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The future belongs to those who can refute AI, not just generate with AI

learningloom.substack.com

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Re: The future belongs to those who can refute AI, not just generate with AI

#11

Post by sosnsbbs »

while1 wrote: post #7

We're building AI testing tools at QA.tech and this matches my experience. Great post. The hard part was never generating code. It's figuring out if what came out is actually correct. Our team runs multiple AI agents in parallel writing code and honestly we spend way more time on verification than generation at this point. The ratio keeps getting worse as the models get better at producing plausible-looking stuff. Th…

> way more time on verification than generation

Was generation a bottle neck previously? My experience has been verification is always the slow part. Often times it’s quicker to do it myself than try to provide the perfect context (via agents.md, skills, etc) to the agent.

The times it’s able to 1 shot things is also code that would take me the shortest amount of time to write.

Re: The future belongs to those who can refute AI, not just generate with AI

#12

Post by notnullorvoid »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #10

My entire professional life, I've been dealing with coworkers who just want their code shipped. Overly complex solutions to simple problems, inefficient algorithms, nested spaghetti code. And it was hard to just plainly reject it. I eventually had to become a mentor, teach them how to do it better. I've called myself a programmer even though I mostly just helped other people to program. Over the years, I've lost the…

> Over the years, I've lost the ability to focus on writing code myself

If this weren't the case how do you think it would affect your usage of coding agents?

Re: The future belongs to those who can refute AI, not just generate with AI

#13

Post by lukaslalinsky »

notnullorvoid wrote: post #12
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #10

My entire professional life, I've been dealing with coworkers who just want their code shipped. Overly complex solutions to simple problems, inefficient algorithms, nested spaghetti code. And it was hard to just plainly reject it. I eventually had to become a mentor, teach them how to do it better. I've called myself a programmer even though I mostly just helped other people to program. Over the years, I've lost the…

> Over the years, I've lost the ability to focus on writing code myself If this weren't the case how do you think it would affect your usage of coding agents?

I've always been more interested in the computer science and software engineering aspects. I did enjoy writing code occasionally, but overall, I was wishing I had some kind of neural implant to convert my thoughts into code. Coding agents are now good enough that I consider that dream as realized, and with that benefit that I do not actually need any implant in my brain. :)

Re: The future belongs to those who can refute AI, not just generate with AI

#14

Post by notnullorvoid »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #13
notnullorvoid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over the years, I've lost the ability to focus on writing code myself If this weren't the case how do you think it would affect your usage of coding agents?

I've always been more interested in the computer science and software engineering aspects. I did enjoy writing code occasionally, but overall, I was wishing I had some kind of neural implant to convert my thoughts into code. Coding agents are now good enough that I consider that dream as realized, and with that benefit that I do not actually need any implant in my brain. :)

Interesting, I've found AI to be further from the goal of converting my thoughts to code than writing code myself.

English is so ambiguous that by the time I provide sufficient context to the prompt it's taken more typing than writing the code would have been. That's not even accounting for the output often needing further prompting to manipulate into what was intended, especially if I try to be light on initial context.

I like it for quick proof of concept stuff though, the details don't matter so much then.

Re: The future belongs to those who can refute AI, not just generate with AI

#15

Post by lukaslalinsky »

notnullorvoid wrote: post #14
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been more interested in the computer science and software engineering aspects. I did enjoy writing code occasionally, but overall, I was wishing I had some kind of neural implant to convert my thoughts into code. Coding agents are now good enough that I consider that dream as realized, and with that benefit that I do not actually need any implant in my brain. :)

Interesting, I've found AI to be further from the goal of converting my thoughts to code than writing code myself. English is so ambiguous that by the time I provide sufficient context to the prompt it's taken more typing than writing the code would have been. That's not even accounting for the output often needing further prompting to manipulate into what was intended, especially if I try to be light on initial cont…

I really approach is the same way as helping my coworkers to be productive. Most of the context is spent on the initial familiarizing with the code and I just double-check that it has the right understanding, there is minimal prompting on my side for this. The next step is to explain the problem I'm trying to solve and and for the simpler ones, it gets what needs to happen 8/10 times. I don't need to be detailed, because it already knows the context. For the complex problems, I split them into small tasks myself and only ask it to do the small steps, small enough to fit into the first category. I feel like the worst outcomes happen when you specify the problem first and let it do it's own research with that in "mind", then it just overthinks and comes up garbage.

Re: The future belongs to those who can refute AI, not just generate with AI

#17

Post by peyton »

notnullorvoid wrote: post #14
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been more interested in the computer science and software engineering aspects. I did enjoy writing code occasionally, but overall, I was wishing I had some kind of neural implant to convert my thoughts into code. Coding agents are now good enough that I consider that dream as realized, and with that benefit that I do not actually need any implant in my brain. :)

Interesting, I've found AI to be further from the goal of converting my thoughts to code than writing code myself. English is so ambiguous that by the time I provide sufficient context to the prompt it's taken more typing than writing the code would have been. That's not even accounting for the output often needing further prompting to manipulate into what was intended, especially if I try to be light on initial cont…

Give it the problem first. Then have it generate the context. Make edits and iterate on the context. Then hit go. Finally, have it write down whatever it needs to for next time.

Re: The future belongs to those who can refute AI, not just generate with AI

#18

Post by atomicnature »

_slih wrote: post #16

the article assumes monster codebases because we can build them. but cheaper code also means cheaper rewrites. maybe the future is disposable software, not carefully reviewed software.

If you read the article carefully -- I've dealt with an alternative scenario as well -- where we may have smaller codebases with larger blast radius.

As to disposable software, it's harder to get traction/adaption when things constantly break or are slow or the experience is crappy in general.

To make it simpler - all else being equal - as a user would you prefer using highly reviewed/vetted/reliable software, or otherwise?

My bet is reliability is an invariant -- nobody wishes for software that crashes, leaks your private info, gives faulty output, is laggy to use and so on.

Re: The future belongs to those who can refute AI, not just generate with AI

#19

Post by h4kunamata »

The future belongs to those who use AI as an assistant to improve tasks and workflows since search engines are broken.

In contrast, we are seeing people using AI to do the heavy thinking, doing their whole work, these people are cooked. If you remove AI right now, they can no longer work, some cannot work at all because they are 100% vide-coder.

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