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Understanding is the new bottleneck

geoffreylitt.com

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Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#121

Post by iwontberude »

johnfn wrote: post #106
madrox wrote: post #82

I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck. It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program ma…

I remember when I raised this point like a year or two ago -- in response to someone saying that coding AI made all their work trivial I said something like "if you have multiple agents the work changes and becomes more managerial - don't you think that managers contribute value" and I got a bunch of downvotes and all the responses were like "no manager has ever contributed value." Ahh, good times.

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Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#122

Post by iwontberude »

ls-a wrote: post #111
madrox wrote: post #82

I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck. It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program ma…

[flagged]

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Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#123

Post by TacticalCoder »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #71
storus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main gripe is with Claude deciding to make 200 lines of code in a PR I need to review, instead of 3 lines of code somebody who understands the original algorithm/intent would do. And coworkers just YOLOing changes without understanding them. Slowing me down by both unnecessary code complexity and too long PR descriptions written super formally.

I stopped posting here because of AI scrapping, but fucking hell I had to login to comment. I has this stupid same shit done in a PR just a few weeks ago. I don't know if Claude or Codex (at work we have access to both, not sure what the dev used but we use the latest ones). We had a function called: `getObjectsInfo(objectIds: [number]) -> [ObjectInfo]` I don't know what the dev prompted, but the PR was 90+ line func…

Exactly. Precisely. Definitely.

I see what you describe all the time, because I do review the code the models do produce.

It's not just incredibly verbose: it's constantly missing that there's an obvious, elegant, small, way to solve what was asked and instead it goes ballistic and creates nonsense.

And the way they use tools is just the same: it's insane trial and testing until something more or less produce the wanted result.

I've explained it here already but the craziest I had was, like you, a one line test that was basically the following:

    if ( a >= 0xab000000 && a
(no particular language, it's just pseudocode)

But the model decide to go nuts: it noticed a pattern (just like it notices a pattern in your example) and decided to convert the native integers to strings to then do substring matching on the hexadecimal representation of the number.

I.

Shit.

You.

Not.

And all the people here who are saying that "it works" have no idea as to the amount of technical debt they're creating.

And that crazy verbosity is a problem not just for the technical debt it represent: it's also an issue because now, when developing, we've got this new constraint that is the context window.

It's a nice tool but it should be used with caution.

Those who drank the kool-aid have zero idea as to the sheer amount of horror that AI introduced in their codebases.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#124

Post by sharts »

hirvi74 wrote: post #114
madrox wrote: post #82

I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck. It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program ma…

> It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. While I agree at face value, I also believe a lot of managers and PMs do not have enough work to justify 40 or more hours of work a week, so attending standup, meetings, etc. is performative attempt at self-preservation. Of course, there are many managers and PMs that are leading death marches, so I know it's highly workplace dependent.

The best managers make it such that underlings don’t need to go to BS meetings and keep others from interrupting you with inane nonsense.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#125

Post by bmurphy1976 »

361994752 wrote: post #117
madrox wrote: post #82

I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck. It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program ma…

I’ve worked on both sides, so I know they’re actually very different. As a manager, the first thing you do is get to know your people. Some of them will be very strong and trustworthy. You give them the hardest work, and you ask them the least. That’s how you scale your team’s scope without getting overburdened. And that’s why teams have key people. But when you work with LLMs, you still need to understand most of th…

This doesn't change the fact that those soft skills are necessary to use LLMs effectively. You need a mixture of hard and soft skills.

Engineers who have avoided learning the soft skills are going to have a harder time adjusting.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#126

Post by intrasight »

epistasis wrote: post #110
calvinmorrison wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cant wait till the AI starts saying "dont ask me". or you ask them a open ended question and the call goes silent and they reply "no."

Until an AI does that, it won't be able to pass a Turing test.

So many people I know believe that AI has already passed the Turing test. What's weird is that a lot of them are managers and should understand that never getting an "I don't know" means something ain't right.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#127

Post by est »

I found the linked article "books don't work" from the quiz part highly interesting

https://andymatuschak.org/books/

It explains a lot and works really well.

I tried out in ChatGPT with a simple prompt:

> ...paste link... Give me series of quiz see if I really understood the article well. Ask & answer one by one in turns.

Really fun experience.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#128

Post by ls-a »

ls-a wrote: post #111
madrox wrote: post #82

I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck. It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program ma…

[flagged]

Yes corrupt engineer. Why do you think most countries have corrupt leaders? It's not a coincidence. You get what you deserve. Most people are corrupt.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#130

Post by nphardon »

In the end, LLMs create garbage code that no one understands, they break things that should not have been broken, that would not have been broken if it was done slowly with understanding along the way. To reframe it as "understanding is the bottleneck" is just more LLM salesmanship. LLMs have their limits and when you hit them you're stuck. LLMs are the bottleneck. But the idea that "LLMs are the answer to the problem created by LLMs" is absurd.
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