I hope that this will expose the true value of education. It's a new scale perhaps, but not a new problem. We sit in classrooms even though books and YouTube videos make available the teachings of far more illustrious teachers than the one in front of us. We watch things written out agonizingly slowly in chalk. We learned to do algebra and calculus even though we had our TI-86s and Mathematica. We learn in Haskell and Scheme even though those are rarely used later. We write toy compilers and write essays and repeat experiments with known outcomes in labs. We do it to learn how to think, how to build. We just have to be even more deliberate about it now.
Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
251–260 of 575 posts
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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
I have also tried developing games with them. I find them very weak at these things.
Often they can't figure out how to test the thing, so "does this attempted solution even work at all?" is its guess from reading the source code, and sometimes I've even caught them writing "tests" which are a regex on the source code, not functionality.
They know almost nothing about "is this solving the right problem?", they're trained to assume the user is right, not to frame-challenge.
My general experience both in game and non-game projects is that it will be lazy by default rather than solving things correctly. Sometimes I spot this from their responses, other times I only notice with manual testing.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#253I fall into the category of senior engineers who benefit from LLMs for all the reasons mentioned in this post. I find it's possible to agree completely with sentiments like this and still feel as if this is all written in the sand below the high tide line, and ten years from now nobody will care about this. Horsemanship and sailing were both specialized skills of high value to society, and now they're not. But in eac…
This analogy breaks down because computers aren't going away unlike horse drawn carriages or sailing vessels. Computers aren't being replaced by something. It's that fewer people will understand how they work while the efficiency and reach of computers extends into areas of life previously unreachable due to the scale of having humans build it or the refusal of humans.
I could wax philosophical about what that leads to but enough people already have.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#254Sewing expertise is going to collapse from sewing machine reliance
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> without having much depth in either domain I don't mean to pick on you, but to present this in the service of this kind of fatalism... you know the inevitable follow-up question, right?
Is it: "How do you know the solution is good?" Because I can still reason and dig into things and ask questions and have the domain explained to me out of curiosity, the same way I could build anything that was originally out of my depth. But what I've noticed is that the need for any corrective power has gone or is going to nil and I'm mainly doing directional work. And even then, I can constantly have sota models "…
You got it. You may well be right, but from my standpoint it's hard to see how you'd know if you weren't. Yeah, the models fill in vagueness with detail sourced from "what's likely and helpful". (In one of my particular domains, that's "use SHAP values for everything everywhere".) Yeah, that detail's increasingly unlikely to be "wrong" in a way that you could explicitly argue. Is it what an expert would come up with? Is it the best it could be? Is there something else that we would have done had we been forced to think it through? Will it ever be _surprising_?
I know, all irrelevant little philosophical roadbumps. The artifact satisfies the buyer. I think I'm going to have to step away from this industry pretty soon, at least for a while.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to write . That is certainly not true. LLMs can't write code worth a damn still, and you have to babysit them to make sure they aren't doing stupid stuff. A human is still by far the best choice for doing programming, and when trend-chasing companies realize the damage they've done to their businesses they will stop pushi…
"LLMs can't write code worth a damn"
I think it depends on the - ahem - context. In my experience they usually can, sometimes they can't.
But generally their sense of software architecture remains abysmal, so even if their writing is ok, you need to have architectural authority the very least to guide them.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#257I fall into the category of senior engineers who benefit from LLMs for all the reasons mentioned in this post. I find it's possible to agree completely with sentiments like this and still feel as if this is all written in the sand below the high tide line, and ten years from now nobody will care about this. Horsemanship and sailing were both specialized skills of high value to society, and now they're not. But in eac…
If my horse is ‘a useful piece of software’, what are the cars and motorboats that AI coding is going to give me?
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#258100% 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…
We have a product guy on the team who was in a deeply not technical role before AI who is trying to do the “hey Claude, read this Jira ticket, implement” thing. It doesn’t work for the vast majority of tickets he attempts because he doesn’t have the necessary understanding to even start thinking about if the solution that the autocomplete generates is even remotely workable. And that’s with fancy dev loops and whatno…
I've had some success with: here is this android bug ticket in a product that I don't know much about, fix it! And it works sometimes. I'm still technical, so it isn't the same, but it was crazy that AI could just solve some problems automagically without me know much about the system being modified.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost nobody knows how to program in assembly but we're doing fine.
That's because the institutional knowledge was passed along through the act of coding. Skills that I learned in Assembly and FORTRAN are applicable to even modern programming languages...but not to "natural language."
I don't agree. Certain optimization skills are learned on the job if people work in specific areas of compilers or performance.
Also the reality is that modern CPU microarchitectures are so different from what old-school assembly programmers used that their supposed optimizations are likely to be counterproductive.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#260100% 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…
People are fundamentally short-term thinkers. Just imagine spraying neurotoxins on your lawn. You're "saved" from the "terror" of noticing more than one kind of grass, but of course you're incrementally increased the cancer risk for yourself, your children, and who knows who else. This is just one example; people do this constantly. Plastic fleece puts an untold amount of poison into the environment, but "I need to b…
All the issues you mention here have a death horizon: the people engaged in the behaviour will be dead when its effects are most acute. That they engage in it then isnt very mysterious.
That doesnt clearly apply here