Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After AI takes everything

ursb.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 121 posts

Re: After AI takes everything

#21

Post by edukite »

rybosworld wrote: post #14
pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

I think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough". One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one). With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that reall…

But it's not good enough. We can see this all over industry where even M$ is producing software so bad even calculator is electron app. Slow, poor quality and for any engineer below acceptable

Re: After AI takes everything

#22

Post by SoftTalker »

hurtigioll wrote: post #17
stavros wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed the fact that AI was used to deliver the anti-AI message.

that fewer people will read because it spends pages saying what could be paragraphs

Yeah it became very wearisome to read. I started skimming about halfway through.

Re: After AI takes everything

#23

Post by biotechbio »

This post is a little long winded. At times I agreed, and others I felt the author was doing a little too much hand-wringing on what-is-mine vs. what-is-the-AI's.

The opportunity is and always has been the possibility of accelerating work. Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation.

We value these things because they have become correlated with quality. We now have the opportunity to decouple these things; maybe something that took no effort will be just as good as a painstaking human labor.

The risk is if this doesn't come true. If we let our skills degrade and get ahead of our skis, embracing "slop" that superficially appears to "work", we will eventually pay the price. Financially and culturally, it seems like we are already all-in on the bet that it will work.

I hope it does, I just want to solve the problems I am working on.

Re: After AI takes everything

#24

Post by giancarlostoro »

biotechbio wrote: post #23

This post is a little long winded. At times I agreed, and others I felt the author was doing a little too much hand-wringing on what-is-mine vs. what-is-the-AI's. The opportunity is and always has been the possibility of accelerating work. Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation. We value these things because they h…

> Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation.

That's where I'm at too. Saves you weeks of effort to boot.

Re: After AI takes everything

#25

Post by visarga »

I have my own take on what is ours and can never be taken away by AI.

When a task is initiated, it starts from a need, from a specific context. To work it out the AI needs to continuously interact with the context, and get feedback from it. At the end gains, losses, risks and costs sink back in the context.

The context is you, the person who prompts, your team or company. It is indexical and relational. It is maximally distributed. It cannot be hoarded. You can't eat so that I feel satiated. AI is called to do the work, but it can't handle 3 things - start, middle and end of a task.

Re: After AI takes everything

#27

Post by agentultra »

Again, they didn’t smash the machines because they hated the technology or wanted everyone to be making lace by hand.

They were arguing for basic human rights in the workplace. Things like child labour were still super common and were among the practices the Luddites wanted to abolish. Along with the workhouses they wanted to replace with protection for workers (they didn’t have the word for it but they wanted a social security system).

They smashed the machines for leverage. There was little labour law at the time. Most of it was written by the capital holders with the help of the constabulary. Things like showing up to work on time or no pay, etc. Violence, controlled violence, was the tool they used to try and get the capital holders to the table and negotiate.

It failed, as we know, and it was a bloody failure. People were executed and jailed. The movement became a pejorative for someone who is backwards and against technology and progress.

Re: After AI takes everything

#28

Post by variadix »

pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

People have built entire careers shipping garbage, now they can ship 10x more garbage and to them that’s progress.

Re: After AI takes everything

#29

Post by graypegg »

SoftTalker wrote: post #18
graypegg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve tried to explain this to folks as “having taste”, but I’m always worried it comes off as subjective and snobby. It might be a fair assessment honestly, it’s hard for me to describe so I wouldn’t hold anyone to it as a standard. Give me an honest vibe check on that. Theres a lot of codebases out there that are at odds with my own opinions about syntax/structure/purpose, but there’s evidence of “taste” that I abso…

Was recognized long before AI came on the scene. The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. Steve Jobs

HAH! Ok fair, maybe parts of that quote are rattling around somewhere in my mind.

Re: After AI takes everything

#30

Post by sandoze »

rybosworld wrote: post #14
pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

I think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough". One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one). With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that reall…

>> It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason

So do many developers. I've lost count how many times a code review had to be rejected or cleaned up because of copy and pasted code and I'm going to admit, sometimes it's just quicker to duplicate a little code and leave a comment for 'next time'.. we've all done it.

.. like this one time I had a PR and the developer created on loooong linear method, couldn't figure out how to share between targets and copied and pasted the same bad code somewhere else. Somehow it got through and when asked why this was on production the answer was 'it worked'.

>> no time for elegance

This happens, your experience in is generally your quality out. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be elegance. I've worked at major product driven companies where elegance took a back seat to getting release out the door.

Post reply on HN