AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it • Hacker News Board

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#151

Post by girvo » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 10:25 PM UTC

IceDane wrote: post #148

lsy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining knowledge of “what you are doing”. With AI coding either you need to carefully review outputs and you aren’t saving any cognitive capacity, or you aren’t looking at the outputs and don’t know what you’re…

It's staggering to me how many times I've heard this argument that LLMs are just the next level of abstraction. Some people are even comparing them to compilers.

> Some people are even comparing them to compilers.

A lot of people are using them as such too: the amount of people talking about "my fleets of agents working on 4 different projects": they aren't reviewing that output. They say they are, but they aren't, anymore than I review the LLVM IR. It makes me feel like I'm in some fantasy land: I watch Opus 4.7 get things consistently backwards at the margins, mess up, make bugs: we wouldn't accept a compiler that did any of this at this scale or level lol

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#152

Post by girvo » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 10:26 PM UTC

heipei wrote: post #72

torben-friis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The huge difference is that we don't know the cost we're going to end up with. Will you have AI at the cost of a slack subscription? At the cost of a teammate? Will it not be available and you'll have to hire anthropic workers with AI access?

Local AI models are already more than capable enough writing code that surpasses the ability of any bad or even mediocre engineer. That is not something we need to worry about. In a way, this is less of a cost issue than the fact that some/many engineers do not seem to be willing or able to host things themselves anymore and will happily outsource every part of their stack to managed services, be it CDN, hosting, dat…

Qwen 3.6 27B is shockingly good, just to add to your point.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#153

Post by bilsbie » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 10:28 PM UTC

It’s weird I have basically a free private tutor in any subject and I use it a lot.

Yet nothing has actually changed.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#154

Post by girvo » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 10:29 PM UTC

SirYandi wrote: post #98

saadn92 wrote: post #10

Hard disagree. I feel like I'm thinking a lot more now because I have so many parallel projects going on at the same time. AI has allowed me to really, truly create in a way that I've never done before. Yes, my coding skills probably aren't as sharp as they used to be, but my system design skills are at an all time high. Don't blame the tool.

So you'll have a beautifully designed system with rotting bones? A system constrained to the same patterns seen in training data. Not terrible, good enough. I don't know, I don't doubt you're more productive. Broadly so. But the depth and rigor I think may be missing, as the article suggests. As an aside, I suppose it's a good time for those nearing the end of their careers, those who no longer need to learn, to cash…

> But the depth and rigor I think may be missing, as the article suggests.

Nearly certainly. Just turns out that depth and rigour matters a lot less than I would've hoped. Depressing, really.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#155

Post by coldtea » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 10:29 PM UTC

keeda wrote: post #128

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineer as a term has already drifted vastly since nobody in the field of "Software Engineering" is actually an Engineer if we go by a strict definitions. Engineers are accredited and in some countries even come with a title.

> ... nobody in the field of "Software Engineering" is actually an Engineer if we go by a strict definitions. This is a pet peeve of mine, so while I understand what you mean, I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering! And since I've had this discussion before, I'll pre-emptively hazard a guess that the argument boils down to "rigor", and point out that a) economic fe…

>I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering!

"Structured, mature, legally enforced, physically grounded standards based approach to the construction of repeatable, reliable, verifiable, artifacts under stable (to the degree that matters) external constraints".

Some niche software development (e.g. NASA/JPL coding projects with special rules, practices, MISRA etc) can look like that.

99.9% of the time though, software "engineering" is an ad hoc, mix and match, semi-random, always changing requirements and environments, half-art half-guess, process, by unlicensed practicioners, that is only regulated at some minor aspects of its operation (like GDPR, or accessibility requirements), if that.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#156

Post by girvo » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC

dannersy wrote: post #140

No one uses it this way, despite what people say. They hit any sort of wall and then ask the robot. Thought ends.

Same way everyone gives lip service to reviewing output. I know for a fact that at work most don't, not deeply/properly. You basically can't and hit the volume that's been demanded.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#157

Post by eleumik » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 10:34 PM UTC

Pannoniae wrote: post #122

sheepscreek wrote: post #6

AI is creating problems. This isn’t one of them. Engineers are going to now think at a higher level of abstraction. No one misses coding in assembly.

Look at the comments about MSVC removing inline assembly as a supported feature for a counterexample. :D (A competent assembly programmer can go miles around a competent high-level programmer, that's still true in 2026...)

Explained by LLM: It is 100% true that no human alive can write 1000 lines of assembly better than GCC or LLVM. It is also still 100% true, right now in 2026, that a truly competent assembly programmer can write 10 lines of assembly that will beat any compiler on earth by a factor of 2x, 3x, even 5x. The entire industry looked at this situation, and somehow concluded the exact wrong lesson: "humans should never write assembly". Instead of the correct lesson: "humans should almost only write assembly".

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#158

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 10:35 PM UTC

sheepscreek wrote: post #6

AI is creating problems. This isn’t one of them. Engineers are going to now think at a higher level of abstraction. No one misses coding in assembly.

At a high level of abstraction, the product owner can talk to the LLM directly by themselves. The "engineers" will have abstracted themselves out of a job.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#159

Post by lukan » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

lsy wrote: post #117

xnx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This concept won't reach that point because when you chisel too hard it crumbles. There are countless lower level tasks that typical programmers no longer learn how to do. Our capacity for knowledge is not unlimited so we offload everything we can to move to the next level of abstraction.

AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining knowledge of “what you are doing”. With AI coding either you need to carefully review outputs and you aren’t saving any cognitive capacity, or you aren’t looking at the outputs and don’t know what you’re…

"You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it"

But it seems we are heading there. For simple stuff, if I made a very clear spec - I can be almost sure, that every time I give that prompt to a AI, it will work without error, using the same algorithms. So quality of prompt is more valuable, than the generated code

So either way, this is what I focus my thinking on right now, something that always was important and now with AI even more so - crystal clear language describing what the program should do and how.

That requires enough thinking effort.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#160

Post by thunky » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 10:39 PM UTC

vict7 wrote: post #97

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #24

There are plenty of engineers that couldn't work without a modern IDE or in languages without memory management. Or without the ability to use a library from GitHub / their package manager. It doesn't feel THAT much different to me. "Engineer" as a term might drift. There are "web developers" that can only use webflow / wordpress.

IDEs are free. Libraries are free. Languages are free. This is becoming more like an internet subscription where you’re at the mercy of Anthropic the same way you may be at the mercy of Comcast. I’m sure you can see the difference between a garbage collector and a nondeterministic slop generator But it feels good to equivocate, so here we are.

Not all IDEs are free. Not all LLMs are subscriptions.