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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
151–160 of 608 posts
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#152I said this in 2015... just not as well!
"Automation Should Be Like Iron Man, Not Ultron" https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#153In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…
> Boris said that writing code is a solved problem That's just so dumb to say. I don't think we can trust anything that comes out of the mouths of the authors of these tools. They are conflicted. Conflict of interest, in society today, is such a huge problem.
There are bloggers that can't even acknowledge that they're only invited out to big tech events because they'll glaze them up to high heavens.
Reminds me of that famous exchange, by noted friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Noam Chomsky: "I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think anyone serious believes this. Replacing developers with a less costly alternative is obviously a very market bullish dream, it has existed since as long as I've worked in the field. First it was supposed to be UML generated code by "architects", then it was supposed to be developers from developing countries, then no-code frameworks, etc. AI will be a tool, no more no less. Most likely a good one, but t…
Ah, don't take me wrong - I don't believe it's possible for LLMs to replace 90% or any number of SWEs with existing technology. All I'm saying is - why to think what AI is (exoskeleton, co-worker, new life form), when its owners intent is to create SWE replacement? If your neighbor is building a nuclear reactor in his shed from a pile of smoke detectors, you don't say "think about this as a science experiment" becaus…
> If your neighbor is building a nuclear reactor in his shed from a pile of smoke detectors, you don't say "think about this as a science experiment" because it's impossible, just call police/NRC because of intent and actions.
Only if you're a snitch loser
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#155not AI, but IA: Intelligence Augmentation.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#156In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…
"Writing code is a solved problem"
disagree.
Yes, there are common parts to everything we do, at the same time - I've been doing this for 25 years and most of the projects have some new part to them.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#157In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…
There's so many timeless books on how to write software, design patterns, lessons learned from production issues. I don't think AI will stop being used for open source, in fact, with the number of increasing projects adjusting their contributor policies to account for AI I would argue that what we'll see is always people who love to hand craft their own code, and people who use AI to build their own open source tooling and solutions. We will also see an explosion is needing specs for things. If you give a model a well defined spec, it will follow it. I get better results the more specific I get about how I want things built and which libraries I want used.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#158There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software.
In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh.
In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchronization costs to eek out mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people. Software is going to become an individual sport, not a team sport, quickly. The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. I would rather a single human (for now) architect with good taste and an army of agents than a team of humans.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#159In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…
I saw Boris give a live demo today. He had a swarm of Claude agents one shot the most upvoted open issue on Excalidraw while he explained Claude code for about 20 minutes.
No lines of code written by him at all. The agent used Claude for chrome to test the fix in front of us all and it worked. I think he may be right or close to it.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar to his. But in areas where they don’t exist, writing code isn’t a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents. Even with full context, wr…
It's funny that "restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents" aligns really well with what we have "supposed" to have been doing already, but many teams slack on: quality tests that are easy to run, and great documentation. Context and verifiability. The easier your codebase is to hack on for a human, the easier it is for an LLM generally.
I had this epiphany a few weeks ago, I'm glad to see others agreeing. Eventually most models will handle large enough context windows where this will sadly not matter as much, but it would be nice for the industry to still do everything to make better looking code that humans can see and appreciate.