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The copilot delusion

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Re: The copilot delusion

#121

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

sanderjd wrote: post #77
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.

People keep saying this kind of thing, but sorry, it's nonsense. Many of my colleagues that I most admire are benefiting greatly and increasingly from LLM tooling.

LLM tooling is useful. I have been using it on a daily basis for at least a year.

I am maybe 10-20% more productive at certain tasks in the long run (which is pretty good!). Nowhere close to to the 10x or even 2x boost people are claiming.

If LLMS were really making software developers 10x more productive over the last year, we would be seeing massive shifts in the industry. In theory either 90% layoffs or 10x product velocity.

Re: The copilot delusion

#122

Post by sanderjd »

sgarland wrote: post #87
sanderjd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, agreed. I can no longer relate to people who don't recognize how powerful a tool like Cursor can be. But I also can't relate to people who think they can, today, build fully working software using just AIs, without people who know how software works and are able to understand and debug what is being generated. Maybe it's true that this will no longer be the case a year from now. I honestly don't know. But at the…

Cursor has been confidently incorrect repeatedly when discussing databases at my job. It doesn’t understand how MySQL works, and wants to make terrible indexing decisions because of it. You wouldn’t know that it’s wrong unless you already know the correct answer, because what it recommended will work, it’ll just be bloated and sub-optimal. And therein lies the problem: computers are so fast, people will happily assum…

Yeah. But you aren't disagreeing with what I wrote.

I think it's breaking a lot of brains that we have these tools now that are useful but not deterministically useful.

Re: The copilot delusion

#124

Post by aozgaa »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #55
padolsey wrote: post #36

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new und…

I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI…

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Re: The copilot delusion

#125

Post by Terr_ »

yencabulator wrote: post #103
tptacek wrote: post #44

The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with. Gross. Also: you could have said this about the spreadsheet.

Meanwhile, > 88% of the Excel spreadsheets have errors https://www.cassotis.com/insights/88-of-the-excel-spreadshee... How many companies mismanaged their finances because they had an enthusiastic spreadsheet user in charge? From that article, we know a country did.

It's a kind of macabre progress that national policy missteps have advanced to "ChatGPT, generate a table of tariffs for the US to impose on other places."

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-205520...

Re: The copilot delusion

#126

Post by monero-xmr »

sanderjd wrote: post #61
monero-xmr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-technical business owners have always had deep anxiety about software development. They don’t understand it, it’s very expensive, timelines can explode, and a hack or leak can materially damage their business. A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the e…

> A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the expertise of other people I honestly really don't understand why this would be the case. Software isn't more complicated than any of the other aspects of the business. I think a "reasonably smart" CEO could just .…

If you run a trucking company, or a retail business, or a food company, etc. I believe you can understand to a fairly detailed level the logistics and “secret sauce” involved that makes the business tick, even if you are not the core employees operating with the skills and expertise.

But if you are a non-technical CEO and your core business is, say, enterprise SaaS software, you don’t fundamentally understand what the heck is going on, and if you have a key deadline and blow it, don’t really understand why. So if a new VP says they can cut your costs dramatically by offshoring everything to India, etc., or replace half these expensive engineers with AI, it seems as plausible as anything else. Especially given the fawning press and hype, and salesmen pitching you all day.

Re: The copilot delusion

#127

Post by alexjplant »

sgarland wrote: post #79

> The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with. I fully agree. This already happened with the explosion of DevOps bullshit, where people with no understanding of Linux got jobs by memorizing abstractions. “Stop gatekeeping,” they say. “Stop blowing up prod, and read docs” I fire back.

> explosion of DevOps bullshit

The fact that somebody can "be DevOps" or work as a "DevOps Engineer" is exemplary of the fact that DevOps as conceived and DevOps as practiced are two very different things. The former would be engineers taking ownership of deployment, collaborating horizontally, and practicing tight feedback loops. DevOps as practiced is the time-honored tradition of a dev team and a cloud team playing tennis with a grenade that is a questionably-stable SaaS that people volley back and forth with rackets like "let's roll the pods" or "it worked on my machine".

> people with no understanding of Linux got jobs

This happens in every industry with every job title. I've worked with Senior+ developers that mutated React props, didn't know how to use Git, couldn't read Java stack traces, etc. I myself have been paid money to do a myriad of things that I have no business doing (like singing or playing guitar or mixing cocktails). It's the way of the world.

Re: The copilot delusion

#128

Post by Aziell »

I used to work with someone like this. At first, he really wanted to do things properly. Over time, he gave up. Not because he was lazy, but because he felt like effort didn’t really matter.

Copilot’s fine for boilerplate. But lean on it too much, and you stop thinking. Stop thinking long enough, and you stop growing. That’s the real cost.

Re: The copilot delusion

#130

Post by cedric_h »

aozgaa wrote: post #124
throwaway314155 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI…

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