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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
321–330 of 575 posts
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the 1890s and 1930s were famous for their population wide critical thinking, of course. Good heavens, what do they teach in the schools these days.
I mean you may be trying to make a point but the counterpoint is Einstein, Bohrs, Planck, Shannon, Turing, Von Nuemann, Feynman, Bohr and most of the other big names all came out during that time. In contrast since then we've had almost not noteable physicists or Computer Scientists that I'm aware, we've got a couple, Hawking and Knuth. But apart from that I don't know if there is a single scientist I could point out…
Not a good argument. Those were big names because they were (co)founders of major fields. Physics and CS aren’t like fashion where you can come out with a new color or design every six months.
You also seem to be restricting yourself to pop science knowledge of who’s made breakthroughs. That’s because our collective understanding of physics has become much more detailed, to the point where it starts to lose the ability to be meaningfully comprehensible to the average layperson.
Consider AdS/CFT, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence
There’ve been many major developments just in that area since the early 1970s, to through the late 90s all the way to 2019 (the island formula), with many major contributors like Bekenstein, ‘t Hooft, Susskind, Maldacena, and many less well-known names.
If you resurrected some of the scientists you mentioned, they’d have a lot of work to do to catch up, and making field-changing major breakthroughs would be just as difficult for them as for anyone else alive today.
Something similar is true in CS. There’s been plenty of progress in all fields of CS, but similar to the situation with physics, its nature is not as simple as what the founders of the field were dealing with, so there’s less awareness of it outside the field. Just to pick one small example, Conor McBride’s insight that the derivative of a regular type is the type of its one-hole context ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358663 ) is beautiful and kind of amazing, but not a result that you’re going to hear much about outside of PhD programs and the like. CS is chock-full of such work. The entire field of programming language theory has come a long, long way since Turing and Von Neumann’s time, to pick a broader example.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#323To be fair nobody codes in ASM and things are fine for decades.
ASM to a higher level language is a jump to a clearly defined higher level language through a deterministic compile step. The jump away to LLMs is something completely different.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
>My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the right problem? Even if it's a valid solution to the right problem, is it the best solution given the time constraints? This is not non-coding work. This is coding.
this is software development
There's a reason it's called Software Engineering
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#325As a tech educator I 100% agree. LLMs are not going to become a "new compiler" where we don't have to worry about the code any more. There's a reason we trust deterministic systems. I've been worried about this a lot, I even created an agent skill called do-i-understand that's designed for novice devs (and experienced too, because atrophy) where the LLM asks you questions about the PR you're about to submit. I've fou…
A deterministic LLM is possible. Would you trust it?
I mean in the traditional software sense. We trust autopilots to fly planes. Would you get on a plane flown by an LLM?
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far, the LLMs I've used need problems to be fairly specifically scoped, or they don't produce the correct solution. Scoping problems correctly is a different skill-set than implementation, but it's still a technical skill that is expected from mid-level and higher engineers.
Yep and I just ran a simple enterprisey "ambiguity" bench on the big three (US) model providers: same ambiguous initial-prompt with same clarifications and pushback prompt sequence afterwards. The edge of correct/better when facing ambiguity is very fuzzy, all models from the past 6 month or so have similar random ways of spinning between too-literal avenues and oddly misplaced misled fixations. Taking the right init…
The best I've come up with is to ask an agent to come up with questions to help get to a focused design. But it still needs me in the loop for that.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#327As a tech educator I 100% agree. LLMs are not going to become a "new compiler" where we don't have to worry about the code any more. There's a reason we trust deterministic systems. I've been worried about this a lot, I even created an agent skill called do-i-understand that's designed for novice devs (and experienced too, because atrophy) where the LLM asks you questions about the PR you're about to submit. I've fou…
Why do you trust the non-deterministic LLM with your skill?
It absolutely might make mistakes. But the skill requires all questions to be based on lines of code with specific line numbers which the human needs to review. That's intentional to serve as a safeguard against hallucinations.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. I’m failing to connect the dots from your post to mine though.
> I also see no evidence that AI programming is a difficult skill that cannot be learned by any intelligent person in much shorter amounts of time than previous professional skills required. I do not think anyone could do the job I do with AI without my decades of experience, is my point. For now.
I’m assuming you’re a software engineer.
The AI programming meta that keeps evolving (last month it was loops) seems like a relatively trivial skill to adopt compared to learning what it’s like to do high quality work and to participate in a team, and these kinds of things. If the AI stops improving then everyone will master the AI skill set that everyone else is using, and people will acquire maturity and experience over time, like always. This is my point.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#329Most computer science programs don't teach "coding" though. There is pretty heavy emphasis on datastructures, algorithms, and system design. I don't think AI atrophies those skills / knowledge as much as the coding language and I think in many cases actually improves them, especially if you are reading the code that is produced and at least understanding the flow of it. I agree that AI reliance is hurting engineer's…
I don't think that's quite correct; every CS program I've seen involves writing code, quite a lot of it. What they don't teach is /software engineering/: working large codebases, maintaining code, dealing with legacy code, long-term collaboration, working with product managed and designers, etc. That's stuff that you mostly end up having to pickup in the real world outside school.
I did B.S. in software engineering instead computer science in college, and there were classes that indeed taught the industry software engineering process like you mentioned.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's quite as bad, but I'm imagining someone in the 1950s going: "People just have to use methamphetamines responsibly in their work, and then we'll see the massive benefits as widespread adoption unlocks the potential of the human mind." In other words, a positive outcome with thing X is possible but there are also big behavioral and cybernetic pitfalls, ones which are suspiciously persistent.
I mean I use coffee quite a lot to prop up my software career. I don’t really find purity to be useful for anything except to answer questions like “should I steal this money now that I am alone” or “should I backstab this friend who pissed me off today.”
> questions like “should I steal this money now that I am alone” or “should I backstab this friend who pissed me off today.”
Ah, yes, a very BOFH approach [0] to workplace quandaries.
> I mean I use coffee quite a lot
Perhaps, but I don't think either of us would agree with the claim: "The way we integrated caffeine for productivity offers a useful and practical model for integrating meth for productivity."
There's an extremely detectable difference in the feedback loops that form between the tool and the people using it. There's something which remains unsolved ~90 years on. If we assume for the sake of argument that coffee is "good" and "productive", then that leads us to the question:
Are these LLM systems going to be more like coffee, or more like meth?