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Building better AI tools

hazelweakly.me

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Re: Building better AI tools

#151

Post by ghc »

mentalgear wrote: post #47
ghc wrote: post #44

This post is a good example of why groundbreaking innovations often come from outsiders. The author's ideas are clearly colored by their particular experiences as an engineering manager or principal engineer in (I'm guessing) large organizations, and don't particularly resonate with me. If this is representative of how engineering managers think we should build AI tooling, AI tools will hit a local maximum based on a…

I could of course say one interpretation is that the ml-systems you build have been actively deskilling (or replacing) humans for 15 years. But I agree that the space is wide enough that different interpretations arise depending on where we stand. However, I still find it good practice to keep humans (and their knowledge/retrieval) as much in the loop as possible.

I'm not disagreeing that it's good to keep humans in the loop, but the systems I've worked on give domain experts new information they could not get before -- for example, non-invasive in-home elder care monitoring, tracking "mobility" and "wake ups" for doctors without invading patient privacy.

I think at its best, ML models give new data-driven capabilities to decision makers (as in the example above), or make decisions that a human could not due to the latency of human decision-making -- predictive maintenance applications like detecting impending catastrophic failure from subtle fluctuations in electrical signals fall into this category.

I don't think automation inherently "de-skills" humans, but it does change the relative value of certain skills. Coming back to agentic coding, I think we're still in the skeuomorphic phase, and the real breakthroughs will come from leveraging models to do things a human can't. But until we get there, it's all speculation as far as I'm concerned.

Re: Building better AI tools

#152

Post by dearilos »

nico wrote: post #8
Edmond wrote: post #4

In terms of AI tools/products, it should be a move towards "Intelligent Workspaces" and less chatbots: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627910 Basically environments/platforms that gives all the knobs,levers,throttles to humans while being tightly integrated with AI capabilities. This is hard work that goes far beyond a VSCode fork.

Using Claude Code lately in a project, and I wish my instance could talk to the other developers’ instances to coordinate I know that we can modify CLAUDE.md and maintain that as well as docs. But it would be awesome if CC had something built in for teams to collaborate more effectively Suggestions are welcomed

i'm taking an approach where we scan your codebase and keep rules up to date

you can enforce these rules in code review after CC finishes writing code

email ilya (at) wispbit.com and ill send you a link to set this up

Re: Building better AI tools

#153

Post by 0x457 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #134
0x457 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't remember the last time I write something meaningfully long with an actual pen/pencil. My handwriting is beyond horrible. That's a skill that depends on motor functions of your hands, so it makes sense that it degrades with lack of practice. > I can't no longer find my way driving without a GPS. Reading a map? lol Pretty sure what that actually means in most cases is "I can go from A to B without GPS, but th…

> I'm sure you still these people skill can do, I wonder if you’d make this kind of mistake writing by hand

I would, it's an ADHD thing for me.

Re: Building better AI tools

#155

Post by segmondy »

taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

Doesn't worry me. I believed AI would replace developers and I still do to some degree. But AI is going to lack context, not just in business domain but how it would intersect with the tech side. Experienced developers will be needed. The vibe coders are going to get worse and will need experienced developers to come fix the mess. So no worries, the only thing that would suck would be if the vibe coders earn more money and experienced hand crafting devs are left to pick up the crumbs to survive.

Re: Building better AI tools

#156

Post by jakelazaroff »

mattmanser wrote: post #142
tptacek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel pretty comfortable with how my comment captures the context of the whole piece, which of course I did read. Again: what's weird about this is that the first part would be pretty coherent and defensible if applied to coding agents (some people will want to work the way she spells out, especially earlier in their career, some people won't), but doesn't make as much sense for the example she uses for the remainin…

I know you carry on to have a good argument down thread, but why do you feel the first part defensible? The author's saying great products don't come from solo devs. Linux? Dropbox? Gmail? Ruby on Rails? Python? The list is literally endless. But the author then claims that all great products come from committee? I've seen plenty of products die by committee. I've never seen one made by it. Their initial argument is…

I know the "what you refer to as Linux is, in fact, GNU/Linux" thing has become a sort of tongue-in-cheek meme, but it actually applies here: crediting Linus Torvalds alone for the success of Linux ignores crucial contributions from RMS, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and probably dozens or hundreds of others.

Ruby on Rails? Are we talking about the Ruby part (Matz) or the Rails part (DHH)?

Dropbox was founded by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. The initial Gmail development team had multiple people plus the infrastructure and resources of Google. I'm not sure why people love the lone genius story so much, but it's definitely the exception and not the rule.

Re: Building better AI tools

#157

Post by swiftcoder »

lupire wrote: post #41
agentultra wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need humans to be perfect to have reliable responses to critical situations. Systems are more important than individuals at that level. We understand people make mistakes and design systems and processes to compensate. The problem with unattended AI in these situations is precisely the lack of context, awareness, intuition, intention, and communication skills. If you want automation in your disaster recovery…

What happens when you walk into a fire and you don't know what to do? Or can't do it quickly enough?

We don't throw new-hires in the deep end of the on call rotation on their first day. We make sure they learn the systems, we provide them with runbooks, assign an experienced mentor for their first on call rotation, and have a clear escalation path if they are in over their heads or need additional resources.

Re: Building better AI tools

#158

Post by danielbln »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #84
arscan wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been thinking of LLMs a bit like a credit-card-for-the-mind, it reduces friction to accessing and enabling your own expertise. But if you don’t have that expertise already, be careful, eventually it’ll catch up to you and a big bill will be due.

Unfortunately a lot of people are basically just hoping that by the time the big bill is due, they have cashed out and left the bill on someone else I also think that even with expertise, people relying too much on AI are going to erode their expertise If you can lift heavy weights, but start to use machines to lift instead, your muscles will shrink and you won't be able to lift as much The brain is a muscle it must…

We are in the business of automation, this is also automation. What good is doing the manual work if automation provides good enough results. I increasingly consider the code an implementation detail and spend most of my thinking one abstraction level higher. It's not always there yet but it's really often good enough to great, given the right oversight.

Re: Building better AI tools

#159

Post by [deleted] »

ofjcihen wrote: post #141
tptacek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel pretty comfortable with how my comment captures the context of the whole piece, which of course I did read. Again: what's weird about this is that the first part would be pretty coherent and defensible if applied to coding agents (some people will want to work the way she spells out, especially earlier in their career, some people won't), but doesn't make as much sense for the example she uses for the remainin…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Building better AI tools

#160

Post by bubblyworld »

ofjcihen wrote: post #141
tptacek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel pretty comfortable with how my comment captures the context of the whole piece, which of course I did read. Again: what's weird about this is that the first part would be pretty coherent and defensible if applied to coding agents (some people will want to work the way she spells out, especially earlier in their career, some people won't), but doesn't make as much sense for the example she uses for the remainin…

[flagged]

Let's not do this kind of thing here? There's plenty to engage with in their comments without resorting to ad-hominems or similar.

(your comment is pretty mild, I'm just worried about the general trend on HN)

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