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The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

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Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#131

Post by dns_snek »

DrewADesign wrote: post #51
Veedrac wrote: post #17

A refusal to even acknowledge that AI might work isn't a very sensible refutation of the risks we're going to face.

> A refusal to even acknowledge that AI might work isn't a very sensible refutation of the risks we're going to face. That's probably why they're not doing that. The core premise-- we will rely on AI so much that we will de-skill ourselves-- requires acknowledging that AI works.

> The core premise-- we will rely on AI so much that we will de-skill ourselves-- requires acknowledging that AI works.

No it doesn't require that because the vast majority of people aren't rational actors and they don't optimize for the quality of their work - they optimize for their own comfort and emotional experience.

They'll happily produce and defend low quality work if they get to avoid the discomfort of having to engage in cognitively strenuous work, in the same way people rationalize every other choice they make that's bad for them, the society, the environment, and anyone else.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#132

Post by dagmx »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #126
dagmx wrote: post #85

Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers. 80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them. We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do. But these people are struggling to…

What do you consider senior? We've seem to have had a significant title-inflation in the last 5 years, and everybody seems to be at least a senior. With no new junior positions opening up, I'm not even sure I blame them.

A senior to me is someone who can tackle complex problems without significant supervision , differentiated from a lead in that they still need guidance on what the overall tasks are. They should be familiar enough with their tech stacks that I can send them to meetings (after the requisite on-boarding time) to represent the team if needed (though I try and not overload my engineers with meetings) and answer feasibility questions for our projects. They don’t need constant check ins on their work. I should be able to bounce ideas of them readily on how to approach bigger problems.

A junior being someone who needs more granular direction or guidance. I’d only send them to meetings paired with a senior. They need close to daily check ins on their work. I include them in all the same things the seniors do for exposure, but do not expect the same level of technical strength at this time in their careers.

I try not to focus on years of experience necessarily, partly because I was supervising teams at large companies very early in my career.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#133

Post by spaceballbat »

dagmx wrote: post #85

Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers. 80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them. We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do. But these people are struggling to…

Grade inflation has spilled over into the corporate world. I’ve interviewed people titled “principal” who would barely qualify as “senior” a few decades ago.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#135

Post by obscurette »

jstanley wrote: post #60
password54321 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post was largely about young people who are growing up with these tools and are still at the stage of developing their habits and tendencies. Personally I am glad I learnt programming before LLMs even if it meant the tedious searches on stackoverflow because I didn't feel like I was coming up against a wave of new technology when it came to future job searches. Having done so I can understand and appreciate the i…

Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.

My professor at uni said that people who have learned to search for information before the internet came along are the best at searching for information on the internet. My personal experience agrees and I'm very glad I'm one of such people.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#136

Post by raincole »

dagmx wrote: post #93
k__ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of opinion what you should know and what you can easily google or ask an LLM.

If someone needs to continuously google how to use the basic data structures in a language they use every day, then I worry about their ability for knowledge retention as a whole.

I think it depends on what you consider "basic data structures"...

If it's the List and Dict (or whatever they are called in that language) then maybe. But I'd not expect someone to spell the correct API by heart to use Stack, Queue, Deque, etc, even they're text book examples of "basic" data structures.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#138

Post by fluidcruft »

bamboozled wrote: post #102
fluidcruft wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the code we've created looks crap and is mostly wrong, full of fluff, or hard to understand I don't disagree in general but I've had a lot of success asking the LLMs to specifically fix these things and make things more maintainable when specifically prompted to do so. I agree debugging and getting things working it often needs supervision, guidance and advice. And architecture it often gets a little wrong and need…

It's not the article is about though, you're doing all this "engineering" to have success with the "AI". You're not really "depending on it", which is more in the spirit of the article and what I found myself starting to do. At some point you think , I'll either do it myself, or use "AI", at which point you will start to become dependent on it.

Ah I see what you mean. I interpret "depending on it" to have shifted. I want to depend on a particular project for my work, and if it happened to exist on github, I would have just used that. But it doesn't exist so I have created a fake github "community" to develop the part that I will depend on and I don't want to think about a lot of the API design for things I haven't thought about yet, I just want it to work and be ergonomic.

But my point remains specifically about the crappy code AI writes. In my experience, it will clean it up if you tell it to. There's the simple angle of complexity and it does an okay job with that. But there's the API design side also and that's what the second part is about. LLM will just add dumb ass hacks all over the place when a new feature is needed and that leads to a huge confusing integration mess. Whereas with this setup when I want to build an extension the API has been mostly worked out and when I want to build an application the API has mostly been worked out. That's the way it would work if I ran into a project on github I wanted to depend on.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#139

Post by risyachka »

dagmx wrote: post #99
alchemism wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pair a senior with an agent LLM, pair a junior with an agent LLM, measure the output over some cycles. You will find your answer in the data, one way or another.

Truthfully, in my experience, they both end up performing near the level of the LLM. It’s an averaging factor not an uplifting one.

Nope, you don't pair senior dev with llm. You allow them use llm, but not an agent.

IF agent starts generating code - nobody will have time and stamina to rewrite all the slop, it will just get approved.

Copy/paste from chat is the only way to ensure proper quality so that developer can write high quality code and just outsource to AI tasks that are boring or generic.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#140

Post by visarga »

mnky9800n wrote: post #110
mtillman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255603105_The_Effec... 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25509828/ 3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392560878_Your_Brai... I’m pretty convinced it should be used to do things humans can’t do instead of things humans can do well with practice. However, I’m also convinced that Capital will always rely on Labor to use it on their behalf.

I don't think that a couple papers counts for much of anything. A couple scientific articles form an opinion about a topic. The evidence shown in those papers are certainly something to think about, but there hasn't been enough time or effort put into the use of understanding how AI technologies aide technical work and the ability to solve more complex problems to make some sort of suggested claim that it is inherent…

Time goes forward, in the future when will you be in a situation you can't access a LLM? Better use LLM as much as possible to learn the skills of controlling agents, scaffolding constrains, docs, breaking problems in such a way that AI can solve them. These are the skills that matter now.

We don't practice much using the assembler either, or the slide ruler. I also lost the skill to start an old Renault 12 which I owned 30 years ago, it is a complex process believe me, there were some owners reaching artist level at it.

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