191–200 of 574 posts
What is valuable now is productivity. Which in today's day and age is the ability to quickly and efficiently drive AI.
Hence the never-ending growth and spewing out of tooling: harnesses, TUIs, multiplexers, agent frameworks, software "factories", etc, etc.
Software engineers are chasing opportunity and expertise in the only thing that's left.
To be fair nobody codes in ASM and things are fine for decades.
ASM is still used in some areas, such as: 1. function trampolines, such as in libraries like ATL (Microsoft's COM template library); 2. hand-optimized encoders/decoders for things like ffmpeg; 3. niche applications such as Ben Eater's 6502 breadboard computer (using a modified WozMon and Microsoft BASIC); 4. reading ASM output from C/C++ code in things like the GodBolt site for performance comparisons/analysis; 5. re…
I 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…
For a bit of extra unease, consider that these people will retain their right to vote, both in making business decisions as employees, in shareholder meetings as shareholders, and in government elections as voters, despite their atrophied reasoning abilities. Who will wind up whispering what to vote for in the ears of these reverse centaurs?
In my experience human design -> agent code -> agent review -> release -> agent observer, does not (at all!) work. One absolutely has to be understand what is going on, how the system works, how the H/W works, etc, to catch agent errors.
The proposition of us losing those skills is terrifying.
Maybe AI will get better and we truly won't need a human in the loop. Then please also have all PRs signed by whatever model wrote them, and do not come to me for trouble-shooting.
So far I think I have learned far more from LLMs than I've lost to them. I forget some syntax, definitely. But I now reach for a much wider range of tools that I have become familiar with because of LLMs. So, partly agree, partly disagree.
May I ask how many years experience you have?
I do understand the sentiment of applying "constraints" over AI usage to certain scopes of our development work. This has an issue in practice. As an example, Function Programming (FP) has a high constraint on programming, where some don't even have loops (gotta use recursions all the way), and almost no state mutation (Exlixir I believe have a mutable state? forgot). FP sounds great with all those constraints. But w…
LLMs don't particularly care how hard the type system or borrow checker is (as long as it has good error messages that can guide it to a solution), they can grind away at these things, and what you describe as a negative actually becomes a strong positive. I think we'll see strongly typed systems plus some level of formal verification become popular as an AI-preferred language.
When the burden of review is lowered because you have purely functional building blocks, with lots of formally verified chunks - people will choose that simply out of (productive, beneficial) laziness. Not to mention we're in a ram crunch, and being able to run your stuff far cheaper has an immediate financial incentive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the right analogy. Granted LLMs are a more sophisticated calculator and engineering is still adapting to this wonky/evolving technology. But to pretend it's a coming catastrophe is to ignore every past parallel development - where this has not happened.
Math skills are at their lowest point ever in modern society, and many are still advocating for the reduction in reliance on calculators for this reason. https://ivyleaguecenter.org/2024/03/12/over-reliance-on-calc...
- Writing (starting from Platos Phaedrus)
- Printed books
- Photography
- Typewriters, keyboards
- Telephones
- Recorded music
- Television
- Wikipedia
- GPS navigation
- Smartphones
- Automation in aviation, medicine, industries
100% 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. Nor even €50k/year. Two things are true: 1) The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to *write*. 2) My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the…