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Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

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Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#231

Post by theturtletalks »

davidcelis wrote: post #195
u8 wrote: post #184

We were so spoiled. We got fat salaries to sit in air conditioned Herman Millers all day learning about computers. Now we discover a way to synthesis intelligence and the only thing we can think to do with it is ruin the most fun career most of us could have ever hoped for. Sure, we're all more productive now, but how much of that is because we leverage AI on top of the intelligence we gained from all of that manual…

> Sure, we're all more productive now, but… I’ve been trying to ask people a different question: sure, we’re more productive now but to me, the AI era is only serving to plunge us deeper than ever into producing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. And for what? What’s it all for? I became a software engineer because I have a lot of fun writing code, thinking through and solving complicated problems, and experie…

2 types of people:

People who use coding as a means to an end, producing a product

People who enjoy process over product and coding is the enjoyable part, not the end product

Company executives fall into bucket 1. Even if you love your cushy air-conditioned job, doesn’t mean the people above you don’t see you as a means to an end, a better product.

Solo founders and small startups are in bucket 1 as well but that doesn’t mean that don’t enjoy coding, just the product being made is much more satisfying.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#232

Post by nilirl »

deadbabe wrote: post #222
nilirl wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument has many, many leaps but I infer your point. The lack of attention does reduce the overall correctness of the system. But, and unfortunately, in most situations the loss of correctness is more than made up for by the speed gains. Unless you're building software that could kill someone, it's hard to reject the improved speed. The cost of delay is usually more damaging than the cost of incorrectness.

In real business, all important software is capable of killing someone or cause monetary loss through incorrectness or loss of functionality due to performance failures. If that doesn’t apply, you are just writing toy apps or front ends that are of no real significance, so yes you could carry on with incorrect code in those cases, but it’s not much of a career either.

Thank you for illuminating the realities of real business.

It made me realize I've only had the misfortune of being employed at fake ones.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#233

Post by jplusequalt »

adi_kurian wrote: post #65

Colonoscopy detection has gotten modestly better with AI assistance. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39216648/ https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2023... https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1309086 https://info.asge.org/083024-colon-asge/acg-quality-task-for... New tool that does task better than worker leads to workers being less good at task. Net outcome for patient is positive. Next? P…

If your argument boils down to "individuals just need to use it the right way" then I ask you to kindly use that same framing for driving cars, owning guns, etc. and then rethink your position.

It turns out that when the use of a tool has external consequences for misusing it, it's important that there are structures in place for penalizing the misuse of that tool.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#234

Post by iLoveOncall »

ianbutler wrote: post #170
iLoveOncall wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly believe that you cannot evaluate how good a system design is if you don't implement it by hand. 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 imple…

> I strongly believe that you cannot evaluate how good a system design is if you don't implement it by hand. Fwiw we both agree that LLMs should not design systems. I do the design, but otherwise I don't get how this is true, the success of a design is indicated by long term success in the system it built. You can measure this against success in the task it was deployed for via performance metrics for one. And then f…

> my understanding is the best people leave faang when they get the itch to do something better with their time.

Your understanding is wrong. The extreme majority of people who leave FAANGs don't leave willingly, and are not the best, unless it's to go to even better companies like Jane Street and the like, but those are rare.

Turns out for most people, there's not much better to do during your 9 to 5 than solving problems for half a million a year.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#235

Post by themafia »

cortesoft wrote: post #226
themafia wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Literally: the context window. With the human you have a window that possibly extends up to _years_. With your language model you have maybe a few megabytes which is always preceded by instructions from the model maker.

Is this true, though? AIs already interact with way more data than their context window, they can make queries to external data sources, and they can make context references to external data that can be pulled in as needed. The context window is the working memory, which is not ‘years’ for humans either.

Okay. Can you take _all_ the data you have out of your mind and put into a computerized format? Is there nothing intangible in your mind?

The human context window includes actual _context_ not just _data_.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#236

Post by themafia »

orbital-decay wrote: post #215
themafia wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Literally: the context window. With the human you have a window that possibly extends up to _years_. With your language model you have maybe a few megabytes which is always preceded by instructions from the model maker.

That's a misconception. Context window of humans is measured in seconds and limited to single-digit amount of entities. Human attention is truly ephemeral, with a ridiculously short span. What you're talking about cannot be emulated by putting everything into the context, you need models with deeper cognitive capabilities, and the longer your context the smarter it needs to be. It can be done by increasing the depth…

> Human attention is truly ephemeral, with a ridiculously short span.

I do not believe this at all. I think you'd have to have a very limited experience working with other human beings to be able to believe this.

> and by training it better.

"Oh yea, just do it _better_. That's your problem." Perhaps some people operate without any context but most of us find the experience lacking.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#237

Post by iLoveOncall »

jcgrillo wrote: post #50
ianbutler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Every time I see an anecdote like this, A it reaffirms my belief that FAANG devs are fairly mediocre on the whole I think another (partially causal?) problem is how they're managed. The whole perf circus is just ridiculous, especially the stuff recently reported about facebook. But they're all more or less like that. Steeped in that cocktail of incentives, who even knows what might happen to an otherwise excellent…

> But also just numerically, they can't be much above average, on average, because there are so many.

There are as many CS grads every 2 years in the US alone as total software engineers employed by FAANGs...

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#238

Post by meetingthrower »

hodder wrote: post #163
zerobees wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're gonna review that voluminous academic literature in a field you're not familiar with, right?... That is my point: an LLM can be great if you know the field and can spot errors. Or, to a lesser extent, if you have some automatic feedback loop that the model can't easily game ("does this code pass unit tests?"). It's a lot less great if there's a risk that you won't detect the early drift.

Sifting through information to separate truth from fiction is a modern, experience-based skill that I’ve developed YES. However, your perspective on how LLMs are used might be too narrow. While no one is suggesting using an AI to find a one-shot cure for Alzheimer's, LLMs are incredibly effective tools when paired with textbooks to master subjects like undergraduate physics.

100% you are so right. Don't rely on the LLM. It is a robot you give tools and context, and then you ask it to do something with that. It's amazing at that.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#239

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Fergusonb wrote: post #11
iLoveOncall wrote: post #4

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…

My friends can't ride horses as well as they used to, they've been using cars to get around too much. Sure horses are more efficient, but cars are faster and more convenient, and allow you to get a lot more done. Also cars will get better in our lifetime, horses are horses.

"My friends can't reason as well as they used to, they've been using LLMs to do their reasoning for them." is going to be the eventual outcome. What's the point in getting more done if it ruins your mind in the process?

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#240

Post by [deleted] »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #234
ianbutler wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I strongly believe that you cannot evaluate how good a system design is if you don't implement it by hand. Fwiw we both agree that LLMs should not design systems. I do the design, but otherwise I don't get how this is true, the success of a design is indicated by long term success in the system it built. You can measure this against success in the task it was deployed for via performance metrics for one. And then f…

> my understanding is the best people leave faang when they get the itch to do something better with their time. Your understanding is wrong. The extreme majority of people who leave FAANGs don't leave willingly, and are not the best, unless it's to go to even better companies like Jane Street and the like, but those are rare. Turns out for most people, there's not much better to do during your 9 to 5 than solving pr…

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