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I don't care how well your "AI" works

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Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#121

Post by ErroneousBosh »

I recently had to write a simple web app to search through a database, but full-text searching wasn't quite cutting it. The underlying data was too inconsistent and the kind of things people would ask for would mean searching across five or six columns.

Just the job for an AI agent!

So what I did is this - I wrote the app in Django, because it's what I'm familiar with.

Then in the view for the search page, I picked apart the search terms. If they start with "01" it's an old phone number so look in that column, if they start with "03" it's a new phone number so look in that column, if they start with "07" it's a mobile, if it's a letter followed by two digits it's a site code, if it's numeric but doesn't have a 0 at the start it's an internal number, and if it doesn't match anything then see if it exists as a substring in the description column.

There we go. Very fast and natural searching that Does What You Mean (mostly).

No Artificial Intelligence.

All done with Organic Home-grown Brute Force and Ignorance.

Because that's sometimes just what you need.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#122

Post by eisbaw »

Programming and CS is the art of solving problems - hopefully problems that matter.

AI lets you do that faster.

AI may suggest a dumb way, so you have to think, and tell it what to do.

My rate of thinking is faster than typing, so the bottleneck has switched from typing to thinking!

Don't let AI think for you. Do actual intensional arch design.

Programmers that don't know CS who only care about hammering the keyboards because they're artisans have little future.

AI also give me back my hobby after having kids -- time is valuable, and AI is energy efficient.

We are truly living in a cambrian explosion -- lot of slop will be produced, but market and selection pressure will weed those out.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#123

Post by andrepd »

lynx97 wrote: post #53
andrepd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You don't like $instance_of_X? You must want to get rid of all $X" has got to be one of the most intellectually lazy things you could say. You don't like leaded gasoline? You must want us to walk everywhere. Come on...

A tool is a tool. These AI critics sound to me like people who have hit their finger with a hammer, and now advocate against using them altogether. Yes, tech has always had two sides. Our "job" as humans is to pick the good parts, and avoid the bad. Nothing new, nothing exceptional.

More lazy analogies... Yes a hammer is a tool, so is a machine gun, a nuke, or the guy with his killdozer. So what are you gonna do? Nothing to see here, discussion closed.

This is not an interesting conversation.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#124

Post by embedding-shape »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #113
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

> the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world Are you sure about that?

No, I'm just pulling anecdotes out of my ass/am hallucinating.

Is there something specific you'd like to point me to, besides just replying with a soundbite?

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#125

Post by grumbel »

spicyusername wrote: post #115
thunky wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now. But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it. Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor qua…

> assign work to an LLM This is just not happening anywhere around me. I don't know why it keeps getting repeated in every one of these discussions. Every software engineer I know is using LLM tools, but every team around me is still hiring new developers. Zero firing is happening in any circle near me due to LLMs. LLMs can not do unsupervised work, period. They do not replace developers. They replace Stack Overflow…

> This is just not happening anywhere around me.

Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. AI is brand new bleeding edge technology right now, and adaption always takes time, especially when the integration with IDEs and such is even more bleeding edge than the underlying AI systems themselves.

And speaking about the future, I wouldn't just worry about it replacing the programmer, I'd worry about it replacing the program. The future we are heading into might be one where the AI is your OS. If you need an app to do something, you can just make it up on the spot, a lot of classic programs will no longer need to exist.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#126

Post by queenkjuul »

embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

You clearly haven't tried looking for a job in the last two years have you

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#127

Post by queenkjuul »

spicyusername wrote: post #115
thunky wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now. But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it. Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor qua…

> assign work to an LLM This is just not happening anywhere around me. I don't know why it keeps getting repeated in every one of these discussions. Every software engineer I know is using LLM tools, but every team around me is still hiring new developers. Zero firing is happening in any circle near me due to LLMs. LLMs can not do unsupervised work, period. They do not replace developers. They replace Stack Overflow…

You're mostly right but very few teams are hiring in the grand scheme of things. The job market is not friendly for devs right now (not saying that's related to AI, just a bad market right now)

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#128

Post by hacb »

embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

It's absolutely not easy to find a new job in France, and more generally in Europe

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#129

Post by queenkjuul »

embedding-shape wrote: post #90
DJBunnies wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah it's pretty bad, but congrats on being an outlier.

Literally the worst job you can find as a programmer today (if you lower you standards and particularly, stay away from cryptocurrency jobs) is 10x better than the non-programmer jobs you can find. If you don't trust me, give a non-programming job a try for 1 year and then come back and tell me how much more comfy $JOB was :)

I was a lot happier in previous non-programming jobs, they just were much worse at paying the bills. If i could make my programming salary doing either of my previous jobs, i would go back in a heartbeat. Hell if i could make even 60% of my programming salary doing those jobs I'd go back.

I enjoy the practice of programming well enough but i do not at all love it as a career. I don't hate it by any means either but it's far from my first choice in terms of career.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#130

Post by rsynnott »

rho4 wrote: post #23

And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.

Don't be the person refusing the 4GL/Segway/3D TV/NFT/Metaverse. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks.

Like, I mean, at a certain point it runs out of chances. If someone can show me compelling quantitive evidence that these things are broadly useful I may reconsider, but until then I see no particular reason to do my own sampling. If and when they are useful, there will be _evidence_ of that.

(In fairness Segways seem to have a weird afterlife in certain cities helping to make tourists more annoying; there are sometimes niche uses for even the most pointless tech fads.)

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