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The human-in-the-loop is tired

pydantic.dev

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Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#91

Post by ptrl600 »

spiderxxxx wrote: post #57
ptrl600 wrote: post #47

I don't understand how people are using AI. A lot of the time, what I want to build, doesn't have a succinct English sentence to describe it. If I describe the user requirement I just get a Fisher-Price toy thing that kind of ignores most of the adjectives and adverbs in my requirement. So I'd have to prompt with a big list of specs and algorithms for the specific thing I want. Then what's the point?

I've not had that problem, but I have 35 years of programming experience, so I can describe exactly what I want. Maybe that's the difference. It doesn't have to be a single sentence, I write a whole paragraph or even pseudocode most of it and tell it to use the pseudocode as comments for the code it will produce. It'll give me a plan and I'll refine the plan until it seems to be what I want. Then we'll get it to star…

The dream is "I have an idea for some awesome software, I will set an army of lemmings out to do all the tough work of figuring out how it actually works".

Well I do have an idea for some awesome software, I know exactly what the user experience should be, but the lemmings are producing useless software that resembles my idea in the way a Fisher-Price phone resembles a real phone. With frontier models, now far less buggy useless software following code conventions perfectly.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#92

Post by hdjrudni »

thinkindie wrote: post #78
appplication wrote: post #32

> Here's a term for what I think is happening: the human reward function problem. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what good looks like. Writing code by hand was never easy, but it was full of small rewards. Solving a problem in your head. Understanding a gnarly bit of logic. Watching the code compile. The feeling of control. LLM-assisted programming has automated much of the work that generated…

I think it all depends on your personal driver: personally I rather see a product I built in whatever way used by ever growing number of people because they find it useful. It means that the time I spent working on that helped other people solving a problem (hopefully). That’s why a was always keen on cutting some corners when and where necessary in order to think about the user first and the code beauty second. Of c…

I don't even want to put 'my' code or apps out into the wild anymore. I've built a a few things I think are useful and I'm using myself but I'm afraid it'll just get called slop or my only users will be bots. What's the point. So I don't get the joy out of sharing it nor the joy of the achievement. But I've widdled down what I thought was an endless backlog of features to nearly zero, I guess that's something.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#93

Post by adamddev1 »

Terr_ wrote: post #37

> I felt that one in my bones. I was up until nearly 2am recently, prompting, because I was so close to getting a plan right. Or so I thought. [...] And it's addictive in a way that makes the isolation worse. Right, it's more like pulling the lever on slot machine. Oooh, 677, bad luck, do a ritual and try again, and maybe this time... Sure, regular programming also has a feedback loop, but normal errors are--as much…

I remember when I was just learning how to code and making some web app, I had to do a lot more blind guessing and running. "Ok let me try this... Will that work now?" I remember staying up really late, feeling stuck to the computer in that slot machine mode.

Then when I learned more I got less and less of that guessing feeling. I understood what I was building and what would work, I began using typed languages and could keep on track with the compiler/LSP. This brought me more into a satisfying flow state, and I had less of that addicting "wait let me see if this will work" magic.

It seems like coding with Claude etc is a lot like a trip back to the guesswork stage, and I don't want to go back there.

(Sometimes, when I'm doing some dev-opsy type stuff of stringing a bunch of messy components together or working with a pile of complex APIs, I can feel myself back in the blind guessing territory, and incidentally this is where I find a chat with an LLM most helpful.)

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#94

Post by hdjrudni »

bad_username wrote: post #90

> Yes the code (sorta) writes itself, but the human reviewing, directing, and course-correcting feels worse, not better. I noticed the opposite. When reviewing and directing a colleague or subordinate, I spend probably 30% of my brain cycles, and 70% of my activation energy, to weigh the technical merit of my feedback against the human impact it will make: bruised egos, differing architectural convictions, correct an…

Amusingly, when I know my peer is just going to point his AI at my feedback, I write for their AI, not for them. I'm much more curt. Maybe not so amusing but I don't feel bad about dumping a laundry list of fixes for them.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#96

Post by BrandonM »

> But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part.

I keep wondering what I’m missing in the AI enthusiasm, and maybe this is a big part of it? Writing code has never felt like the hard part to me.

In my 20s, I was excited about using a computer. AIM trained fast touch typing. I learned modal editing with vim. I learned all the common Unix commands to transform text files and filesystems in myriad ways. I learned to script and to create my own productivity keyboard shortcuts. I ran Gentoo Linux at home. Then I started my software career.

There, I learned git inside and out. I learned that IDEs all have vim keybindings, so you can have seamless language integration alongside speed-of-thought text manipulation. I became an expert in Java.

When I’m programming, if I know what I’m building, I’m moving at maximum speed. I’m not thinking about typing or syntax or using my mouse much. I’m learning the shape of the code I’m changing. I’m figuring out the right changes to make for myself and future work. When I pause, I’m pausing to think. Sometimes I realize the entire approach won’t work, but I learned something valuable, and I restart the work in a better direction with fewer pauses.

The code was never the bottleneck. Coding never feels like the hard part. When it does feel hard, I build a better abstraction or use IDE refactoring tools or craft a gnarly Unix pipeline with one or more sed invocations.

But this AI excitement is making me think perhaps this combination of skills is unusual. Maybe a lot of devs haven’t been exposed to great tooling or mastered the tools. If I put myself in those shoes, then coding seems much harder, and AI coding seems like a bigger win.

If I were in my 20s today, I might not spend so much time mastering the skills I take for granted. In that context, AI would feel like a magic productivity boost. For my part, though, I got excited about software engineering when I truly grasped that none of it was magic.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#97

Post by fragmede »

appplication wrote: post #32

> Here's a term for what I think is happening: the human reward function problem. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what good looks like. Writing code by hand was never easy, but it was full of small rewards. Solving a problem in your head. Understanding a gnarly bit of logic. Watching the code compile. The feeling of control. LLM-assisted programming has automated much of the work that generated…

Setting up a loop so the AI can test its output, so you can have it go off on its own, gives me a dopamine hit. The more rube Goldberg-ian the hit, the bigger the dopamine hit. I setup a network->usb-c keyboard dongle, and a fingerbot so codex could remote control a laptop, plus a webcam so it could see what the laptop was doing, so that I could get hibernate working on that specific hardware with that Linux kernel.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#98

Post by bickov »

The tiredness isn't from being in the loop. It's from what the loop hands you. Reading a wall of an agent's prose to check if it understood a screen is exhausting. The same check as a marked element with coordinates takes a second. It's not a human-attention problem, it's format problem. Models emit prose because it's cheap to generate, not cheap to review.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#99

Post by krysp »

There are different kinds of developer. Some will find their joy through building fast, they tend to love LLMs. Some love the art of writing code; they don't tend to love LLMs. And there are others too. Those that enjoy fully understanding a piece of code can find the process deeply draining, while those that look at things from a system level find the LLM frees them from the details.

All kinds are needed for different types of work, and it's not discussed enough that LLMs make some developer archetypes more effective and others more exhausted. Great article.

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