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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

#261

Post by wvenable »

fzeroracer wrote: post #223
wvenable wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I see people say this, that they've built a house but what they've built is something that structurally collapses immediately and fails due to problems that even an average person would've avoided had they learned how to build a house. So did you build a house, or did you build a house?

How can I argue about such a hypothetical?!? If I ask an LLM or my mother-in-law about how to get wine out of the carpet, and I get wine out of the carpet, maybe I have done it wrong and my house will burn down! Who knows?! Your argument is meaningless; there's nothing anyone can say to that.

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

#262

Post by orbital-decay »

themafia wrote: post #236
orbital-decay wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a simple neurologic fact, there's nothing to believe. You can use a trivial experiment to verify that you can't keep details in your sliding attention window for more than a few seconds or focus on more than a few things simultaneously. Human memory and cognition is layered and this immediate layer is what resembles the model's context the most.

You're possibly mixing it up with long-term memory which doesn't keep immediate facts and details, it's for heavily processed and compressed summaries, for the lack of a better analogy from the LLM world. You aren't keeping the entire codebase in your memory, just its highly processed and conceptualized version. This conceptualization can be somewhat emulated as an agentic loop, but it can only go so far, current models quickly lose coherency and aren't good enough to predict what's important.

Models don't need to remember more details, they need stronger processing of what they already remember.

>"Oh yea, just do it _better_. That's your problem."

I think we're talking about different things. Models can be trained better to cram more intelligence into the same amount of parameters, that's what I mean. Similarly to how your ability to learn (and perform) math depends on your prior math training.

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

#263

Post by wvenable »

cryo32 wrote: post #248
wvenable wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's your point? I could just not ask an LLM and not do anything. Is that better somehow?

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

#264

Post by sdesol »

ncruces wrote: post #196
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…

I wish I could've one shoted this 200 LoC PR: https://github.com/ncruces/wasm2go/pull/42/changes#diff-5181... I'd really like to know the prompt, because I did try and, this took me way too long to figure out.

The AI agreed

> There isn’t a magic prompt I could have written before knowing the solution. A retrospective prompt can reproduce the 200 lines only because it embeds the invariants you discovered. The useful AI task would have been systematically finding counterexamples and iterating toward those invariants, not generating the final file in one shot.

For me the value with AI isn't the one shot, it is the fact that it can help you iterate faster. My biggest take awway so far with AI is it can help you fail fast. The faster you can fail, the faster you can iterate.

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

#265

Post by DrewADesign »

nilirl wrote: post #181
DrewADesign wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious if someone coming into that fresh, without having had the mental exercise of, for example, grappling with data structures and (lower-level) algorithms in practical applications by hand, could achieve a mindset that useful and productive? 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 experienc…

Yes, and I struggle to give junior developers feedback because of this. The code they submit for review no longer represents their thinking or their skill. The feedback loop for beginners is a bit broken. What is their skill now? How is it displayed? How and where do we provide valuable feedback? I find myself just approving large PRs because I don't have the time to read it all. I feel like I've let down a lot of de…

> I feel like I've let down a lot of developers this year.

I think the industry has, and we don’t get much out of individualizing it. Let’s not forget that this progression is a series of deliberate choices made by a handful of very influential people that couldn’t give a teaspoon of shit about developers beyond what their subscriptions bring in.

It’s not a super well-received opinion around here, but I think the economics of the large-scale services will mean on-device models are going to be where this all goes sooner or later. My gut says setting up a local LLM coding assistant will be more like choosing and setting up an ide. I don’t have a crystal ball though.

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

#266

Post by cryo32 »

wvenable wrote: post #263
cryo32 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's your point? I could just not ask an LLM and not do anything. Is that better somehow?

Yes. You could not do it. Doing stuff isn’t essential. Especially when you have no idea what you are doing.

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

#267

Post by mistersquid »

bitwize wrote: post #243
bpavuk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

One of the canonical references of Jobs’ use of “bicycle for the mind” also compared the efficiency of locomotion to the California Condor which was (I’m working from memory, here) 17X more efficient than a human walking.

A human on a bicycle, according to Jobs then, is more efficient than the most efficient animal locomotion known to humankind. The comparison included animals moving through non-terrestrial environments.

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

#268

Post by physix »

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…

The bike/motorbike/car analogy is good. In each you can find enjoyment that suits your character.

I have been drawn to coding from the first day I took a course at college learning Pascal and assembly on an IBM PC. Hell I even wrote an IEEE/488 driver for an Osborne 1.

As an experimental physicist, coding was always central to my work. I always felt guilty because I had more pleasure coding than tackling the physics itself.

This is a new age we are entering. AI changes how we do things, but I believe that the human passion to be creative and do intellectual work will always be part of it. It's in our nature.

So I'm not worried that we'll all dry up and turn into zombies.

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

#269

Post by thrixton »

One thing I have found out immensely useful for is exploring new niche areas.

One example is I got it to setup a new terminal (wezterm) and configure it quickly to my liking. This would have been a lot of googling and reading before, generally too much time for me to invest.

I don't think it's valuable knowledge for me to have apart from a high level to evaluate the possibilities.

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

#270

Post by wvenable »

cryo32 wrote: post #266
wvenable wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? I could just not ask an LLM and not do anything. Is that better somehow?

Yes. You could not do it. Doing stuff isn’t essential. Especially when you have no idea what you are doing.

So never learn anything? Be entirely beholden to other people for everything? People who somehow themselves also have complete knowledge? I've done so many things myself now and that has given me the confidence to do even more.

If I had to have a complete idea of what I was doing to do it, I wouldn't even have a job. Doing stuff and making mistakes is exactly how you learn.

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