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Don't be a meat proxy
551–560 of 786 posts
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.
I do believe there's a tiny subset of people who are more productive with AI, in the same way that Erdős was more productive with amphetamine. But most who keep on going about their 10x productivity gain are indistinguishable from that one obnoxious guy at a party who won't shut up about his Ayahuasca retreat last spring. And they think they're Erdős.
this is a great metaphor precisely because (outside those with paradoxical stimulant response) everyone thinks they're more productive on amphetamines and there's some naive evidence to that effect. the number of things you've actually done is significantly higher. the change in value created, as measured by the decrease in distance between where you are and the the goal you're shooting for, is unpredictable at best and slowly degrades as reliance increases.
AI is like having a junior dev with an adderall addiction and an encyclopedic knowledge of coding syntax at your beck and call.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#553- how come your blog page doesnt show a list of posts?
- isnt that like standard behavior on any blog?
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#554> Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words In the past, avoiding this process was called plagiarism, and it was frowned upon, to put it mildly. Now, because the LLMs say it's OK, it's become the norm. The, "this is what Claud said", response also comes off like an appeal to authority. When these LLMs have no authority and get the basics wrong constantly.
I don't quite read it that way, it seems more like "take this with a grain of salt". But I suppose it depends on who's saying it.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results Why would it mean that? That's one way of using them, sure. Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects. > I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow Alright, does that mean you also believe it's…
> Or just that you've never seen it, but you're open to it existing? This one. Only a sith deals in absolute. I don’t mind experiments to try to find methodologies for those tools. And I believe there are instances where they’ve been successfully used. The issue I have is the kind of generic statements that they are good enough to replace currently established methodologies. Like using AI is a panacea. > Personally,…
> Have you investigated how it has helped you? And if there are other, more economical way to get the same result?
No I haven't, but I'm happy to just freeform walk you through my thinking on it: I typically write (wrote?) software for two purposes: consulting/freelancing for others so building what others want, or for simplifying and making my own life easier and more enjoyable. "Stupid" stuff like Home Assistant for example, isn't really life-or-death, or Jellyfin for that matter, both things my family relies on now, but our daily life just gets easier all throughout the day when everything works in sync with what we're doing.
It used to be I had to make a decision what to spend time on, either I work on my professional stuff so we have enough money to survive (maybe more) and I get new challenges and all that, or I spend time improving and maintaining my home infrastructure, or whatever software I feel like I'd need to be better at doing my professional development.
I no longer am making that choice, I'm spending less time in front of the computer, yet the output and quality of my work remains the same, and the code and design when I look at it, even stuff I shipped 6 months ago, I'm still happy with how the code is, which for me I guess is the way I validate if what I produce is good enough.
Nowadays, my entire home-lab is configured with Nix and almost everything except my workstation and some random stuff, runs NixOS. Everything is hosted on a local Forgejo instance, which also has it's own (custom "written" of course) agent acting on issues and PRs, and I have my harness basically maintain my entire home lab at this point. Now I just open issues, have a conversation until everything is 100% clear, end up with a PR to review and merge if it looks good, and I can do this while juggling other things.
I agree with you that there are tons of people who are selling LLMs as a panacea to lots of things, and there is so much over-hype in the industry and ecosystem, I also feel like every "new thing" kind of comes with this type of almost scamming, which sucks, and makes it hard to discern from real positive opinions vs just regurgitated opinions someone read somewhere. I'm not sure what the answer to that is, except perhaps as what you say, only a sith deals in absolutes.
What are the exact "currently established methodologies" you're talking about that cannot be replaced by LLMs + a harness today, just as some examples? You're probably right that those exists, but I'm curious to hear what you think would be the most difficult to replace today.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#556I feel like when most LLM type emails from people it’s because of one of three reasons:
1) they don’t know the answer - looked up on llm
2) correlate to #1, I want to look smarter than I actually am
3) I’m too lazY to send you a thoughtful / personal response , I offloaded it to an llm
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#557I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how…
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Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people tend to forget that not only do we ourselves have different skillsets and can be amazing at one thing but horrible but another, but this also applies to other people in the world! Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And…
> Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too. If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results or be a reverse centaur, then I’d be glad not to be able to work with them. I’ve never seen a good example where…
> No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools.
Uhm ... I've heard quite alot arguing against IDEs. And I feel IDEs are too much of a lock in.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense. Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go. Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job. Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?
Let me give you a scenario and see if it is in this same fireable offense line: An Ops person who deals with company code base but is not a SWE in the code base regularly has to work around issues with this software (They are OPs). However they have read access to the source. In the past, they see a bug and open a jira with how it was found for the dev team, and it may or may not ever get looked at. Now ops can point…
I see no harm with sharing an AI analysis in the ticket; it might save the engineer time.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#560> Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words In the past, avoiding this process was called plagiarism, and it was frowned upon, to put it mildly. Now, because the LLMs say it's OK, it's become the norm. The, "this is what Claud said", response also comes off like an appeal to authority. When these LLMs have no authority and get the basics wrong constantly.
I don't quite read it that way, it seems more like "take this with a grain of salt". But I suppose it depends on who's saying it.
True. If I say it, it’s normally the grain of salt meaning. But I don’t copy/paste answers, I restate my understanding of what it said, and try and change my tone accordingly.
The people who repeat/paste it verbatim tend to see it as an authority, from what I’ve seen.