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AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

sylvainkalache.com

331–340 of 379 posts

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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the uncanny valley of AI. It's still not quite good enough yet that you can trust it blindly on a big codebase, so you still have to read and understand everything - which is often harder than just writing it up yourself. EDIT: don’t get me wrong. I still think AI is incredibly useful for a lot of tasks! But when implementing an architecturally hairy thing, I find it less stressful and equally quick to jump down…

I'd say it's more about learning how to organize your work more efficiently. If you think about a product like marble: it's something that most be chiseled out of time. Some people can chisel better products: the AI is just a better chisel. Sometime still has to guide the chisel and judge the art/product. In our cases, the market judges products.

> In our cases, the market judges products.

It happens, but it's rare. When last did a product take over a market without 100s of millions, sometimes even billions, of VC dollars?

There is no motivation to build a better mousetrap today, because the drooling idiot with a Claude account will look at how quick you signup users, clone it in a week (hey, it only needs to be superficially the same), and get VC money to dump until you go out of business.

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

#332
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 he…

I have no idea why you're being downvoted. Your comment makes a lot of sense and I've upvoted it...

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

#333
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't try to be productive. It's exposing the hypocrisy of privileged groups suddenly being treated like regular people, when they did NOTHING for decades to help others or even to protect themselves ("f** you, got mine", rockstar programmer, 10x programmer, talents everywhere, etc mentality). No unions, no collective bargaining, sheer individual greed.

Do you think that all programmers have always existed in the US? On that note, do you think that all programmers in the US are these Silicon Valley stereotypes? Plenty of programmers in the US make normal wages for professionals with degrees doing things not at the technology companies famous for their disregard of the rest of humanity. As someone who has done trades and also “machine shop programming” and jail break…

It's a universal programmer trait. Let's call them "culturally regular programmers": they are less social than the average person. They lean more libertarian and more selfish.

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

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, from your comment and your reply, are you just happy that more people are being treated poorly? That makes no sense. You seem to understand that he was being snarky, so why do you not understand that that snark and desire to see “others” brought down to a lower level just because some were already there doesn’t help anyone? Actually, that division does help people, those people that are putting people there in th…

You haven't established anybody being treated poorly, only that they're being treated like professionals and not artisans.

Haha, it seems childish but if you’d like to go that route I’ll just point you to the original posters reply:

>It's exposing the hypocrisy of privileged groups suddenly being treated like regular people, when they did NOTHING for decades to help others or even to protect themselves ("f* you, got mine", rockstar programmer, 10x programmer, talents everywhere, etc mentality). No unions, no collective bargaining, sheer individual greed.

So, I guess since you’re taking that position, Thomas: are you just pro pain for an increasing number of workers or can we agree that adding more people to the pool of mistreated labor isn’t beneficial for anyone?

Personally I’m going to continue advocating for better rights for both.

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

#335
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can share a weird story: Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform. I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about. At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or…

I don't think it's generalizable. The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. It's more compelling, and we probably see more of them because of it, but it's the same general thing. The kind of person who insists on understanding things and working through the problem has always been rarer. It's not "humble", it's "inquisitive" and "persistent".

> I don't think it's generalizable. The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. It's more compelling, and we probably see more of them because of it, but it's the same general thing.

There's an infinity between someone who has to panel beat what they copied off SO and someone who just bangs their head repeatedly against an LLM.

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

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla's Firefox AGENTS.md begins with: Limit the amount of comments you put in the code to a strict minimum. You should almost never add comments, except sometimes on non-trivial code, function definitions if the arguments aren't self-explanatory, and class definitions and their members. Do not remove existing comments unless they are directly related to what you are changing. https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/sou…

Is anybody else concerned that we've gone from exactly specifying to a computer, using an exact language, what to do, to a more sophisticated form of prayer?

Nah, I'm sure it's fine. What could possibly go wrong with abandoning nearly a hundred years of CS knowledge and hard-won lessons and replacing all of it with the equivalent of trying to convince a sociopathic teenager to clean their room?

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

#337
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that all programmers have always existed in the US? On that note, do you think that all programmers in the US are these Silicon Valley stereotypes? Plenty of programmers in the US make normal wages for professionals with degrees doing things not at the technology companies famous for their disregard of the rest of humanity. As someone who has done trades and also “machine shop programming” and jail break…

It's a universal programmer trait. Let's call them "culturally regular programmers": they are less social than the average person. They lean more libertarian and more selfish.

According to who and what?

I think the entire open source community would like to have to have a word with you.

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

#338
post #99
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things. Anecdote I like to tell.. I was working on a financial planning software, intentionally purely vibe coded as an experiment. I eventually discovered AI had implemented seven duplicate copies of tax calculation functions. All of them different. All of them wrong. All of them giving different answers for same input. Not even the most junior of newbie junior enginee…

Which model though? I have similar anecdotes but all with older models. The jump in capabilities in the last 6 months has been substantial.

> The jump in capabilities in the last 6 months has been substantial.

What I would like to see is a chart graphing the model size against some objective measure of capabilities, specifically for coding.

It's easy to see gains when you're doubling the effort. What I want to know is if the extra effort is opening up more capabilities over time or fewer capabilities over time.

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't established anybody being treated poorly, only that they're being treated like professionals and not artisans.

Haha, it seems childish but if you’d like to go that route I’ll just point you to the original posters reply: >It's exposing the hypocrisy of privileged groups suddenly being treated like regular people, when they did NOTHING for decades to help others or even to protect themselves ("f* you, got mine", rockstar programmer, 10x programmer, talents everywhere, etc mentality). No unions, no collective bargaining, sheer…

What "pain" are you talking about? You keep trying to smuggle this framing in. I don't accept the premise.
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