I'm still waiting to see how LLMs have made the world a better place because it honestly feels like its done the opposite.
They haven't. They have made the world significantly worse.
Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
131–140 of 573 posts
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#132I used to think this was a problem. But now? I don’t think it matters. Why? Because people are going to get so much more ambitious about the stuff they build with AI, that code expertise for the stuff they are building is already scarce anyway. People will choose difficult and less popular languages, and will replace open source packages with stuff built entirely in-house by AI. Going forward, there is no choice exce…
Do we even need to get LLMs to create code in the end then? Can we imagine a future where the thing simply does it all, you deploy the LLM like a docker image and have it process all requests directly. Sounds far fetched today, coming to your cluster in five years.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#133Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#134100% We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong." Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read t…
> That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year. When you factor in overhead and benefits, many companies were regularly paying that much for someone (many someones) to "read this Jira ticket and implement the feature". We are currently in the "centaur" phase where a human-AI combination produces the best output,…
We've gone through this with chess, and the days when a human can do anything to help AI there are long past; the human can only drag it down. It seems to me to be a form of the bitter lesson. I expect this will happen in every field where we don't add guardrails to require humans in the network. I have a hard time seeing regulation happening around this in the US but vanity may also serve, will CEOs be satisfied ruling armies of virtual assistants, or do they need big buildings full of human thralls?
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ai can work through all of those questions in number 2 and design around it. I was just doing that yesterday designing a game demo lol
Works for a demo, but quickly stagnates. Future models may of course push the limits further, but right now it quickly goes sideways without someone knowledgeable at the helm.
You don't design things with never ending details though. If your developing a feature there's a limited scope to it. If your designing the direction of a large project you're working with higher level concepts.
The point is that AI is aware of constraints and can manage a round it. You've got to keep in mind the size of a typical software project and plan. Most people aren't writing a kernel. They're writing some backend tool and need a project that fits into a couple of quarters with a handful of people at most involved.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#136I'm also concerned about people asking an opaque machine for an answer and stopping there instead of going to different sources, evaluating their credibility, exercising their own ability to construct their own worldview from disparate facts and opinions.
Flagged for the expressing the most obvious and legitimate concern about LLM-backed "research".
"I use AI to generate a summary which I print out and read slowly every time I use a new codebase" is the new propaganda line pushed by Anthropic and OpenAI. They cannot tolerate this rebuttal.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#137I think the hope of the business end is that coding expertise will at some point no longer be needed at all.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#138Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#139I strongly agree with the concept that cognitive friction is the engine of learning. First and foremost, it's an issue of "dependency": if you stop training the "muscle" of logic and reasoning, it gradually atrophies, just like unused physical muscles. You become dependent on external tools that replace a capability you once had yourself. A historical example that brought about a similar shift is this: when the produ…
> cognitive friction is the engine of learning. I agree 100% too. This is why in order to understand new codebase or to ramp up to new projects, I use AI to generate a textbook style reading material for me along with "verify yourself" types of exercises along the way. Then I print them on a paper and read it using a pencil/pen and take notes. Because of my math training, I am in the habit of slowing down to read tex…
Exactly the type of usage I would hope to see advocated for in the future. As I wrote, when leveraged with Socratic methods and a sort of "interactive documentation", they can really boost one's understanding. Of course, this is predicated on the individual having enough information to know the right questions to ask.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#140Except sloppy experts.
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