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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#131

Post by drchickensalad »

nabbed wrote: post #128

I'm glad I am no longer in tech because I just don't want to do this. This is not a dig at AI. If I take this article at face value, AI makes people more productive, assuming they have the taste and knowledge to steer their agents properly. And that's possibly a good thing even though it might have temporary negative side effects for the economy. >But the AI is writing the traversal logic, the hashing layers, the wat…

I wish I moved to HCOL earlier so I could have saved enough fast enough to be you. I thought it would take more time before the end...

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#132

Post by aspenmartin »

egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

I do disagree with the notion that you have to slog through a problem to learn efficiently. That it's either "the easy way [bad, you dont learn] or the hard way [good you do learn]" is a false dichotomy. Agents / LLMs are like having an always-on, highly adept teacher who can synthesize information in an intuitive way, and that you can explore a topic with. That's extremely efficient and effective for learning. There is maybe a tradeoff somewhat in some things, but this idea that LLMs make you not learn doesn't feel right; they allow you to learn _as much as you want and about the things that you want_, which wasn't before. You had to learn, inefficiently(!), a bunch of crap you didn't want to in order to learn the thing you _did_ want to. I will not miss those days.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#133

Post by nightski »

tsunamifury wrote: post #122
egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

Books are for the mentally enfeebled who can't memorize knowledge. - Socrates

Aren't books to communicate knowledge?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#134

Post by sdf2df »

tsunamifury wrote: post #122
egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

Books are for the mentally enfeebled who can't memorize knowledge. - Socrates

Wrong person you're quoting but he did not foresee the benefit of leveraging the work of others to extend and build-on-top.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#135

Post by jascha_eng »

sn0wflak3s wrote: post #91
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #6

This essay somehow sounds worse than AI slop, like ChatGPT did a line of coke before writing this out. I use AI everyday for coding. But if someone so obviously puts this little effort into their work that they put out into the world, I don’t think I trust them to do it properly when they’re writing code.

I wrote it myself. But the irony isn't lost on me. "Who did what" is kind of the whole point of the article. Appreciate the feedback.

FWIW I reported your post to the mods because it reads completely AI generated to me. My judgement was that it might have been slightly edited but is largely verbatim LLM output.

Some tells that you might wanna look at in your writing, if you truly did write it yourself without Any LLM input are these contrarian/pivoting statements. Your post is full of these and it is imo the most classic LLM writing tell atm. These are mostly variants of the 'Its not X but Y" theme:

- "Not whether they've adopted every tool, but whether they're curious"

- "I still drive the intuition. The agents just execute at a speed I never could alone."

- "The model doesn't save you from bad decisions. It just helps you make them faster."

- "That foundation isn't decoration. It's the reason the AI is useful to me in the first place."

- "That's not prompting. That's engineering"

It is also telling that the reader basically cant take a breather most of the sentences try to emphasize harder than the last one. There is no fluff thought, no getting side tracked. It reads unnatural, humans do not think like this usually.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#136

Post by skydhash »

codebolt wrote: post #65
noemit wrote: post #3

Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…

One issue is that developers have been trained for the past few decades to look for solutions to problems online by just dumping a few relevant keywords into Google. But to get the most out of AI you should really be prompting as if you were writing a formal letter to the British throne explaining the background of your request. Basic English writing skills, and the ability to formulate your thoughts in a clear manne…

> the ability to formulate your thoughts in a clear manner, have become essential skills for engineering

  The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.
Dijkstra (1970) "Notes On Structured Programming" (EWD249), Section 3 ("On The Reliability of Mechanisms"), p. 7.

And

  Some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.
Dijkstra (1976-79) On the foolishness of "natural language programming" (EWD 667)

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#137

Post by _doctor_love »

egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

It always comes down to economics and then the person and their attitude towards themselves.

Some things are worth learning deeply, in other cases the easy / fast solution is what the situation calls for.

I've thought recently that some kinds of 'learning' with AI are not really that different from using Cliffs Notes back in the day. Sometimes getting the Cliffs Notes summary was the way to get a paper done OR a way to quickly get through a boring/challenging book (Scarlet Letter, amirite?). And in some cases reading the summary is actually better than the book itself.

BUT - I think everyone could agree that if you ONLY read Cliffs Notes, you're just cheating yourself out of an education.

That's a different and deeper issue because some people simply do not care to invest in themselves. They want to do minimum work for maximum money and then go "enjoy themselves."

Getting a person to take an interest in themselves, in their own growth and development, to invite curiosity, that's a timeless problem.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#138

Post by zdragnar »

squidbeak wrote: post #100
0x3f wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit simplistic. The bakery can just expand its product range or do various other things to add work. In fact that's exactly what I would expect to happen at a tech company, ceteris paribus.

A market has to exist for this expanded range and for the expanded ranges of every other bakery. Otherwise the bakery's just wasting flour. Where is this expanded demand coming from?

Two loaves of bread off the same line are perfect substitutes for each other, and compete to be sold.

Lines of code within the same code base aren't competing to be sold. They either complement each other by adding new features, making the actual product sold more valuable, or one replaces another to make a feature more desirable- look better, work faster, etc.

The market grows if you add new features- your bread now doubles as a floatation device- or you introduce a new line of bread with nuts and berries.

So, the business has to decide- does it fire some workers and pocket the difference until someone else undercuts them, or does it keep the workers and grow the market it can sell to faster?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#139

Post by tayo42 »

aspenmartin wrote: post #132
egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

I do disagree with the notion that you have to slog through a problem to learn efficiently. That it's either "the easy way [bad, you dont learn] or the hard way [good you do learn]" is a false dichotomy. Agents / LLMs are like having an always-on, highly adept teacher who can synthesize information in an intuitive way, and that you can explore a topic with. That's extremely efficient and effective for learning. There…

I don't think your saying the same thing. Ai can help you get through the hard stuff effeciently and you'll learn. It acts as a guide, but you still do the work.

Offloading completely the hard work and just getting a summary isn't really learning.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#140

Post by wcfrobert »

egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

My solution to this is to prioritize. There isn't enough time in a person's life to learn everything anyways.

Selectively pick and struggle through things you want to learn deeply. And let AI spoon-feed you for things you don't care as much about.

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