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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

#111

Post by cvwright »

jclardy wrote: post #46

This is what a lot of people miss. People think, "Oh we won't need software soon, AI can just build interfaces when we need them" but in reality, the software was built to solve a problem, usually by people invested in solving that problem. Saying "Build me a todo app" will give you the sum of averages, a completely average todo app that works fine, but it isn't great in any measure. The details are what separates th…

Sometimes I don’t need my todo app to be “great” or revolutionary in any way. I just need it to work, and bog standard average is perfectly fine for a lot of things.

This frees me up to spend more time at the design level, solving harder or more novel problems.

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

#113

Post by RealityVoid »

bonoboTP wrote: post #33
RealityVoid wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When an employee writes a system, the employee owns the system. When an AI writes a system for you, YOU own the system.

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

#114

Post by skydhash »

johnfn wrote: post #102

But surely at some point you need to stop, right? Most web developers are perfectly capable without understanding the intricacies of the file system or OS, even though the browser sits on top them. Most engineers don’t know assembly, or transistors or electrical engineering. Steve Jobs didn’t know every line of Objective-C that went into OSX. I don’t think Michelangelo collected all his paint materials by hand when p…

The issue is reliability. I don't need to know the implementation of the database or the lower levels of the network tasks because I trust that they works well. A bug that affects me has a very low chance of occurring and the main risk is me not reading or understanding the docs.

With AI generated systems, no one knows what's going on. Not even the AI. When an issue pops up (which has a very good chance to happen because of the complexity of integrations), debugging it can be like reverse engineering obfuscated assembly code.

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

#115

Post by skydhash »

iepathos wrote: post #98
Barrin92 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We don't need to understand them to be able to verify they work correctly I don't think that's the case and it's becoming more obvious every day. From people who cannot distinguish truth or fiction on online platforms, good code from bad, to insecure software that causes supply chain attacks, to investment vehicles or fake medicine peddled that does not work, the idiotic MBA manager who does not understand the worke…

If I commission a part specified as 10.00 ± 0.01 mm, I can verify it with a calibrated micrometer without understanding the CNC machine, its software, or how to manufacture the part. Likewise, a function with a finite input space can be exhaustively tested against its specification without understanding its implementation. In these cases, I need to understand the requirement and the test, not the production details,…

> If I commission a part specified as 10.00 ± 0.01 mm, I can verify it with a calibrated micrometer

But there is someone that needs to design that part, specify the material needed and a few other things. The actual verification is fast because someone has compiled the list of checks. And compiling that list of checks is hard work. In other words, where '10.00 ± 0.01 mm' comes from is very important.

That's why people says typing code is not the issue. Code is merely the medium of '10.00 ± 0.01 mm' definition. The actual product is the software process. And that is already a black box as only a few developers goes on to learn computer architecture and instruction sets. Instead we deal with high level instructions like map, filter, and print. Which are the tools to say '10.00 ± 0.01 mm' instead of "this length" while demonstrating with fingers. And yes for programmers, most specs are as imprecise as the latter form.

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

#116

Post by skydhash »

brindleth wrote: post #68
flogistonical wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. My point exactly > But the features I'm building are _better_, and the effort is less. Can we cash that check or is it gonna trade heavily discounted like all grand claims on AI since all software all around us together with the economy and the Earth's life supporting systems keep degradi…

> My point exactly No it wasn't. You said the claims were only based on quantity. I'm saying the opposite. I deliver the same quantity, with higher quality. > Can we cash that check or is it gonna trade heavily discounted like all grand claims on AI since all software all around us together with the economy and the Earth's life supporting systems keep degrading every year? I'm not sure what evidence I could offer you…

Someone that describes programming like that is strongly suspect IMO.

> I'm not wasting mental bandwidth typing out a dozen React components full of the same-old state management, form processing code, etc.

Why haven't you abstracted that away already? Like building a UI library.

> 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.

There's a method to actually read library docs to find what you need. This seems like someone complaining about the effort to do research with a book, but forgot to use the table of contents and the index and instead starts on page 1.

> 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.

You don't persuade a computer, you just translate the solution that is right. That's what coding is, merely translating. And to do that well, you need to know both languages: The domain and the computer platform. If you don't know the computer platform, you can't translate an idea. It would be like trying to speak French without knowing French. Yes you can try with Google Translate, but machine translated texts can be quite horrible to the native speaker. Same with using AI to generate code.

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

#117

Post by froh »

charbz wrote: post #112

https://www.charbzg.com/blog/ai-empowerment

> It is empowering to hand off execution July 26, 2026

> I read David Nicholas Williams's short blog post titled It's not empowering to hand off the details, in which he argues that AI cannot replace expertise because doing good work requires deep familiarity with the details.

> I couldn't agree more!

> He articulates very well the puzzling phenomenon I see every day with "AI-pilled" colleagues (including many engineers) who trust the model with far more than they should. They delegate the thinking and designing along with the execution, lose touch with the codebase, miss out on critical learnings, and then complain when the slop they produced doesn't solve the original problem.

> But I think the argument is incomplete without a counterexample. There is one phase where handing off work to AI is genuinely empowering, and that is worth defining and formalizing.

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

#118

Post by rowanG077 »

Gigachad wrote: post #80
radicality wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly for me. I have a recent example too. I run a bunch of eps32 devices at home, using esphome. Pre-AI I wrote all the yaml myself and understood what’s happening and didn’t have any very bespoke hacks. Recently I asked an agent for a feature where the screen will get dimmer after some time, and eventually after a day the screen will turn off and then turn back on if I tap, which should be pretty easy in esphom…

I've been hit with the team manager trying to clear tickets on the jira board with entirely AI generated code, and what I've observed is they always make the system more complex, usually absurdly complex. The AI code never looks at things from a higher level, or reconsiders the requirements, it just layers on a load of crap until the tests pass.

It does that, yeah. But my experience mostly in codex with gpt 5.5 and 5.6 is that if you micromanage it enough you can get clear code. It just gets really annoying to repeatedly do that.

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

#120

Post by bitwize »

cwnyth wrote: post #74
jameshart wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem is that agents are notoriously bad at handling ‘me’ vs ‘you’ over an extended conversation. ‘Without my approval’ far back in the context of an extended session gets fuzzy about who ‘me’ is.

This has always seemed strange to me. It will offer a suggestion, I'll make a comment about a suggestion, and it returns with, "Your suggestion..." The further distance from the suggestion, the more likely it confuses who made it.

This is because of the nature of what it's doing. It's still just predicting tokens behind the scenes; it's just treating the entire conversation between you and it as one long chunk of text for which it must predict the text to come. But the model has no way of keeping track of who said what, and it's not really conversing with you the way you are with it. So screwups like confusing "my" for "your" are to be expected.

Much of the transformative power of LLMs has come from dumb logic wrapped around them that either changes what is fed to them ("memories", "thinking/reasoning", etc.) or how their output is interpreted/acted upon (agent harnesses, loops, etc.). For this reason, Anthropic could release "Claude Necronomicon" tomorrow and tell us it could hack the planet and gain control of the world's nukes, dooming us all, but until it's actually hooked up to something that enables the execution of those commands, it can't do squat. Of course, that's no reason not to worry since some idiot is likely to build that torment nexus (and they may well work for Anthropic), but at the end of the day the thing is still just predicting tokens and everything else it seems to be doing is being faked with clever massaging of the input or output.

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