381–390 of 575 posts
A much easier way to force friction is to expect everyone to read the code they are producing. Yes read all of it and understand what it's doing.
A lofty bar sadly.
when the tool becomes a crutch you end up with a limp. at work, i can tell that people are not thinking and losing the ability to thinking hard. I keep coming back to what LLMs "really" are. Recursive autocomplete, it keeps choosing the best fit for the next token. This really demystifies it for me. It also reinforces that is not "reasoning", so there's no hidden mental model.
its also wild how quickly and willingly many people handed this over. the apathy and desire for connivence runs extremely deep among my coworkers. we are at the point where people are not even running their local dev servers and clicking around to ensure their work is functionality correct, they just ingest the ticket, dump it into the model, commit the output, and say they're the most productive they've ever been.
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…
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…
I think we now entering this state where code is cheap but good well made programs will be rarer then ever, a lot of crap can be made and a lot of programs made without ever thinking the problem through properly will occur. It might be like how an archeologist since the invention of plastic can date the period of the soil as post plastic, if one could cut open the software stack of the coming systems that will be bui…
This is an accurate description of 90% of corporate software pre-LLM.
LLMs are introducing a unique kind of bloat and dysfunction but it's not like they are replacing pristine code. Most software that is subject to market pressures and is generating a profit is painful to look at and difficult to work in.
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> 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 . Remember we used to spend enormous amount of time in school and in our spare time studying computer science? Algorithms, operating systems, compilers, and etc. All kinds of insights. All kinds of fun. All kinds of hard engineering. Yet, how much time do we really need to spend in our day-to-day work implementin…
With AI, people can build and collaborate on applications much more complex with much less technical knowledge. It might be ugly and crappy but I bet they’ll be mostly autonomous and not need to work through their IT team, or go through the hell of PM and requirements. If I know my requirements, I don’t need you. Hell, I can just start building and add requirements as I come across them. It’s not a major risk to the project like it used to be.
It will, and is, going much faster than the spreadsheet did.
Forcing friction the way this post describes won't work because the genie is out of the bottle. A much easier way to force friction is to expect everyone to read the code they are producing. Yes read all of it and understand what it's doing. A lofty bar sadly.
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…
Decades ago, enterprises said, "If you're writing assembly you're doing it wrong". That led to a reduction in knowledge of assembly in the average programmer but the people who specialize in it haven't gotten any worse at it. The result was a generation of programmers who make useful software while very few of them understand the machine they program. You could easily make either a positive or negative value judgemen…
Yes, it's true... but who cares? We lost that skill because we don't need it anymore.
English is becoming a very popular programming language.
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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 rul…
I don't agree. Chess is a perfect information game with objective, easily measurable outcomes. Show me a software business that looks like that and I'll agree with your hypothesis. Otherwise I don't believe your metaphor proves much of anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Decades ago, enterprises said, "If you're writing assembly you're doing it wrong". That led to a reduction in knowledge of assembly in the average programmer but the people who specialize in it haven't gotten any worse at it. The result was a generation of programmers who make useful software while very few of them understand the machine they program. You could easily make either a positive or negative value judgemen…
I came here to rephrase the headline as "Punch card expertise is going to collapse from compiler reliance." Yes, it's true... but who cares? We lost that skill because we don't need it anymore. English is becoming a very popular programming language.
The long term impact of AI on society is exclusively a net positive if utilised in the correct way. But most of the westerners lack faith in government fiscal policy and think that they are going to be left destitute when they can no longer provide for themselves. When in fact UBI is going to be the most likely outcome.
They are myopically focusing on the short term labour market effects of AI on their own profession instead of realising the long term utopian societal outcome.
"We need to ban AI because I'm going to lose my job!" - This is only said by someone who is winning in their society and wants to maintain the status quo not by those who slipped through the cracks.
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