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My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

matthewrocklin.com

121–130 of 241 posts

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#121

None of these articles address how we'll go from novice to expert, as either self-taught or through the educational system, and all the bloggers got their proverbial "10k hours" before LLMs were a thing. IMO This isn't abstractions, the risk is wholesale outsourcing of learning. And no, I don't accept the argument that correct and LLMs errors is the same as correcting a junior devs errors because the junior dev would…

I can tell you the current thinking of most of the instructors I know: teach the same fundamentals as always, and carefully add a bit of LLM use.

To use LLMs effectively, you have to be an excellent problem-solver with complex technical problems. And developing those skills has always been the goal of CS education.

Or, more bluntly, are you going to hire the junior with excellent LLM skills, or are you going to hire the junior with excellent LLM skills and excellent technical problem-solving skills?

But they do have to be able to use these tools in the modern workplace so we do cover some of that kind of usage. Believe me, though, they are pretty damned good at it without our help. The catch is when students use it in a cheating way and don't develop those problem-solving skills and then are screwed when it comes time to get hired.

So our current thinking is there's no real shortcut other than busting your ass like always. The best thing LLMs offer here is the ability to act as a tutor, which does really increase the speed of learning.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#122
post #119

>>I get it, you’re too good to vibe code. You’re a senior developer who has been doing this for 20 years and knows the system like the back of your hand. >> [...] >>No, you’re not too good to vibe code. In fact, you’re the only person who should be vibe coding. All we have to do is produce more devs with 20 years of experience and we'll be set. :)

Original author of the post here. Just to give credit where it's due, that was a quote from this other excellent article written by someone else:

https://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/a-guide-to-gen-ai-llm-vi...

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#123
post #5

I get vibe-coders not having a good experience once the honeymoon is over. But I'm fascinated that a professional software developer could have such a different experience than I do. • LLMs generate junk • LLMs generate a lot of junk

My question is why use AI to output javascript or python? Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal? If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction. Which means its incapabilities in…

If you read on in the post you might be interested in the section titled

Drop Python: Use Rust and Typescript

https://matthewrocklin.com/ai-zealotry/#big-idea-drop-python...

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#124

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

One can have fun with all manner of things. Take wood-working for example. One can have fun with a handsaw. One can also have fun with a table saw. They're both fun, just different kinds

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question is why use AI to output javascript or python? Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal? If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction. Which means its incapabilities in…

One thing I have been doing is breaking out of my long-held default mode of spinning up a react/nextjs project whenever I need frontend, and generating barebones HTML/CSS/JS for basic web apps. A lot of the reason we went with the former was the easy access to packages and easy-to-understand state management, but now that a lot of the functionality packages used to provide can be just as easily generated, I can get a…

Pretty interesting take this. I wonder if there is a minimal state management we could evolve which would be sufficient for LLMs to use while still making it possible for a human to reason about the abstraction. It won't be as bloated as the existing ones we came up with organically however.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#127

I clicked out of the article since it starts out with a contradiction. Experienced engineers can successfully vibe code? By definition it means not reading the output. If you’re not reading your output, then why does skill level even matter?

Don't you think "having a concrete idea of what sort of code change / end behavior you're looking for" affects the prompts and LLM output?

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#128
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” Indeed, of all the possible things to say! AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.

I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Wrestling the computer is stuff like figuring out how to recite the right incantation so Gradle will do a multi-platform fat bundle, and then migrate to the next major Gradle version. Unless you have a very specific set of kinks, tasks like these will make you want to quit your career in computers and pick up trash on the highway instead. You very likely have some of…

Now we have to figure out how to recite the right incantation to Claude to get it to recite the right incantation to Gradle in an exchange redolent of "guess the verb" from old Adventure games. Best case if you get it wrong: nothing happens. Worst case: grue will eat you.

Sanchez's Law of Abstraction applies. You haven't abstracted anything away, just added more shit to the pile.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI lets you pick the parts you want to focus on and streamline the parts you don't. I get zero joy out of wrestling build tools or figuring out deploy scripts to get what I've built out onto a server. In the past side projects would stall out because the few hours per week I had would get consumed by all of the side stuff. Now I take care of that using AI and focus on the parts I want to write.

Also just.. boring code. Like I'm probably more anti-AI than most, but even I'll acknowledge it's nice to just be like... "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" and just have it work. Or how to load strings from exotic character encodings. Or dozens of other bitchy little issues that drag software dev speed down, don't help me "grow" as a developer, and/or are not interesting to solve, ful…

I've always believed that the dozens of 'bitchy little issues' are the means to grow as a developer.

Once you've done it, you'll hopefully never have to do it again (or at worse be derivatives). Over time you'll have a collection of 'how to do stuff'.

I think this is the path to growth. Letting a LLM do it for you is equivalent to it solving a hard leetcode problem. You're not really taxing your brain.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#130
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also just.. boring code. Like I'm probably more anti-AI than most, but even I'll acknowledge it's nice to just be like... "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" and just have it work. Or how to load strings from exotic character encodings. Or dozens of other bitchy little issues that drag software dev speed down, don't help me "grow" as a developer, and/or are not interesting to solve, ful…

I've always believed that the dozens of 'bitchy little issues' are the means to grow as a developer. Once you've done it, you'll hopefully never have to do it again (or at worse be derivatives). Over time you'll have a collection of 'how to do stuff'. I think this is the path to growth. Letting a LLM do it for you is equivalent to it solving a hard leetcode problem. You're not really taxing your brain.

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