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Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

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Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#201

Post by Razengan »

rwmj wrote: post #184
Razengan wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that still has little bearing on actual cooking skills, no?

Knowing how to go from whatever is fresh today in the garden to a meal is a cooking skill, yes. And how to preserve gluts of fruit, also a skill.

I mean, if I grow my garden and just provide you with the vegetables,

does that affect your cooking skills in any way?

In fact, if you divide your time between growing your own produce AND honing your cooking, both of those skills may suffer

compared to devoting your time to just focusing on one ability.

Otherwise if you try to do everything you'll never be as good as a full-time farmer or a full-time chef.

or how about another analogy:

Say one day your idea for a dish requires softer or sweeter carrots, etc, but oops you spent the last season only growing crunchier and mellower carrots, what're you gonna do now? With external suppliers you always have a wider choice of ingredients better suited to the end product you want at any given time.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#202

Post by AndrewOMartin »

hermitcrab wrote: post #169
sriram_malhar wrote: post #31

Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of having worked without AI. They have been schooled in the basics. Enough of us know about data structures, concurrency, networks, language design etc. from the ground up that the knowledge is passed on. I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Given the attendance rate…

Herodotus wrote about finding people living in the ruins of a great city (Babylon) who had no idea who built it or how they built it.

The city of London was abandoned for about 400 years and fell into ruins after the people who built it left.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#203

Post by epolanski »

owebmaster wrote: post #151
epolanski wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can achieve more with AI than without. What's the complain exactly? That AI still hasn't made my effort and thinking and directing and checking and ideas completely redundant and thus out of job? It's like you people see everything in black and white and miss that most of the real world is a gradient of shades of grey and quite never full black or white.

> What's the complain exactly? What complain? OP asked a question. Carmack created Doom, Quake in 2, 3 years. What has he created in 4 years of AI? Should be exceptional if one of the most productive programmers ever says it makes him more productive. What does he have to show?

Silly question.

He's doing research, not product work now.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#204

Post by owebmaster »

epolanski wrote: post #203
owebmaster wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the complain exactly? What complain? OP asked a question. Carmack created Doom, Quake in 2, 3 years. What has he created in 4 years of AI? Should be exceptional if one of the most productive programmers ever says it makes him more productive. What does he have to show?

Silly question. He's doing research, not product work now.

So people are right to say he has nothing to show to back his claims.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#205

Post by Paradigma11 »

Yoric wrote: post #159
philjackson wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on this with real-world examples you've experienced?

Not GP, but I can. I'm currently working on porting a mid-sized project to a new architecture, new programming language and of course adding new features. Getting a new feature implemented is quite easy. You spend a few hours brainstorming specs with the agent, then ask it to implement it. This gives you extremely frequent code drops that add a new brick, add a new feature, etc. All of this with 100% code coverage (w…

But why did it pass the reviews of the independent subagents whose sole job it is to check all those things?

They are very good at that.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#206

Post by dwroberts »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #10

'Make sure you don't fall behind!!!' is my least favourite type of post about ai. There's resllt nothing to learn about ai. You're just typing and telling it what to do.

Also the thing that is infuriating is, do people obsessed with using AI for everything not realise that, they are surplus to the entire process? They are doing 'prompting' or whatever but the end goal will eventually be that they are obsolete and will not be required. Companies will just endlessly, automatically pump out AI generated stuff without any human intervention at all. The tools they gloat about will be closed up and they will not have access to them any more.

You're not really 'keeping up' with anything, you're just fooling yourself into being part of a process that wants to eradicate your presence.

It's almost like embracing this stuff is giving them an illusion of control they don't have

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#207

Post by penguin_booze »

glimshe wrote: post #3

We are going from the era of manual, line-by-line mental model transcription to one where software engineers can focus on data structures, software architecture and algorithms. I love being able to quickly bring out the program that is already running in my head without having to worry about the grind of typing it into a format that the compiler understands. Dealing with API names. Syntax. Language quirks. Library go…

> AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, rekindled my passion for computers.

"Walking on stilts made me taller"?

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#208

Post by CharlieDigital »

Yoric wrote: post #159
philjackson wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on this with real-world examples you've experienced?

Not GP, but I can. I'm currently working on porting a mid-sized project to a new architecture, new programming language and of course adding new features. Getting a new feature implemented is quite easy. You spend a few hours brainstorming specs with the agent, then ask it to implement it. This gives you extremely frequent code drops that add a new brick, add a new feature, etc. All of this with 100% code coverage (w…

    > Then you look at the code. Code that has passed review, generally. You realize that the database schema has been broken silently, and that the agent has rewritten the tests or the golden fixtures to match.
I find that the code review leg of this is critical to invest a lot of energy into hardening.

First is don't trust the code review from your local harness, even if it uses sub-agents; externalize it into another system.

Second is to get your most critical human code reviewers to encode their heuristics in markdown files and feed those to the code review agents.

Third, if possible, is to bring the code review "into the loop" so that it's not only running in the PR, but also running in the coding loop so the coding agent has immediate, external feedback. Final PR code review is a backstop.

This pattern [0] works well because it solves for some team level problems where folks are using different harnesses or different models (consistency issues) and it means that code reviews don't just sit at the end of the loop; it actively alters the code production cycle.

[0] https://zeeq.ai/docs/key-features/code-review-tool

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#209

Post by wat10000 »

Fighting is competitive and single-minded in a way that programming very much is not. The purpose of fighting is to defeat, often kill, an enemy who wants to do the same thing to you. In that world, there’s no room for anything but the most advanced techniques and technology.

Most jobs, programming included, aren’t like that at all. There’s an element of competition, but you don’t get killed by somebody who does it better. Maybe they get paid more, but you can still have a job too.

I read this advice like: in a world of backhoes, don’t be a guy with a shovel. Except a guy with a shovel is still very useful in the modern world. Backhoes are great but can’t do everything. And even for jobs they can, the shovel might be good enough.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#210

Post by ElProlactin »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #196
anonzzzies wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again I don't get what people on HN are doing? Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed. I mean, we should not measure everything in money, but for lack of a better measure for productivity, I cannot see how anyone fi…

If it works for you, great! Just keep going. I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves? Certainly they understand their problems better than you and they can adapt to rising issues faster if their in-house team does it themselves. And certainly what kind of AI you can access, they can too and perhaps even more. So what will remain your value propositions? I’m…

> I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves?

Plenty of reasons, including:

1. They don't (yet) know how to use AI to accomplish what they need.

2. The ROI is still meaningfully positive and they don't want to have to do it themselves.

3. Having a third-party do the work provides protection for decision-makers. If the project fails, the third-party takes the blame and "nobody gets fired for buying IBM".

4. The vendor does bring valuable insight to the table and pairs it with the use of AI to deliver a result that wouldn't have been possible in-house.

This doesn't mean that everyone will be able to get work and maintain their rates in AI world but some people will.

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