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Not everyone is using AI for everything

gabrielweinberg.com

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Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#181

Post by tokioyoyo »

hypfer wrote: post #170
vibe_that_works wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying as a hiring manager since this might help other post-grad job seekers: - Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. - Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year.

> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. Why? If the winding path is actually interesting and gives you insights into how the person works, why would that be a bad thing?

Not the OP, but because that’s not usually the answer I’m looking for, and my assumption would be the interviewee is not familiar with the concepts. I’d want to hear about how they use it, what are their pain points, how they’ve automated stuff and etc.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#182

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #34
romanovcode wrote: post #5

Earlier 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 have one too. He'll say "Claude says this:" and pastes a screenshot of some Claude Code output. Most of the time it's wrong, or makes assumptions that won't hold true. Or it comes up with some overcomplicated solution and I'm like "This is like a 10 line change, right here".

These people just destroy their ability to read and understand the systems they're working with. I actually see it as them making themselves redundant. Because if you can't understand anything without Claude, and Claude doesn't even give the right answers, then what are you worth?

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#183

Post by reg_dunlop »

emodendroket wrote: post #92
hypfer wrote: 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.

It's possible to work for an employer, and not have to compromise your values and or professional integrity.

The attitude suggested by your response suggests you haven't lived that reality yet.

Either way, I'd rather be rejected by an employer for speaking my truth, than lie to be somewhere I'd rather not be.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#184

Post by hypfer »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #181
hypfer wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. Why? If the winding path is actually interesting and gives you insights into how the person works, why would that be a bad thing?

Not the OP, but because that’s not usually the answer I’m looking for, and my assumption would be the interviewee is not familiar with the concepts. I’d want to hear about how they use it, what are their pain points, how they’ve automated stuff and etc.

Okay I see thank you.

But that sounds more like "evasive" is the problematic attribute and not "long winding".

Which does show up at the same time often, true. But not always.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#185

Post by gambiter »

aocallaghan17 wrote: post #9

Reminds me of this article: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba... Software engineers are definitely in a bit of a bubble here. Are we just early adopters who see the value sooner, or does it uniquely benefit software engineering, or do we just like cool automation and we're deluding ourselves that this adds value beyond the cost?

That's a decent article. My only issue is it seems heavily biased at the end, or at least he seems to misunderstand what the 'A.I. types in Silicon Valley' are doing.

> Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea.

I've been in software a long time, and I do sort of see this trend, but I think it's because these are tools that build other tools. The interface has always been a 'best I can do for now' thing, with the focus on doing things that are useful. Computers were just calculators in the beginning, which led to more complex calculators, instruction sets, programming languages, operating systems, GUIs, interconnectivity, etc.

What people are doing today is experimenting, like they always have. They're putting their experiments out there so that others can use them and build on them. Some will use those tools to build other tools, and some won't. But over time, the experiments that work will get distilled and turn into real products that people who 'do not yearn for automation' will still want to use, so it seems like the value is there.

I guess the real question is whether they will create value that offsets the near-term costs, because I don't think the billions in investments are sustainable, and I'm not convinced the centralized data center paradigm is the right way.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#186

Post by skydhash »

dukeyukey wrote: post #60
JCTheDenthog wrote: post #20

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 it’s rarely so black and white. Knowing the inputs and outputs is merely the first steps, you need to think about the transitions too as they have their own costs.

Those costs don’t disappear and it’s truly naive to think they don’t matter. Take security issues, they may arise because what you thinks was the input is merely a subset of the true input range. And the extra possibilities lead to unforeseen behavior.

A lot of programming is about ensuring that the input and the output are the sets defined in the specs. And the rest is that the transition/relation is the right tradeoffs of performance, correctness, and costs.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#187

Post by sdesol »

variety8675 wrote: post #2

I'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

> replacing deterministic systems in their support flows

The issue is, they don't want to provide "better" support but "cheaper" support. Imagine a trained agent that understands the big picture. Now imagine a company investing in humans to use AI to retrieve knowledge that the human can easily identify as being relevant or not, and using that knowledge to better aid the customer.

Right now AI is being sold as a "we don't need support personells" instead of "how can we provide better service." For a lot of products, better service will probably not matter as "cheaper" products will win most of the time.

Most people don't want to pay for better. They want to pay the same for something better, which is what companies are not investing their time in figuring out how to use AI properly for I think.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#188

Post by tfehring »

emodendroket wrote: post #92
hypfer wrote: 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.

It's still just a bad answer across the board. Having opinions and being able to articulate and defend them clearly is itself an extremely important hiring signal regardless of a company's stance on generative AI. An AI-forward company will be looking for an answer like "I haven't written code manually since 2025, I use ..., I stay on top of new tools without drowning in hype by ..." If that's not your answer, you probably aren't a good fit for those companies, but companies that would be a fit will still want a similar level of decisiveness. Much better to give an honest answer that will sound good to the right people than a wishy-washy answer that will sound bad to everyone.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#189

Post by vibe_that_works »

hypfer wrote: post #170
vibe_that_works wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying as a hiring manager since this might help other post-grad job seekers: - Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. - Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year.

> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. Why? If the winding path is actually interesting and gives you insights into how the person works, why would that be a bad thing?

Often the hiring manager will have the person to be hired somewhere in his report chain. So if a person can't effectively communicate and can't properly respond to a "I only have 2 minutes, shoot", then I am getting a future liability into the company that will slow down all future communications.

I much rather prefer someone who needs 3 seconds to triage a question and tell me: "This is X, I know this, here is the solution" or "This is Y, I don't know it, but I will get back to you within 24h".

I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes". There is no jointly with your boss. Let's do a some math of a 1:12 manager to direct report ratio. That means for every hour you have, your boss only has 5 minutes. And if you talk to your boss' boss, they have 25 seconds for every of your hours.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#190

Post by rpdillon »

rafaepta wrote: post #81

So true, just built a deterministic system to identify duplicated code. It's offline and doesn't use AI on purpose, since a gate that blocks your CI has to give the exact same answer every time, and finding dupes means comparing every function against every other (that's index work). It does NOT use AI. But ironically, I used AI to build it ( https://github.com/Rafaelpta/dupehound )

> But ironically, I used AI to build it

This is a pattern I encourage - the AI might not be reliable, but with coaching, it can produce reliable tools. `colordiff` was causing issues with `less` when I was looking at diffs (character encoding issues I think), and when I asked Kimi K2.6 what to do, it built me a rust command-line diff tool in one shot that I've been using ever since (it even downloaded rust, wrote the tool, and compiled it).

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