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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

larsfaye.com

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Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#341

Post by eikenberry »

chrisjj wrote: post #261
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #209

As 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?

There are 2 levels of determinism that matter here IMO. Level 1, given the same input you get the same output. Level 2, you know what to change on the input to get a specific change on the output.

LLMs are currently capable of level 1, but not capable of level 2. Trust follows what is actually deterministic.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#342

Post by jwalton »

KronisLV wrote: post #333
jgilias wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 whatnot. Remove the dev from the equation. Suppose you need to produce circumstances for the slop machine to succeed on its own (imagine a loop). What is missing? A…

In general, when I’ve worked on projects where I’ve spent that much time planning, having a magic AI box that wrote perfect code wouldn’t have helped that much. When you spec every everything out like that, writing the code is the most trivial part of this whole process.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#343

Post by lioeters »

keybits wrote: post #257
jp57 wrote: post #237

I 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?

A faster horse.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#344

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #301
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a design principles + tech preferences doc I force llms "lint" their approach against. It's not perfect but it helps. I’ve done the same but it’s a moving target as models advance and I find half of my points are ignored until I’m prompting “No wtf why are you still trying to symlink the global Python executable just use the virtual environment that’s already activated”. Anyway, companies are pouring billion…

> Anyway, companies are pouring billions into improving AI tooling user experience so most of what I do manually I just anticipate to be a waste of time. I get patches into the biggest AI projects all the time to make inference faster on my 3090 and all you have to do is read the contribution docs and open a small PR. It’s not a cabal of super geniuses. We are literally in the Wright Brothers era of AI. You can trivi…

> It’s not a cabal of super geniuses. We are literally in the Wright Brothers era of AI. You can trivially outpace what big companies are doing it’s insane

Not my core competence and I’m not interested in making it a core competence while the field is still rapidly changing. I find harness engineering interesting, but not lucrative enough to push one of the many very important other things on my plate to the backburner.

I don’t think Python language developers are super geniuses either, and I’ve never submitted code for consideration.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#345

Post by chrisjj »

xdavidliu wrote: post #298
chrisjj wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A deterministic LLM is possible. Would you trust it?

they probably mean deterministic in the sense of traditional computer programs consisting of if-else decision points and ordinary cpu logic, as opposed to numerical models (which can of course be deterministic too, as you pointed out)

Model inference is just that same logic but faster.

I think the point is determined. No-one can determine what the LLM might do.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#346

Post by platevoltage »

ksd482 wrote: post #101
phyzix5761 wrote: post #74

I'm still waiting to see how LLMs have made the world a better place because it honestly feels like its done the opposite.

I think a lot of good might come from medical sciences or chemistry, where LLMs will be used in coming up with new medicines, methods or synthesis.

I can totally see where that could be the case. I'm sure there have been breakthroughs already, but it's not mainstream news. The mountain of AI slop is all over the mainstream though. You have to wonder why.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#347

Post by netniuq »

doctoboggan wrote: post #172

I often think back to the early GPT days before agents as maybe the last time I will deeply learn a technical subject. I think that was when I actually learned the most as I had to stay completely in the loop. I had recently started a new job and had to work with k8s for the first time. Using GPT to help me implement new services and help me diagnose and fix issues with kubectl taught me so much. Now with agents I do…

yes, this seems sadly very true for me, too.

In some ways, it feel like I'd be "stuck" at my 2024 capabilities if I didn't push myself constantly, and I'm really glad for every hour I spent learning/applying new stuff before that, because now it feels way harder.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#348

Post by esafak »

r_lee wrote: post #43
larsfaye wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be a doing a whole lot better. Do you think there's an abundance of critical thinking in society? Because math skills aid in that.

I honestly can't tell what reward there is for this "critical thinking" since the entire world is bathing in "AI will replace you" what point is there to be a human calculator if nobody rewards you for it? and I'm not talking about wealthy Bay Area tech workers doing it so that they can write their substack blogs but rather the average person

Getting to live in a civilized society with a responsible government. Witness the counterexample.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#349

Post by andai »

Wasn't everyone making these arguments for the last 50 years with each wave of advances and convenience? "Real programmers use [current_tech - 1]."

I mean, they were right, then, too. My meaning is that expertise already collapsed several decades ago.

--

One of my favorite talks of all time:

Jonathan Blow, Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (2019)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#350

Post by [deleted] »

xtracto wrote: post #309

Yes, and it doesn't matter. Writing code in programming languages is a skill/necessity created by us to instruct computers what we want them to do Initially in the 60s, this was done by connecting circuits one way or another (think ENIAC). Then we devised "programmable" computers and devised a bunch of codes (computer code instructions) that abstracted away those cables. The we created Programming Languages to furthe…

[deleted]
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