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It's not empowering to hand off the details

davidnicholaswilliams.com

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Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#31

Post by raincole »

RGS1811 wrote: post #19

I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They'…

> as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat

This... quite describes what the current AI feels like to me. So I really don't see a problem. If AI does too much for you, you should, uh, just prompt it to do less.

Everyone talks about how their AI escapes sandbox and virtualization or delete their entire repos or something. Perhaps they're using a skynet I'm not aware of. From my experience when I added "discuss; don't edit any file yet" at the end of the prompt I've never seen the LLM go against my will and edit the files anyway.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#32

Post by chris_armstrong »

iamleppert wrote: post #21

This same argument could be applied to anything. Layers of abstraction exist for a reason, because at a certain point, we can only deal with so many things at once. We have to be able to delegate "the details" to others -- be that a person, a company, or an AI model. Does "not getting into the details" mean you have to understand how the GCC compiler works when you write C code? Do you need to be an expert in machine…

I didn't interpret it as an argument about layers of abstraction. You need to be in the detail at the level you're writing (and it's certainly advantageous to know some of the detail of the abstractions below) because you're building abstractions on top of that, because the details subtly change at the base level you're building at, impacting the level that you're building to.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#33

Post by bonoboTP »

RealityVoid wrote: post #5
cheevly wrote: post #3

Every word of this seems objectively false. AI is more than capable of handling the details. I have generated countless tools for myself without needing to know or care about the details.

Tools? Yes. Reliable foundations? Eh, mostly not. Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but I'm not impressed. Not in the least because in order to get a good system you must have a good image of the system in your head. And if AI builds the system, how will you ever get that system in your head?

How would you do it if you hired an employee in your company to do it? You'd talk to the employee and read the docs they write. Same here.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#34

Post by smitty1e »

xtajv wrote: post #13
bogometer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said what I was thinking. AI can do the things I always found mind numbing and tedious, but because I did it already early in my career, I know when to intervene because the agent is not doing it correctly. I think that is the OP's point.

I think about LLMs in software today as attempting to provide a similar role as compilers in terms of translating high-level thoughts into low-level details. The only problem is that I actually trust compilers.

How quickly would you drop a non-deterministic compiler for the source code of a project?

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#35

Post by andy99 »

RGS1811 wrote: post #19

I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They'…

> I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat.

Right now we’re still in the benchmaxxing phase, I feel like most AI models of combination of models and harness are not really a “product” yet in the sense of having a particular and opinionated UX engineered to be helpful at a specific task, there much more still in a race to be the smartest.

There’s a lot of room for diversification of the actual character of this interaction, for example in the direction you mention. I think once that starts we’ll get into the real “useful” phase, right now we’re really just showing off and exploring how much it can do, even if it’s incidentally really useful in some cases.

Personally I agree with the parent post, I hate it when AI tries to lead me “would you like me to ...” I’d much prefer something awaiting my instructions than wasting tokens tryitn or steer me to doing something inevitably dumb.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#36

Post by bonoboTP »

bitwize wrote: post #16

We're living in the glorious future where software engineers don't have to worry about nitty-gritty stuff like actually making software and can focus on the really important work: administrative and managerial tasks!

AI can do administrative tasks.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#37

Post by [deleted] »

lelanthran wrote: post #24
RGS1811 wrote: post #19

I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They'…

> Here's what I want: I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat. You aren't going to get that. Why would they even offer you that? You're going to be the meatbag peripheral to an AI.

[deleted]

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#38

Post by wavemode »

iamleppert wrote: post #21

This same argument could be applied to anything. Layers of abstraction exist for a reason, because at a certain point, we can only deal with so many things at once. We have to be able to delegate "the details" to others -- be that a person, a company, or an AI model. Does "not getting into the details" mean you have to understand how the GCC compiler works when you write C code? Do you need to be an expert in machine…

You're confusing translation and interpretation. A compiler is merely translating your code into a lower-level form. (There is a degree of heuristic-based interpretation that goes into generating good code, but the code's observable behavior is not allowed to change.)

But an LLM has to interpret your words and make judgment calls about the logical details, which is a very different thing. An LLM sufficiently intelligent to make acceptable judgment calls in all situations (acceptable enough to ship to production without human review of those details) would likely be indistinguishable from AGI.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#39

Post by brindleth »

flogistonical wrote: post #23
cheevly wrote: post #3

Every word of this seems objectively false. AI is more than capable of handling the details. I have generated countless tools for myself without needing to know or care about the details.

The pro argument is always quantity based, yet we never get to see the actual gain in quality. It's always "I'm doing SO MUCH more". Never "I'm doing better, with less effort." It's also what we see in the wild. There are so many things going on, so many news about "AI". Are things getting better in any meaningful way? Why are we getting so much from "AI" yet things keep getting worse? The only real, objective and ve…

I'm doing better, with less effort.

I mostly work on UI (for an internal, science-focused app) and it used be that features would take a sprint or two to grind out, and would always be an MVP to meet just the most essential user requirements, because that's all we could afford, time-wise, to do. And if I figured out while implementing there could be a nicer UI approach to something, it was often too late to change the approach.

Now, I can get to that MVP in under a day. And I can experiment with ten radically different approaches, or change my mind about something significant at any stage in the implementation. I can afford to add refinements and user-pleasing extras that I could never have done before. I'm not delivering features at 10x the speed. There's a limit to the amount of code I can (and should) be submitting for review. But the features I'm building are _better_, and the effort is less. I'm not wasting mental bandwidth typing out a dozen React components full of the same-old state management, form processing code, etc. I'm not trawling through charting library docs, looking for the precise combination of settings to make my chart's x-axis ticks labels rotate 45 degrees. My mental energy is focussed on figuring out what solution is actually _right_, not the minutiae of how to persuade the computer to do it.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#40

Post by fortzi »

iamleppert wrote: post #21

This same argument could be applied to anything. Layers of abstraction exist for a reason, because at a certain point, we can only deal with so many things at once. We have to be able to delegate "the details" to others -- be that a person, a company, or an AI model. Does "not getting into the details" mean you have to understand how the GCC compiler works when you write C code? Do you need to be an expert in machine…

Your vouching for centralization of knowledge, and even understanding, which I think is a very bad idea. It’s not like the rest of us are becoming specialized at something else - knowledge, in the broad sense, is the foundation of all skills. Without it we have nothing to contribute
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