71–80 of 328 posts
Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The number of people now involved in software development has now increased because of a lower barrier to entry. I don't see what this has to do with what I posted. Yes, AI lowers the floor on software development, and there are positive aspects of that, but that doesn't change the possibility of an innovation stall.
re: concerns at a societal level. More people are making software than before. People who have been coding for a long time have moved up an abstraction layer and are further from the code. But many people are actually closer to the code than before.
More people are coding, I wouldn't say they are closer to the code if they are vibe coding. Are any of them going to produce the next breakthrough in computer language/framework/method of development/etc?
The risk of AI is that we dull the skills of enough people at the high end of the state of the art of the nuts and bolts of software development that we slow down innovation on that end. That's the concern.
Previously-non-programmers vibe coding CRUD apps they never could have before is all well and good but really has nothing to do with this concern. They may create wonderful and successful businesses but they are irrelevant to computer science related innovation.
I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? N…
Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.
Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.
Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pressure to not delegate everything?
I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? N…
I am not convinced that there are tasks, like project management or architecture, that the Ai is inherently worse at.
I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? N…
When I was in design school, as much of our work was in physical media — graphite, cut paper, paint, vine charcoal — as was practicing great kerning and getting experience with the digital tools. Even though you still had to make the individual strokes and choose appropriate tools in the digital realm, there was still a perception of the process that was obviously lacking among those that came from strictly digital backgrounds. It’s similar to seeing someone who’s only worked with photo references try life drawing — there’s an entire part of the cognitive process not being used when you’re drawing something that’s already 2D. Sure, they can learn, but unless they’re forced to, they’ll probably just keep taking a picture and drawing that. But image generating, even with extremely granular inpainting and such, is so different it’s not even comparable. I’d hesitate to say that someone with a lot of experience doing very advanced image generation would be dramatically further along than a complete beginner if they learned to draw which is not true of the photo reference artist, and even less true of a purely digital artist that did life drawing on a tablet.
Kind of like how millennials, many of whom always had access to technology, but also experienced dial-up-era computer use, are generally more technically savvy than the your stereotypical “iPad kid” that can’t even traverse a directory structure.
The two senior engineers in my org (in a FAANG) who vibe-code the most have lost literally all of their skills. Their code has become terrible and their judgment even worse. A very similar topic was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004 and I make the exact same conclusion: All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs i…
Idk man my system design game is better than its ever been because I put in the effort to use these tools and recognize they can't do software design better than I can and because I've increased the scope of what I'm building I often have to think more deeply about the problem up front. A typical speccing sessions lasts a few hours for me on big work before I have AI start writing that work where I'm just going back…
LLMs will implement what you ask them to, even if it is the wrong approach. They can be lazy and take shortcuts all the time, but they do not feel PAIN (obviously they don't feel anything and aren't lazy, I'm just personifying them but you get the point). Only when you implement by hand can you feel if the implementation of your design is painful or not, and only this signal can tell you if your design if truly good or not.
I do think LLMs are useful for design work, they are good at asking clarifications and probing questions which actually do push you to approach problems differently, but leaving implementation of designs to LLM is a recipe for disaster, and judging your own design skills when you're not implementing such designs is seriously laughable. And to be clear, it already was before LLMs, when "software architects" were just designing and then had peons implement for them.
LLMs are enabling a whole new level of bad code that is best describe by the following Jurassic Park quote: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”.
> A it reaffirms my belief that FAANG devs are fairly mediocre on the whole
Off-topic but having worked in other companies as well, I can guarantee you that this is not the case. The skill of engineers in FAANGs and other "top tier" companies is much higher than average.