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Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

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Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#151

Post by jvvw »

llm_trw wrote: post #38
sshine wrote: post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

Homework is a proxy for your retention of information and a guide to what you should review. That somehow schools started assigning grades to it is as nonsensically barbaric as public bare ass caning was 80 years ago and driven by the same instinct.

I agree on the grades part. And I was just thinking that the university that I went to never gave us grades during the year (the only exception I can think of was when we did practice exam papers so we had an idea how we were doing).

I think homework is more than a guide to what you should review though. It's partly so that the teacher can find out what students have learned/understood so they can adapt their teaching appropriately. It's also because using class/contact time to do work that can be done independently isn't always the best use of that time (at least once students are willing and capable of doing that work independently).

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#152

Post by mkvoid »

sho_hn wrote: post #85
hollowturtle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who wa…

This is fascinating. The idea of leveling off in the learning curve is one that I hadn't considered before, although with hindsight it seems obvious. Based on your recollection (and without revealing too many personal details), do you recall any specific areas that caused the struggle? For example, was it a lack of understanding of the program architecture? Was it an issue of not understanding data structures? (or whatever) Thanks for your comment, it opened up a new set of questions for me.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#153

Post by Fricken »

0x1062 wrote: post #53
hollowturtle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.

Tools help us to put layers of abstraction between us and our goals. when things become too abstracted we lose sight of what we're really doing or why. Tools allow us to feel smart and productive while acting stupidly, and against our best interests. So we get fascism and catastrophic climate change, stuff like that. Tools create dependencies. We can't imagine life without our tools.

"We shape our tools and our tools in turn shape us" said Marshall McLuhan.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#154

Post by [deleted] »

radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#155

Post by lukan »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #149
lukan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Put simply, using AI makes you worse at your job - precisely when you need to be better." I don't follow. Usually jobs require deliver working things. The more efficient the worker knows his tools(like AI), the more he will deliver -> the better he is at his job. If he cannot deliver reliable working things, because he does not understand the LLM output, then he fails at delivering.

You cannot just reduce programming to "deliver working things", though. For some tasks, sure, "working" is all that matters. For many tasks, though, efficiency, maintainability, and other factors are important. You also need to take into account how to judge if something is "working" or not — that's not necessarily a trivial task.

That is part of "deliver working things".

A car hold together by duct tape is usually not considered a working car or road save.

Same with code.

"You also need to take into account how to judge if something is "working" or not — that's not necessarily a trivial task."

Indeed, and if the examiner cannot do that, he might be in a wrong position in the first place.

If I am presented with code, I can ask the person what it does. If the person does not have a clue - then this shows quickly.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#156

Post by exitb »

radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…

It's not that there's anything wrong with this in particular. It's just that the general market seems much more optimistic about AI impact, than the AI companies themselves.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#157

Post by exe34 »

xnorswap wrote: post #145
radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…

I'm with you, I'm very surprised by the amount arguments which boil down to, "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat". I have read that people are getting more selfish[1], but it still shocks me how much people are willing to push individualism and selfishness under the guise of either, "Well it's not illegal" or "Well, it's not detectable". I think I'm just very much out of tune with the…

> "Well it's not illegal"

What's good for the gander.... I promise you they will use AI to vet your application.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#158

Post by skissane »

logicchains wrote: post #106
eviks wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot a second sentence that completes the logic chain. Yes, "some tools are useful for some work", so what? That wasn't the original claim...

The claim was that it's lazy to use a tool as a substitute for learning how to do something yourself. But when the tool entirely obviates the need for doing the task yourself, you don't need to be able to do it yourself to do the job. It doesn't matter if a forklift driver isn't strong enough to manually carry a load, similarly once AI is good enough it won't matter if a developer doesn't know how to write all the co…

> once AI is good enough it won't matter if a developer doesn't know how to write all the code an AI wrote for them, what matters is that they can produce code that fulfills requirements, regardless of how that code is produced.

Once AI is that good, the developer won't have a job any more.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#159

Post by Muromec »

radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…

It is very sensible position and I think the quote is a bit out of context, but the important part here is who it is coming from -- the company that makes money on both cheating in the job application process (which harms employers) and replacing said jobs with AI, or at least creating another excuse for layoffs (which harms the employees).

In a sense, they poisoned the well and don't want to drink from it now. Looking at it from this perspective justifies (in the eyes of some people at least) said cheating. Something something catalytic converter from the company truck.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#160

Post by oytis »

michaelt wrote: post #118
oytis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I heavily rely on Google for work, wouldn't expect a candidate spend precious interview time googling though.

There are a bunch of subtly different ways to perform a coding interview. If the interviewer points you at a whiteboard and asks you how to reverse an array, most likely they're checking you know what a for loop is and how to index into an array, and how to be careful of off-by-one errors. Even if your language has a built-in library function for doing this, they'd probably like you to not use it. If the interviewer…

Makes sense. I've never been asked to make such an exercise in real time, most of the time that would be a take home task - but I understand if someone wants to do that. Still it would be weird to demand that a candidate uses Google, wouldn't it?
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