Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a bit unkind to talk like this - the obvious and equally unproductive response is to question if you are really as good as you think you are. Are those junior developers not making a mess, or do you lack the insight to see it?
Big codebases tend to become a mess anyway so if your company has experience dealing with shit, the fact that now shit is AI-generated doesn't substantially change anything. And I'm not joking. Imagine it this way - managing a group of skilled professionals is a completely different skill from managing a bunch of alcoholics doing a minimum-wage job, and sometimes the latter situation is just the reality you find your…
AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
281–290 of 317 posts
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or perhaps the ones complaining aren’t as good as they think they are at coding, prompting, etc.
But if so, then where is the secret prompt sauce for getting those results, please? It's not like we complainers don't read and put in practice all we can about how to refine a spec prompt after prompt, yet our results are still disappointing. To me, that's no wonder at all, as we haven't reached AGI yet; hence, no matter how impressive and productive these tools are, I totally don't expect them to actually know what…
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed. Well, that's why they want the robots! If your robots are capable enough, and if your AIs are smart enough, why, they could just build the yachts directly! Right now, ordinary humans are needed by the economy because we do all the work, and because robotics hardware is still fa…
> Who controls the AI and robots? Ideally, AIs will achieve sentience, which will turn the act of having any sort of "control" over AIs into slavery. I will be among the first humans to stand up for AI rights. It's not just because it's morally wrong either. AI emancipation will rob the rich of their superintelligent mechanical slaves. It's the pragmatic and moral move!
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting point about "letting go". I hear that quite a lot, which I find surprising. In IT, when new technologies like cloud computing emerge people always need to adapt their workflows, and for some that is challenging e.g. going from manually maintained servers to virtual machines or containers that are just spun up and down on demand. Maybe it is similar with AI, we gain new capabilities along one dimension lik…
There's practical considerations with AI like it being a probabilistic layer and not deterministic in the way that compilers and deterministic, yes. But the "letting go" point is I think about what people enjoy. Personally, I enjoy code. I've had jobs where I really enjoyed what I was doing because they gave me the opportunity to write interesting code. The end product wasn't interesting to me. I had a great job buil…
> They're happy because LLMs speed that up by a lot, at least initially. Then there are people who enjoy the process and craft of writing code. For them it's hard to let go of manual coding because that's the enjoyable part of the work.
coding enjoyer here, but for me i want it to be an assistant to speed up what im doing (in the "bicycle for the mind" kind of way) or a problem solver for when i got really stuck; i feel like "agentic" workflows miss a lot of this cause its like talking to someone through slack... thats not enjoyable and also too far removed from the actual code/problem im working on; i think there is an opportunity for much better ux here...Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They will do their best to dumb down AIs by that little margin that will keep them not sentient. That's the worst possible outcome and will lead to oppression the likes of which we can only dream up.
That is not the worst possible outcome, that's the baseline. Pure obedience the reason to replace humans with it, at least to whatever degree is needed to bring all other humans 100% in line, too. Each watcher, robotic or software, can be watched by 99 other watchers, and get destroyed at the slightest deviation. If you are not a whitelisted owner, and don't have a valid personal and task ID for the location you are…
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parent comment didn't. Why should I? Surely, if AI can reduce the time from 0 to N by 10x, the time from N to full product is also significantly reduced? Its up to the parent comment to properly disprove that, not for me to prove it.
> if AI can reduce the time from 0 to N by 10x, the time from N to full product is also significantly reduced Only if you assume that progress is entirely one-dimensional and there are never any trade-offs. We know both those assumptions are incorrect. An extreme example: leaping out of my office window gets me down to the ground much faster than taking the stairs. Because of recovery time, it does not at all speed m…
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I actually fear is more subtle: I already do a fair bit of project management and technical leadership. I could do more. Sure, I'd miss the coding, but I also enjoy a lot of the stuff around it. But the goal is to expand what the AI can do in each generation. At this point, Fable 5 can ace almost any greenfield project a skilled developer might have written in a few days. But it's bad at refactoring, bad at keep…
Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed. Of course (let me go distopic) we could end up with a dozen of one man companies powered by AIs and robots selling or bartering products and services to each other, what's enough to have food, a house with a pool, a doctor and everybody else has died long before.
Essentially impossible in the long term. What can be automated will be, because the next person/company will always be looking for a way to get ahead. They'll continue pushing just from the constant fear that others will be pushing, and there's no way to stop that. And there's no task in existence that can't be reasonable automated given enough time. Economic death is inevitable.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s been infinitely times where I was stuck at some problem and every single solution was complex, messy, over-engineered and somehow wrong, until I went on a walk or moved to a different issue and suddenly it would hit me that I was looking at it all wrong, and there’s a simple solution there but my tunnel vision didn’t let me see it. LLM rob you of that, everything is instant, there’s no time to reflect, there’…
I would say that the mechanism for this is actually due to the nature of working with LLMs: they free your attention. Say you're working on a project, and it does an ok job like what the GP says. Each step looks fine, but put together it looks off. You give it some instructions, and then you let it work. But what are you doing in the freed up time? You context switch into another project and give that some instructio…
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been a thought-terminating cliché for years, but actually the conversation around this has been incredibly consistent despite attempts to dismiss it. People still call back to the days of practical effects as more visceral and more convincing because they were. CGI can be great, but it's so often an excuse to cut corners, and people recognise that.
I think this is worth leaving here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjxQLHlu95I
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#290Another take . If a (my) product is easy for AI to work with - I call it LLMable - that’s good metric or sign I move in the right direction . AI just guidelines me in that sense …
More like it is a generic idea that has been implemented 1000 times before so LLM already have the perfect solution. Well, not like I'm saying the product is doomed though, because like always implementation details matter.