course it's by Google) rather than hallucinating.

Also, Gemini is free or at least has much higher usage limits than ChatGPT or Claude, and it's well integrated into Android and soon Apple with their new Siri, so things like circle to search just work well.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#105
post #28

I only use AI for software development. For writing, I don't use it at all except to translate source materials. So yes, AI is only for software development in my case. The real question is whether I have any value outside of software development. Sometimes I get the feeling that AI is replacing the value I have in society.

I have no doubt that as AI gets more expensive, my employer would lay off more developers to pay for more AI tokens, until there are very few developers left. And the hilariously sad part is, the current developers keep training the AI to do their job. Eventually I expect they will lay off almost all the developers. It really feels like we're going to be stabbing each other in the back just to be the last one to get let go.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#107
post #72

On the post-grad job hunt right now - I note that most employers will ask in a technical interview or whiteboard interview "how are you using LLMs?" It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. I've been responding with a sort of long winded answer about how 'there is…

> re-factoring a big repo of decades old fortran+C cod

Having been in academia in the past and now in software I can say with a lot of certainty that this will take a lot more upfront work than otherwise.

Academic code does not have a lot of structure. And usually lacks a lot in terms of tests. While AI is best when it can mimic patterns as well as there are tests to target.

So you will probably need to budget a few weeks to establish good patters, docs as well as testing patterns before you can seriously make it really do what you want it to do.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wri…

How else would anyone do something like issue a refund if not through a programmatic interface?

Direct access to the database, and create the "refund program" on the fly. Yes, stuff of nightmares.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#109
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. Have you considered just answering truthfully? Would you even want to work somewhere where you need to play a role and where they flip out when you say the wrong word you should've correctly guessed through mind reading? T…

I assume it's because he is seeking to pay rent, food bills, and other expenses through employment.

I mean maybe that is because I live in a still mostly not failed state (Germany), but I can't imagine that these things would be _so bad_ that living in fear of saying the wrong thing would be something worth considering.

Plus, and leaving that aside, I have my doubts that even if you did that, that that company would stay alive for very long. Reality has the habit of eventually ripping this kind of unproductively delusional people (like e.g. a boss that flips if you don't say the right word with regards to the current hype) to shreds eventually.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#110
post #21

> AI has gotten so good Actually anything that is about 90% great and 10% disastrously wrong is utter crap given the way people want and do use AI models. They are great tools in the right hands and awful in the wrong.

It's funny lately I've been seeing the cursor advertisements all with some premise of regular young person wants to develop an app and the ads really do focus on the simplest of premises: the only ones I've seen in these skits are essentially variants on the "todo app" web app tutorial

the tech is pretty good at helping identify simple bugs when they happen and to write short sections of code given very explicit instructions but yeah I have yet to see good examples of short one sentence ideas turned into a working product that looks better than anything that could be a UDemy tutorial app.

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