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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#211

Post by maccard »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #143
maccard wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is it’s over eager engineers who we would have historically considered not strong who suddenly feel able to contribute in a different way

I know exactly the persona you’re describing. It’s unfortunate because they have a great learning tool now. I always felt bad for over eager engineers who were not strong. They had the right attitude but I thought lacked the learning resources and perhaps the learning skills others stronger engineers had. Before if you found yourself in an area you don’t understand. Some people make it all the way through school with…

Yeah that’s exactly the person I’m talking about.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#212

Post by vintermann »

energy123 wrote: post #114
voidUpdate wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ is calibrated so that the average IQ is 100. If the average IQ is going down, something has gone very wrong somewhere

IQ gets manually recalibrated downwards when people get stupider so it's mean 100 by construction.

Hmm, who does the calibration, and how scientific are they about it? Can we check their work?

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#213

Post by maccard »

dwedge wrote: post #146
maccard wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is it’s over eager engineers who we would have historically considered not strong who suddenly feel able to contribute in a different way

Those engineers are annoying but I'm so sad about the previously great engineers who are doing this and now contributing slop everywhere.

Anecdotally, there are no engineers who I considered “great engineers” before who are now just posting slop. The great engineers are still great engineers - and I don’t know (or care) if they’re LLM assisted.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#214

Post by smuemd »

varjag wrote: post #86
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My giddy aunt. Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain. Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.

Shitgularity is here, it's just unevenly smeared. It is clear though that virtually all degradation we have is in human capital and social sphere against the background of staggering technical capability.

well put

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#218

Post by mrheosuper »

deepsummer wrote: post #162
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with asking Claude (or any LLM) is that they will get things wrong much more often than a human, while sounding perfectly confident about the information. It's a recipe for disaster unless you're asking it about something where you have enough expertise to be able to sniff out the BS. So if people are asking you a question, that means they figure you're able to answer the question accurately. If you can d…

Have you really used the latest models (say Opus 4.8+ or Fable)? When was the last time they gave a wrong answer to a question about the code base? Half a year ago that could have happened. But not today.

Yesterday, when I was working with LVGL, using Fable.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#219

Post by globular-toast »

deepsummer wrote: post #184
globular-toast wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confusing machines with motors. Many machines do things that simply are not possible without. A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking, but it enables you to go faster than you can run. Menually operated sewing machines produce stitches that would be infeasible by hand. Motorising any of those machines could be considered lazy, though.

But you could still arrive if you walk instead of using the bicycle. And I am sure you can do the same stitches by hand, it just takes forever. Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.

You cannot walk 100 miles in a day, but anyone with a bit of training can cycle that in an afternoon. It's not a matter of effort or laziness, it's simply not possible.

The stitching comment is just pedantic. People don't hand stitch like a machine not because they are lazy, it's because it's ineffective and impractical. It's not impossible to drive screws directly into softwood by hand, but you'd never get anything done that way. It's not lazy to choose another method, it's just being an effective worker.

As for coding agents, it's clearly effective to write software without them because we have been doing it for decades so far. It still remains to be seen whether they are laziness (ie. it's just a motor) or if they are actually enabling new possibilities (ie. we get software that really wouldn't have been possible before).

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