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Punch yourself in the face with reality

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Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#31

Post by NopIdoN »

Grombobulous wrote: post #27
randusername wrote: post #19

> And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not. Building technology to overcome relatable hardships and frictions is a worthy challenge full of meaning. Using someone else's technology to erase frictions and hardships from your life can erode meaning. On my worst days I am convinced programming and technological optimism is a theft of meaning;…

I agree with your overall sentiment, although maybe the article and this sentiment more generally are going a little bit overboard with the skepticism/negativity. It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes. But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you. This sit…

> It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.

dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#33

Post by Grombobulous »

NopIdoN wrote: post #31
Grombobulous wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your overall sentiment, although maybe the article and this sentiment more generally are going a little bit overboard with the skepticism/negativity. It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes. But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you. This sit…

> It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store. dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me

Mistakes without a significant lesson or takeaway aren’t a useful avenue for growth.

I think it’s possible that this concept that AI is an easy shortcut is a form of gatekeeping.

We had the same reactions to StackOverflow and web search when those technologies came around. And there’s certainly partial truth to it. Maybe reading a full book really does make you more well-rounded than googling your answer, but sometimes blowing a lot of time searching an index in a physical book hoping to find the piece of knowledge you need is just spending time for sake of spending time.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#34

Post by inigyou »

a_c wrote: post #30

I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real…

It sounds great for prototyping. Once you do a month's experimentation in a day and generate some shit app that barely works, but looks functional, you have a definite goal to recreate that design but working properly.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#35

Post by inigyou »

quirkot wrote: post #8

Such a great synopsis. The things that are easy to signal (landing page, presentation deck, logo, etc) have never been the make-or-break aspect. The part that's always been hard, that remains hard, is that a business must solve a problem for people. Even B2B is solving business problems for specific people. And people are a difficult, difficult problem to solve.

Is it really? Most startups don't seem to solve anything for anyone, not really, but they do enough to get investor money, using pitch decks and logos and landing pages, and the founder gets paid from investor money while the product collapses, which seems like a success for the founders to me.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#37

Post by threethirtytwo »

No this isn't punching yourself in the face. Not for swes.

What's written above is self confirmation that you are better than AI and that you will always have a job because you are better because AI can't build something that works. That stuff about convincing yourself you're building something useful is actually the easy question.

Punching yourself in the face involves telling truths that are incredibly hard to stomach. That you don't matter, that all your years of coding and your identity is about to be consumed by a machine that is superior. The fact that you still hold a rank as a software engineer right now is only because that machine is slightly worse than you. But as it improves, your role becomes meaningless. The life you built your skills around becomes meaningless. It is less about what AI is now and more about the trajectory of AI and what the current AI says about the AI of the near tomorrow. We don't code by hand anymore and this came about in less than 5 years since the popular rise of LLMs. Think about what the next 5 years will bring.

That is punching yourself in the face with reality^^

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#38

Post by a_c »

inigyou wrote: post #34
a_c wrote: post #30

I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real…

It sounds great for prototyping. Once you do a month's experimentation in a day and generate some shit app that barely works, but looks functional, you have a definite goal to recreate that design but working properly.

Indeed it is. I’m very grateful to what LLM enables me.

The revelation to me was that I used to code what I know, now I could code what I don’t know. The common path is that when I face something I don’t know, which is quite often, to move forward I have to level up my understanding.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#40

Post by pizzafeelsright »

inigyou wrote: post #34
a_c wrote: post #30

I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real…

It sounds great for prototyping. Once you do a month's experimentation in a day and generate some shit app that barely works, but looks functional, you have a definite goal to recreate that design but working properly.

This was true a while ago. Today we are replacing decades old sloppy production code with 100% verified better code through tests written by AI, code written by AI. This is not looking functional but drop in functional replacement with measurable improvements.
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