Live data from Hacker News

AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

101–110 of 656 posts

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#101
post #75

The eloquence with which this point gets (repeatedly) made is continuing to improve each next time I read it. However, I still feel like we haven't nailed it. That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse (e.g. "the medium is the message", "you ship your org chart", "9 mothers can't make a baby in a month"), in which the most pointed version of this critique packs a punch in just a few words that r…

This concept won't reach that point because when you chisel too hard it crumbles. There are countless lower level tasks that typical programmers no longer learn how to do. Our capacity for knowledge is not unlimited so we offload everything we can to move to the next level of abstraction.

That's true, but I think it's beside the point. The flip side of that argument, which is equally true, goes something like, "not doing cognitive push-ups leads to cognitive atrophy."

There are skills we're losing that are probably ok to lose (e.g. spacial memory & reasoning vs GPS, mental arithmetic vs calculators), primarily because those are well bounded domains, so we understand the nature of the codependency we're signing up for. AI is an amorphous and still growing domain. It is not a specific rung in the abstraction hierarchy; it is every rung simultaneously, but at different fidelity levels.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#102
post #50

There are plenty of engineers that couldn't work without a modern IDE or in languages without memory management. Or without the ability to use a library from GitHub / their package manager. It doesn't feel THAT much different to me. "Engineer" as a term might drift. There are "web developers" that can only use webflow / wordpress.

At least today, it isn't practical for most people to run these models locally- I think adding a dependency on a cloud service is different enough to some local (possibly open source) tool like an IDE.

Self hosting at a reasonable scale is much cheaper than people think. I am running clusters of DGX Spark machines with BiFrost load balancers in our company and for client projects. They work flawlessly!

128 GB unified memory, Nvidia chip and ARM CPU for just around 3k€ net. They easily push ~400 input and ~100 output tokens per second per device on say gpt-oss-120b. With two devices in a cluster, thats enough performance for >20 concurrent RAG users or >3 "AI augmented" developers.

And they don't even pull that much power.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#103

I think AI can generally be utilized in two ways: 1) you use it to help write code that you still “own” and fully understand. 2) you use it as an abstraction layer to write and maintain the code for you. The code becomes a compile target in a sense. You would feel like it’s someone else’s code if you were asked to make changes without AI. I think 2) is fine for things like prototypes, examples, references. Things tha…

And any push to use 2 to build infra to make 1 easier is hard to sell when a lot of engineers think AI will be able to perfectly do 1 in some nebulous time in the near future.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#104
post #10

Hard disagree. I feel like I'm thinking a lot more now because I have so many parallel projects going on at the same time. AI has allowed me to really, truly create in a way that I've never done before. Yes, my coding skills probably aren't as sharp as they used to be, but my system design skills are at an all time high. Don't blame the tool.

The real question is whether you'd be able to continue doing your work if someone took your toys away and said "here's a nickel, kid, go buy yourself a real computer". I'm not referring to whether you'd be able to keep up your productivity since it is clear you couldn't just like a carpenter with a nail gun works faster than one with a hammer and a bucket'o'nails. Could you do the work, starting with the design followed by boiler plate and finishing with a working system? The carpenter could, albeit slower since his tools only speed up the mechanics of his work. Coding agents do much more than that, they take away part of the mental modelling which goes into creating a working system. The fancier the tool, the more work it takes out of your hands. Say that the aforementioned toy thief comes by in a year or two after the operating systems (etc.) you're targeting have undergone a few releases with breaking changes. A number of APIs have been removed, others have been deprecated and new ones have been added. You were used to telling the agent to 'make it work on ${older_versions} as well as ${newest version} but now you're sitting there with a keyboard at your fingertips and that stupid cursor merrily blinking away on the screen. How long would it take you to become productive again? What if the toy thief waits 5 years before making his heist? What if the models end up rebelling or sink into depression and the government calls upon you to save your economic sector?

When cars first appeared it took quite some knowledge and experience to even get the things started, let alone to keep them running. Modern cars are far better in all respects and as a result modern drivers often don't have a clue what to do when the 'Check Engine' light appears. More recent cars actively resist attempts by their owners to fix problems since this is considered 'too dangerous' - which can be true in case of electric cars. That's the cost of progress, it is often worth it but it does make sense to realise what it would take to go back in time to the days when we coded our software outside in the rain, upphill both ways with only a cup of water to quench our thirst. In the dark. With wolves howling in the woods. OK, you get my drift.

Will there be something like 'software preppers' who prepare for the 'AIpocalypse' by keeping their laptops in shielded containers while studiously chugging along without any artificial assistance. Probably. As a hobby, at least, just like there are 'survivalist preppers' who make surviving some physical apocalypse their goal in some way or other.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#105
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you graduate your engineering degree without being able to think? Even my colleagues who cheated their way through uni still needed critical thinking to do that and get away with cheating without being caught. People might hate this but being a good cheat requires a lot of critical thinking.

Half of my graduating class could barely program.

What did you study?

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just saying that I already see that people are outsourcing all the thinking to the models - not only code generation and reviews, but even design - the part that "senior engineers" without imagination think only they are capable of doing. It's worrying how much trust is being put in those systems. And my worry is not about the job anymore, but our future in general.

It's a bit of a weird place to be in as a senior engineer who has spent 2 decades perfecting his craft. So, on one hand, I'm also kinda sad and how quickly we've thrown the guardrails away, but on the other -- it's... Well. It's just work. Turns out, no one ever really cared how elegant or robust our code was and how clever we were to think up some design or other, or that we had an eye on the future; just that it wo…

Yeah, but the thing is, it's not "just work". Software now has really big impact on the world and actual lives.

In a corporate world, we are typically detached from real world consequences and looking at people around me, people really don't think about such things - but I do. And I really care, because "relaxed" standards might result in errors that amount to stuff like identity thefts, or stolen money, shit like this, even on the smallest scale.

Obviously we can't prevent everything, but it seems like we, as industry, decided to collectively YOLO and stop giving shit at all. And personally I don't like that it is me who is losing sleep over this, while people who happily delegate all their thinking over to LLMs sleep better than ever now.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#107

There are plenty of engineers, who simply can't think, AI will not change anything in this regard.

Can’t think properly seems to be the real issue. That’s one of the reasons that SE domain is mostly in ruin. AI won’t help, only to delay a bigger mess.

Ever since the standard office setup went from offices or cubicles to bullpens and hot desks there is less and less time to think, and all of that is a management decision to ship things as fast as possible

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#108
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you graduate your engineering degree without being able to think? Even my colleagues who cheated their way through uni still needed critical thinking to do that and get away with cheating without being caught. People might hate this but being a good cheat requires a lot of critical thinking.

Half of my graduating class could barely program.

Yep. Way more than half of the people I interview can't even do a very basic FizzBuzz, even with guidance. Those are people with a degree, job experience and reference letters.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#109
Convenience is king. We became fat and unhealthy because high calorie foods are cheap and easy. We will become stupid because AI will do our thinking for us. There’s no way around it. Only a small percentage of the population are capable of perpetual self control. The old world forced you to be healthy, there was no other choice. Now there are like 15 things you have to have self control to do the hard work at even though you can get the same results the easy way. Working out, dieting, “proper” social interaction, sleep timing, child rearing, social meetups, career networking etc. The list is never ending and none of it is organic like it used to be.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#110
I think many of us have interviewed people with 10+ YoE, and resumes that seem impressive, and then seen them fail to do much of anything in evaluations. I expect this problem to get significantly worse. There will be a class of people tucked into organizations where they can get away with sitting in meetings and YOLOing AI code for years.
Post reply on HN