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AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

sylvainkalache.com

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Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#191

Post by wallst07 »

Sharlin wrote: post #23
throw839948499 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the solution is so simple, why claude did not found it? At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me). After three decades of outsourcing to lowest bidder, I do not buy that humans are somehow better! > patient, old school troubleshooting I usually see similar arguments around systems with major red flags (no docs, poor CI, decade ago no CVS...). And engineers with private stash of…

So after 30 years of outsourcing to the bottom 10%, you think Claude is better than the bottom 90% even though it’s so stupid that it doesn’t even know it should ask for advice or more information when it’s stuck?

Claude asks me all the time when it's stuck, what are your prompts?

I think some of these anti-claude comments have some face, then I get a peek into how people use them, and it seems all wrong.

The tooling is incredibly configurable, but comes out of the box with a big auto button, because thats what people want. Doesn't mean advanced users have to use it.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#192

Post by sersi »

hypfer wrote: post #29

Meta: The blinking cursor of the "logo" of the blog being sticky in the top left corner makes it impossible for me to read the text. It constantly fires interrupts at me. Depending on what your goals as the author are, you may or may not want that. Being able to scroll it out of view might be enough to achieve the aesthetics goal, and the goal of people actually listening to you.

After 2 minutes of reading that article, I inspected and deleted the node. Very annoying.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#193

Post by rdedev »

yard2010 wrote: post #27
jtfrench wrote: post #5

The more code writes autonomously, the less intuition the human owners have about that code. Loss of intuition is a seed of technical debt that grows with time. Over a long enough horizon, it can make looking at your own codebase feel like the first day on the job (sometimes at a company you started). Luckily, there are ways to mitigate this and essentially translate those human intuition of how the codebase “should”…

I've been thinking about this lately - is it like using 3rd party libs to achieve stuff faster? As much as I would lovr to hand craft the datetime logic in my app, I might as well use luxon and invest this time somewhere else. Only now with llms, you get virtually infinite 3rd party libs you can use, you create them on the fly. So if you have strong engineering values, I would say simply it boils down to "contracts o…

It's not just about it feeling like a 3rd party library but it's a library that's at risk of changing significantly after every 'update' without warning.

Atleast with a well built library you know the contours and how it fits into your larger system

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#194

Post by oblio »

Tade0 wrote: post #113
danielheath wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing people who _used to be_ like that losing that understanding without realizing it's happening - they have a superficial idea of what the code is doing, enough to feel like they understand it, but the change is apparent when watching them handle something unexpected.

LLMs reduced interest on tech debt, but it's still there and people who have a tendency to acquire it will go bankrupt eventually.

"The code market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." will probably be a thing.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#195

Post by spicyusername »

Its true we will lose the skills, but so far the LLMs are more than picking up the slack when wielded competently.

They _regularly_ go above and beyond when troubleshooting and frequently in 1/2 - 1/1000th of the time.

I remember spending entire days troubleshooting in the before times. Now it's like 30 minutes, tops, on literally any issue.

This is what progress looks like. We used to do a thing and now we don't.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#196

Post by iforgotmypasswo »

legulere wrote: post #139
iforgotmypasswo wrote: post #92

I feel a lot of comments here are missing the forest for the trees. We do not yet have the next generation systems that will manage AI creation and maintenance of systems. Humans have been making spaghetti code systems and maintaining them poorly for years. Best practices developed… eventually. But certainly not in the 70s and 80s. Spaghetti was the norm for quite some time. The development paradigm has changed. Fore…

> But certainly not in the 70s and 80s. Some already developed even earlier and most ideas were already there in the 80s. The problem was just that the field was growing so fast that it was filled with people without formal training or fresh out of university. That way the knowledge did not spread. For instance the 1986 paper „no silver bullet“ already described the need for iterative approaches later described as ag…

That’s a fair point. Practically, we need to adopt new practices and systems in the field. They may already exist in many cases.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#197

Post by oblio »

setopt wrote: post #49
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think LLMs have some of the same risks and benefits of stimulant drugs. They can make you more productive if used effectively as a tool, but they can also delude you into thinking you are better than you are and create a dependence such that you aren't just less productive without the LLM/drug, you fail to be productive at all because you don't know how to function without it.

That sounds somewhat applicable to many tools. Like Vim/Emacs, for example. Or computers and smart phones in general.

Computers - mostly no.

Smartphones - mostly yes.

Smartphones are fully portable which makes them always available and super addictive.

Computers have 10% of that addictive power.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#198

Post by mcmcmc »

spicyusername wrote: post #195

Its true we will lose the skills, but so far the LLMs are more than picking up the slack when wielded competently. They _regularly_ go above and beyond when troubleshooting and frequently in 1/2 - 1/1000th of the time. I remember spending entire days troubleshooting in the before times. Now it's like 30 minutes, tops, on literally any issue. This is what progress looks like. We used to do a thing and now we don't.

> when wielded competently.

And what happens when the competency drains away?

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#199

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

oblio wrote: post #171
JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I hear this I do wonder to myself how they're using AI. For me, as long as I'm properly RPI looping it and not blindly pressing "yes" then it will nearly always reach the solution, usually a fair bit quicker, because it effectively becomes an ideation machine that can keep more thoughts and knowledge in it than my brain can. However, I'm using it through giving it the context, it has access to the repos, access…

> RPI loop What's that?

Research Plan Implement.

At the risk of you already knowing this or similar - in essence for a slice of a piece of work, you get the LLM to research the information required into (usually) a research file, which you go back and forth with in-line or via conversation until you're happy.

You then build the plan for the piece of work, again going back and forth with the LLM until you agree with the plan, with the key here being you have a specific set of concrete steps with very limited vagueness. Again this is quite often a plan document.

You then implement the plan with your LLM, following the concrete steps and monitor/evaluate the result.

For me its the 101 mandatory first way to use LLM that turns it from guesswork to genuinely useful. (that or some other similar method, SDD or whatever)

Because without it or something similar you're fully dependent on AI's weaknesses not coming to the fore (context/scoping failures that are silent unless you demand visibility up front and ruthlessly chop/clarify), and you often ascribe bad AI slop as model limitations instead of context/scoping failures.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#200

Post by mistersquid »

bob1029 wrote: post #6

A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users. I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people. I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patien…

> The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting.

This critique (if it can be termed such) admits that the code itself has little value especially compared to the work of “30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting”.

In my past experience, developers who critique more-junior colleagues in this way work better in isolation than as part of a team because working as part of a team would require mentoring colleagues through the often difficult process of troubleshooting.

Giving “the team an exact solution on a silver platter” may not be helpful if implementation depends on knowledge withheld because one does not have the resources, ability, or motivation to mentor.

Something about giving a fish rather than teaching to fish comes to mind.

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