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Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

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Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#101

Post by sokoloff »

ofjcihen wrote: post #83
hombre_fatal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, don't use if you don't want to. I'm referring to versions of the claim I see around here like LLMs are useless. Being so uncurious as to refuse to figure out what a tool might be useful for is an anti-engineering mindset. Just like you should be able to say something positive about Javascript (async-everything instead of a bolted-on async subecosystem, event loop has its upsides, single-threaded has its upsides…

As a counter argument, the replies I see that say LLMs are “useless” are saying they’re useless to the person attempting to use them. This can be a perfectly valid argument for many reasons. Their use case isn’t well documented, can’t be publicly disclosed, involves APIs that aren’t public, or are actual research and not summarizing printed research to name a few I’ve run into myself. This argument that “engineers ar…

“Their purposes” are not necessarily perfectly aligned with “their employer’s purposes”.

I have met more than a few engineers who seem to practice “mortgage-driven development”.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#102

Post by 8note »

osigurdson wrote: post #63

While I didn't agree with the "junior developer" analogy in the past, I am finding that it is beginning to be a bit more like that. The new Codex tool from OpenAI feels a lot more like this. It seems to work best if you already have a few examples of something that you want to do and now want to add another. My tactic is to spell it out very clearly in the prompt and really focus on having it consistently implement a…

if you havent tried yet, get it to ask you clarifying questions to make the requirements unambiguous.

and ask it to write a design doc, and to write a work plan of different prompts to implement the change

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#103

Post by shitpostbot »

RugnirViking wrote: post #78
orochimaaru wrote: post #74

My thesis is actually simpler. For the longest time until the Industrial Revolution humans have done uninteresting work for the large part. There was a routine and little else. Intellectuals worked through a very terse knowledge base and it was handed down master to apprentice. Post renaissance and industrial age the amount of known knowledge has exploded, the specializations have exploded. Most of what white collar…

I disagree that ancient work was uninteresting. If you've ever looked at truly old architecture, walls, carvings etc you can see that people really took pride in their work, adding things that absolutely weren't just pure utility. In my mind that's the sign of someone that considers their work interesting. But in general, in the past there was much less specialization. That means each individual was responsible for a…

[dead]

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#104

Post by bluefirebrand »

exe34 wrote: post #99
orochimaaru wrote: post #74

My thesis is actually simpler. For the longest time until the Industrial Revolution humans have done uninteresting work for the large part. There was a routine and little else. Intellectuals worked through a very terse knowledge base and it was handed down master to apprentice. Post renaissance and industrial age the amount of known knowledge has exploded, the specializations have exploded. Most of what white collar…

> Those who have expertise in their field will be able to be more efficient. My problem with it as a scientist is that I can't trust a word it writes until I've checked everything 10 times over. Checking over everything was always the hardest part of my job. Subtle inconsistencies can lead to embarrassing retractions or worse. So the easy part is now automatic, and the hard part is 10x harder, because it will introdu…

Yes, this is exactly how I feel about AI generating code as well.

Reviewing code is way harder than writing it, for me. Building a mental model of what I want to build, then building that comes very naturally to me, but building a mental model of what someone else made is much more difficult and slow for me

Feeling like it is working against me instead of with me is exactly the right way to describe it

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#105

Post by octo888 »

viccis wrote: post #18

The one thing AI is good at is building greenfield projects from scratch using established tools. If want you want to accomplish can be done by a moderately capable coder with some time reading the documentation for the various frameworks involved, then I view AI as fairly similar to the scaffolding that happened with Ruby on Rails back in the day when I typed "rails new myproject". So LLMs are awesome if I want to s…

I got the feeling for your cross-team use case is that tech leaders have a dream of each team exposing their own tuned MCP agent and your agents will talk to each other.

That idea reminds me of "DevOps is to automate fail". Perhaps: "agent collaboration is to automate chaos"

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#106

Post by mnky9800n »

overgard wrote: post #98

LLM's can't really reason, in my opinion (and in a lot of researchers), so, being a little harsh here but given that I'm pretty sure these things are trained on vast swaths of open source software I generally feel like what things like Cursor are doing can be best described as "fancy automated plagiarism". If the stuff you're doing can be plagiarized from another source and adapted to your own context, then LLM's are…

What I find a bit annoying is that if you sit in the llm you never get an intuition about the docs because you are always asking the llm. Which is nice in some cases but it prevents discovery in other cases. There’s plenty of moments where I’m reading docs and learn something new about what some library does or get surprised it lacks a certain feature. Although the same is true for talking to an llm about it. The truth is that I don’t think we really have a good idea of the best kind of human interface for LLMs as a computer access tool.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#107

Post by freeone3000 »

snapcaster wrote: post #71
rijoja wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the exact opposite*, the author said that if you're doing boilerplate _code_ it's probably fine. The thing is that since it can't think, it's absolutely useless when it comes to things that hasn't been done before, because if you are creating something new, the software won't have had any chance to train on what you are doing. So if you are in a situation in which it is a good idea to create a new DSL for yo…

Maybe reconsider assumptions? Maybe DSLs shouldn't be done anymore if they're not able to be utilized by AI agents easily

I’m not going to make my code worse because your broken tool finds it easier.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#108

Post by 6510 »

notachatbot123 wrote: post #21
janaagaard wrote: post #12

A Danish audio newspaper host / podcaster had the exact apposite conclusion when he used ChatGPT to write the manuscript for one his episodes. He ended up spending as much time as he usually does because he had to fact check everything that the LLM came up with. Spoiler: It made up a lot of stuff despite it being very clear in the prompt, that it should not do so. To him, it was the most fun part, that is writing the…

> It made up a lot of stuff despite it being very clear in the prompt, that it should not do so. LLMs are not sentient. They are designed to make stuff up based on probability.

Making stuff up is not actually an issue. What matters is how you present it. If I was less sure about this I would write: Making stuff up might not be an issue. It could be that how you present it is more important. Even less sure: Perhaps it would help if it didn't sound equally confident about everything?

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#110

Post by rsyring »

mnky9800n wrote: post #106
overgard wrote: post #98

LLM's can't really reason, in my opinion (and in a lot of researchers), so, being a little harsh here but given that I'm pretty sure these things are trained on vast swaths of open source software I generally feel like what things like Cursor are doing can be best described as "fancy automated plagiarism". If the stuff you're doing can be plagiarized from another source and adapted to your own context, then LLM's are…

What I find a bit annoying is that if you sit in the llm you never get an intuition about the docs because you are always asking the llm. Which is nice in some cases but it prevents discovery in other cases. There’s plenty of moments where I’m reading docs and learn something new about what some library does or get surprised it lacks a certain feature. Although the same is true for talking to an llm about it. The tru…

FWIW, I've had ChatGPT suggest things I wasn't aware of. For example, I asked for the cleanest implementation for an ordered task list using SQLAlchemy entities. It gave me an implementation but then suggested I use a feature SQLAlchemy already had built in for this exact use case.

SQLAlchemy docs are vast and detailed, it's not surprising I didn't know about the feature even though I've spent plenty of time in those docs.

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