111–120 of 189 posts
I think this particular anxiety was explored rather well in the anonymous short story 'The End of Creative Scarcity': https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3353977/1/The-End-of-Creative... Some existential objections occur; how sure are we that there isn't an infinite regress of ever deeper games to explore? Can we claim that every game has an enjoyment-nullifying hack yet to discover with no exceptions? If pampered pet ani…
My (naive?) assumption is that all of this will come down: the price (eventually free) and the energy costs.
Then again, may daughters know I am Pollyanna (someone has to be).
> I've never been more productive Maybe it’s because my approach is much closer to a Product Engineer than a Software Engineer, but code output is rarely the reason why projects that I worked on are delayed. All my productivity issues can attributed to poor specifications, or problems that someone just threw over the wall. Every time I’m blocked is because someone didn’t make a decision on something, or no one has th…
This is very true at large enterprises. The pre-coding tasks [0] and the post-coding tasks [1] account for the majority of elapsed time that it takes for a feature to go from inception to production.
The theory of constraints says that optimizations made to a step that's not the bottleneck will only make the actual bottleneck worse.
AI is no match for a well-established bureaucracy.
[0]: architecture reviews, requirements gathering, story-writing
[1]: infrastructure, multiple phases of testing, ops docs, sign-offs
Don't get me wrong, it lets me be more productive sometimes but people that think the days of humans programming computers are numbered have a very rosy (and naive) view of the software engineering world, in my opinion.
I also have a large collection of handwritten family letters going back over 100 years. I've scanned many of them, but I want to transcribe them to text. The job is daunting, so I ran them through some GPT apps for handwriting recognition. GPT did an astonishing job and at first blush, I thought the problem was solved. But on deeper inspection I found that while the transcriptions sounded reasonable and accurate, significant portions were hallucinated or missing. Ok, I said, I just have to review each transcription for accuracy. Well, reading two documents side by side while looking for errors is much more draining than just reading the original letter and typing it in. I'm a very fast typist and the process doesn't take long. Plus, I get to read every letter from beginning to end while I'm working. It's fun.
So after several years of periodically experimenting with the latest LLM tools, I still haven't found a use for them in my personal life and hobbies. I'm not sure what the future world of engineering and art will look like, but I suspect it will be very different.
My wife spins wool to make yarn, then knits it into clothing. She doesn't worry much about how the clothing is styled because it's the physical process of working intimately with her hands and the raw materials that she finds satisfying. She is staying close to the fundamental process of building clothing. Now that there are machines for manufacturing fibers, fabrics and garments, her skill isn't required, but our society has grown dependent on the machines and the infrastructure needed to keep them operating. We would be helpless and naked if those were lost.
Likewise, with LLM coding, developers will no longer develop the skills needed to design or "architect" complex information processing systems, just as no one bothers to learn assembly language anymore. But those are things that someone or something must still know about. Relegating that essential role to a LLM seems like a risky move for the future of our technological civilization.
I think this particular anxiety was explored rather well in the anonymous short story 'The End of Creative Scarcity': https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3353977/1/The-End-of-Creative... Some existential objections occur; how sure are we that there isn't an infinite regress of ever deeper games to explore? Can we claim that every game has an enjoyment-nullifying hack yet to discover with no exceptions? If pampered pet ani…
The calculator made it less important to be relatively good with arithmetic. Many people just cannot add or subtract two numbers without one. And it feels like they lose intuition , somehow: if numbers don't "speak" to you at all, can you ever realize that 17 is roughly a third of 50? The only way you realise it with a calculator is if you actually look for it. Whereas if you can count, it just appears to you. Simila…
> Back to coding: if you have a deep understanding of your codebases and dependencies, you may end up finding that you could actually extract some part of one codebase into a library and reuse it in another codebase. I understand the point you are making. But what makes you think refactoring won't be AI's forte. Maybe you could explicitly ask for it. Maybe you could ask it to minify while being human-understandable a…
I don't know that AI won't be able to do that, just like I don't know that AGI won't be a thing.
It just feels like it's harder to have the AI detect your dependencies, maybe browse the web for the sources (?) and offer to make a contribution upstream. Or would you envision downloading all the sources of all the dependencies (transitive included) and telling the AI where to find them? And to give it access to all the private repositories of your company?
And then, upstreaming something is a bit "strategic", I would say: you have to be able to say "I think it makes sense to have this logic in the dependency instead of in my project". Not sure if AIs can do that at all.
To me, it feels like it's at the same level of abstraction as something like "I will go with CMake because my coworkers are familiar with it", or "I will use C++ instead of Rust because the community in this field is bigger". Does an AI know that?