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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

#241

Post by pydry »

theturtletalks wrote: post #231
davidcelis wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doe…

The difference is about slop tolerance not "process over product".

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

#242

Post by meetingthrower »

Jensson wrote: post #212
hodder wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once more, you are making massively blanketed biased assumptions about me. You seem to believe LLMs cannot even produce simple exams and rubrics is that right?

At most you could do multiple choice questions, or questions with a single objective answer such as "what is the capital of France". But such tests aren't very helpful to learn new things. Students cannot grade their own answers for more complex problems, they make mistakes but say they are correct since they don't understand the material, or they are correct but since it doesn't say the exact same thing as the examp…

You are so incorrect here. If you feed it an evaluation rubric it will go after it! You really understimate the technology when in good and well intentioned hands. (Yes lazy people will use it to cheat and get to the answer faster. But it is like a grad student tutor who will do an evaluation in 30 seconds! Rapid iteration and laddering up...)

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

#243

Post by bitwize »

bpavuk wrote: post #208
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…

if computers themselves are bicycles for the mind, LLMs are cars. or even motorcycles, if we talk smaller models. - they require specific roads being paved for them. for example, if your tooling is proprietary and not accessible from the CLI, your agent is pretty much fucked. if your tool is not represented in training data (think, `jj` VCS or your proprietary/tailor-made tooling), you require duct tapes such as "ski…

There's one more: The "bicycle for the mind" analogy was one Jobs chose specifically in reference to the fact that a human on a bicycle moves more efficiently than a human on foot—or any other land animal for that matter. But it's still the human's own effort that propels the bike. Motor vehicles require an external energy source, the human only directs it. Similarly, with LLMs, it's no longer the user's own effort that's doing the thinking.

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

#244

Post by ianbutler »

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…

> 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.

Lol. I don't know I was talking with a guy yesterday who left a FAANG clearing 1.4 million / yr who's now running his own successful startup. My sample is successful founders backed by top tier VCs or exited founders who have done much better than FAANG. If you can't do more you stick around the FAANG, those who can go and do it.

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

#245

Post by phil21 »

cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. 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 pre…

Yes. The moment you move from daily IC work to management your skills begin to atrophy. Even if you are magical and somehow they do not - you are not keeping up/practicing on the newer developments.

If you are doing your job as a manager it’s the scariest career possible. There is no realistic fallback to lower paid IC work after a certain amount of years. Your job is to enable others, not do things yourself.

There are shades of grey and you try to keep skills at least honed a little here and there doing R&D and side projects - but it’s just not the same as day to day production line work.

And of course some people start at a much higher baseline of skill than others. The impact is largely the same though over time.

This is by far the single largest caution I give to skilled engineers who talk to me about moving into a management track. It’s a decision not to be taken lightly.

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

#246

Post by jcgrillo »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #237
jcgrillo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I stand corrected! That's very interesting.

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

#247

Post by sdesol »

carterschonwald wrote: post #205
sdesol wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> playing a slot machine hoping I still believe the slot machine analogy holds to some extent, but I can honestly say my winning percentage is at least 90% for one shot generated code now. I think if you know it's limitations (inlcluding your own), I don't think about hoping anymore. I should note that when I say AI, I mean the collective models from all the major providers. The most important lesson is, you need to…

whats your fave/best one shot code gen? mine def has to be the initial impl of my python to my personal fave compiler ir. i got claude chat to write it in two sentences. 4 turns helping it rmeemver where it put shit becsuse of transcript issues

The code in http://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli contains over 300 go files and I would say 90% were one shots. I can even prove that they are AI generated since I attribute the AI in each file, as shown in the example below:

https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/r...

Since I don't know go, I can't say which is the best. I am also sure they would not live up to a go experts expectations. I just know that since I don't know go, I would not have been able to create the tool. I can also prove that you can easily maintain AI generated code since I have been expanding and evolving it for over 6 months with pretty much no issues.

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

#248

Post by cryo32 »

wvenable wrote: post #202
fzeroracer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I ask my buddy for help I'm not considering that part of research or learning I consider that leaning on their potential expertise. You're not learning shit on how to build a house just because you ask your friend to build one for you. If we're talking about research as in actually attempting to learn and get to the heart of a matter then yes. You should be cross referencing everything.

My point is if you ask your friend/LLM how to build a house and then build a house then you've learned how to build a house. I've build a lot of "houses" recently that I wouldn't have attempted if I didn't have a friend/LLM to ask.

You probably just built a shanty town according to a professional.

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

#249

Post by AngryData »

bee_rider wrote: post #158
ilaksh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ownership class does not really do work. What they delegate (high level plans) is generally easier to do for AI agents than things like software engineering because it does not need to be as precise or executable. However, there the work has very broad scope scope and the roles are very high risk, so it might need a Fable 5 or Fable 6 level vision language model to remove the jaggedness to make it 'safe' enough t…

It will be interesting to see how AI and company leadership/ownership stuff shakes out. In some sense I would expect it to be quite different than what exists currently, because an AI can’t be responsible for anything legally, and (arguably?) can’t own anything. But then, C-levels don’t actually seem to have much personal legal liability toward their company’s decisions, or maybe it won’t be so big of a deal. I’d be…

Yeah, the idea that C-suites ever took any significantly liability has always been a fantasy for as long as I can remember. At worst/best case a single lower level individual will be used as a scapegoat for the systemic abuses of the company.

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

#250

Post by GeoAtreides »

hodder wrote: post #61

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 learning new things or are you just reading LLMs output? there might be some overlap, but those are very distinct activities
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