In the language of Lynch's Dune, AI is not an exoskeleton, it is a pain amplifier. Get it all wrong more quickly and deeply and irretrievably.
AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
111–120 of 608 posts
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#112In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…
He is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar to his. But in areas where they don’t exist, writing code isn’t a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents. Even with full context, wr…
Truth. I've had much easier time grappling with code bases I keep clean and compartmentalized with AI, over-stuffing context is one of the main killers of its quality.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#113In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…
> Boris said that writing code is a solved problem
That's just so dumb to say. I don't think we can trust anything that comes out of the mouths of the authors of these tools. They are conflicted. Conflict of interest, in society today, is such a huge problem.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#114[dead]
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#115Neither, AI is a tool to guide you in improving your process in any way and/or form.
The problem is people using AI to do the heavy processing making them dumber. Technology itself was already making us dumber, I mean, Tesla drivers not even drive anymore or know how, coz the car does everything.
Look how company after company is being either breached or have major issues in production because of the heavy dependency on AI.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#116In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…
That is the same team that has an app that used React for TUI, that uses gigabytes to have a scrollback buffer, and that had text scrolling so slow you could get a coffee in between.
And that then had the gall to claim writing a TUI is as hard as a video game. (It clearly must be harder, given that most dev consoles or text interfaces in video games consistently use less than ~5% CPU, which at that point was completely out of reach for CC)
He works for a company that crowed about an AI-generated C compiler that was so overfitted, it couldn't compile "hello world"
So if he tells me that "software engineering is solved", I take that with rather large grains of salt. It is far from solved. I say that as somebody who's extremely positive on AI usefulness. I see massive acceleration for the things I do with AI. But I also know where I need to override/steer/step in.
The constant hypefest is just vomit inducing.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#117[flagged]
This take lands for me. I'm a busy dad working a day job as a developer with a long backlog of side project ideas.
Hearing all the news of how good Claude Opus is getting, I fired it up with some agent orchestrator instruction files, babysat it off and on for a few days, and now have 3 projects making serious progress that used to be stale repos from a decade ago with only 1 or 2 commits.
On one of them, I had to feed Claude some research papers before it finally started making real headway and passing the benchmark tests I had it write.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#118Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#119I like this analogy, and in fact in have used it for a totally different reason: why I don't like AI. Imagine someone going to a local gym and using an exosqueleton to do the exercises without effort. Able to lift more? Yes. Run faster? Sure. Exercising and enjoying the gym? ... No, and probably not. I like writing code, even if it's boilerplate. It's fun for me, and I want to keep doing it. Using AI to do that part…
We've all been raised in a world where we got to practice the 'art' of programming, and get paid extraordinarily well to do so, because the output of that art was useful for businesses to make more money. If a programmer with an exoskeleton can produce more output that makes more money for the business, they will continue to be paid well. Those who refuse the exoskeleton because they are in it for the pure art will m…
You’re forgetting that the “art” part of it is writing sound, scalable, performant code that can adapt and stand the test of time. That’s certainly more valuable in the long run than banging out some dogshit spaghetti code that “gets the job done” but will lead to all kinds of issues in the future.