Lost me at "I’m building something right now. I won’t get into the details. You don’t give away the idea."
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We might all be AI engineers now
101–110 of 384 posts
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#102Strangely we never hear gushing pieces on how great gcc is. If you have to advertise that much or recruit people with AI mania, perhaps your product isn't that great.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "most engineers" not "most engineers we've hired". But also "most engineers" aren't very good. AIs know tricks that the average "I write code for my dayjob" person doesn't know or frankly won't bother to learn.
Even speaking from a pure statistical perspective, it is quite literally impossible for "AI" that outputs world's-most-average-answer to be better than "most engineers". In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what percentage of engineers it's better than: all it does is it consumes as much data as possible and returns the statistically most probable answer, therefore it's gonna be better than roughly 50% of engineers.…
>> Even speaking from a pure statistical perspective, it is quite literally impossible for "AI" that outputs world's-most-average-answer to be better than "most engineers". In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what percentage of engineers it's better than: all it does is it consumes as much data as possible and returns the statistically most probable answer
Yeah, you come across as someone who thinks that the AI simply spits out the average of the code in its training data. I don't think that understanding is accurate, to say the least.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#104Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…
Standard AI promotion talking points. Show us the frigging code or presumably your failed slow website that looks like a Bootcamp website from 2014.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#105[flagged]
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Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem is overstated. People always learn the things they need to learn. Were people clutching their pearls about how programmers were going to lack the fundamentals of assembly language after compilers came along? Probably, but it turned out fine. People who need to program in assembly language still do. People who need to touch low-level things probably understand some of it but not as deeply. Most of…
I don't think the comparison (that's often made) between AI and compilers is valid though. A compiler is deterministic. It's a function; it transforms input into output and validates it in the process. If the input is incorrect it simply throws an error. AI doesn't validate anything, and transforms a vague input into a vague output, in a non-deterministic way. A compiler can be declared bug-free, at least in theory.…
Actually, it isn't that different. Compilers are trash. They produce hilariously bloated and stupid code, even the C++ compilers, not to speak about your average JIT compiler.
However, in practice we don't care because it's good enough for 99% of the code. Sure, it could be like 5x better at least but who cares, our computers are fast enough.:tm:
AI is the same. Is it as good as the best human output? Definitely not. Does it do the job most of the time? Yes, and that's what people care about.
(But yes, for high-impact work - there's many people who know how to read x64 asm or PTX/SASS and they do insane stuff.)
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#107Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
But that's the problem. Something that can be so reliable at times, can also fail miserably at others. I've seen this in myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM use leads to faster burnout and higher cognitive load. You're not just coding anymore, you're thinking about what needs to be done, and then reviewing it as if someone else wrote the code. LLMs are great for rapid prototyping, boilerplate, that kind of thing…
Prototyping is a perfectly fine use of LLMs - its easier to see a closer-to-finished good than one that is not.
But that won't generate the returns Model producers need :) This is the issue. So they will keep pushing nonsense.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#108I vibe coded a Kubernetes cluster in 2 days for a distributed compilation setup. I've never touched half this stuff before. Now I have a proof of concept that'll change my whole organization. That would've taken me 3 months a year ago, just to learn the syntax and evaluate competing options. Now I can get sccache working in a day, find it doesn't scale well, and replace it with recc + buildbarn. And ask the AI questi…
You perhaps just introduced one more moving part, that you don't understand well. Instead of thinking of a simpler solution.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#109Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
But that's the problem. Something that can be so reliable at times, can also fail miserably at others. I've seen this in myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM use leads to faster burnout and higher cognitive load. You're not just coding anymore, you're thinking about what needs to be done, and then reviewing it as if someone else wrote the code. LLMs are great for rapid prototyping, boilerplate, that kind of thing…
> I've seen this in myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM use leads to faster burnout and higher cognitive load.
This needs more attention. There's a lot of inhumanity in the modern workplace and modern economy, and that needs to be addressed.
AI is being dumped into the society of 2026, which is about extracting as much wealth as possible for the already-wealthy shareholder class. Any wealth, comfort, or security anyone else gets is basically a glitch that "should" be fixed.
AI is an attempt to fix the glitch of having a well-compensated and comfortable knowledge worker class (which includes software engineers). They'd rather have what few they need running hot and burning out, and a mass of idle people ready to take their place for bottom-dollar.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#110[deleted]