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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"

#171

Post by Muromec »

anal_reactor wrote: post #161
xnorswap wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honesty is not something our modern societies optimize for, although I do wish things were different

It's not just the society, it's this particular company who optimizes for it.

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

#172

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #9

> 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. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree. Exact opposite of our application process at my previous company. We said usage of ChatGPT was expected during the application and int…

> We said usage of ChatGPT was expected during the application and interview phase, since we heavily rely on it for work

You must have missed out on hiring some very good candidates, then.

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

#173

Post by mrdevlar »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #23

If I want to assess a candidates performance when they can't use AI then I think I'd sit in a room with them and talk to them. If I ask people not to use AI on a task where using AI is advantageous and undetectable then I'm going to discriminate against honest people.

But they don't want to do that.

They want to use AI in their hiring process. They want to be able to offload their work and biases to the machine. They just don't want other people to do it.

There's a reason that the EU AI legislation made AI that is used to hire people one of the focal points for action.

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

#174

Post by exe34 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #130
sho_hn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?

Failing for a bit, thinking hard and then somehow getting to the answer - for me it was usually tutorials, asking on stackoverflow/forums, finding a random example on some webpage.

The fastest way for me to learn something new is to find working code or code that I can kick for a bit until it compiles/runs. Often I'll comment out everything and make it print hello world, and then from there try to figure out what the essential bits I need to bring back in, or simplify/mock, etc, until it works again.

I learn a lot more by forming a hypothesis "to make it do this, I need that bit of code, which needs that other bit that looks like it's just preparing this/that object" - and the hypothesis gets tested every time I try to compile/run.

Nowadays I might paste the error into chatgpt and it'll say something that will lead me a step or two closer to figuring out what's going on.

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

#175

Post by hinkley »

Prepping for an interview a couple weeks ago, I grabbed the latest version of IntelliJ. I wanted to set up a blank project with some tests, in case I got stuck and wanted to bail out of whatever app they hit me with and just have unit tests available.

So lacking any other ideas for a sample project I just started implementing Fizzbuzz. And IntelliJ started auto suggesting the implementation. That seems more problematic than helpful, so it was a good thing I didn’t end up needing it.

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

#176

Post by jaggederest »

lukan wrote: post #155
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Completely agree. I'm judging the outputs of a process, I really am only interested in the inputs to that process as a matter of curiosity.

If I can't tell the difference, or if the AI helps you write drastically better code, I see it as no more nor no less than, for example, pair programming or using assistive devices.

I also happen to think that most people, right now, are not very good at using AI to get things done, but I also expect those skills to improve with time.

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

#177

Post by sho_hn »

mkvoid wrote: post #152
sho_hn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

A big problem was that he couldn't attain a mental model of how the code was behaving at runtime, in particular the lifetimes of data and objects - what would get created or destroyed when, exist at what time, happen in what sequence, exist for the whole runtime of the program vs. what's a temporary resource, that kind of thing.

The overall "flow" of the code didn't exist in his head, because he was basically taking small chunks of code in and out of ChatGPT, iterating locally wherever he was and the project just sort of growing organically that way. This is likely also what make the ChatGPT outputs themselves less useful over time: He wasn't aware of enough context to prompt the model with it, so it didn't have much to work with. There wasn't a lot of emerging intelligence a la provide what the client needs not what they think they need.

These days tools like aider end up prompting the model with a repo map etc. in the background transparently, but in 2023/24 that infra didn't exist yet and the context window of the models at the time was also much smaller.

In other words, the evolving nature of these tools might lead to different results today. On the other hand, if it had back then chances are he'd become even more reliant on them. The open question is whether there's a threshold there where it just stops mattering - if the results are always good, does it matter the human doesn't understand them? Naturally I find that prospect a bit frightening and creepy, but I assume some slice of the work will start looking like that.

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

#178

Post by nkrisc »

Eisenstein wrote: post #130
sho_hn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?

So, so, so many people have learnt to code on their own without a mentor. It requires a strong desire to learn and perseverance but it’s absolutely possible.

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

#179

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #109
eviks wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is if the way to learn is doing it without a tool. Imagine using a robot to lift weights if you want to grow your own muscle mass. "Robot is a tool"

"Growing your own muscle mass" is an artificial goal that exists because of tools. Our bodies evolved under the background assumption that daily back-breaking labor is necessary for survival, and rely on it to stay in good operating conditions. We've since all but eliminated most of that labor for most people - so now we're forced to engage in otherwise pointless activity called "exercise" that's physically hard on p…

What on earth are you talking about?

- Physical back-breaking work has not been eliminated for most people.

- Physical exercise triggers biological reward mechanism which make exercise enjoyable and, er, rewarding for many people (arguable for most people as it is a mammalian trait) ergo it is not undesirable. UK NHS calls physical exercise essential.

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

#180

Post by meindnoch »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #138
TeMPOraL wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Growing your own muscle mass" is an artificial goal that exists because of tools. Our bodies evolved under the background assumption that daily back-breaking labor is necessary for survival, and rely on it to stay in good operating conditions. We've since all but eliminated most of that labor for most people - so now we're forced to engage in otherwise pointless activity called "exercise" that's physically hard on p…

And guess what, people's overall health and fitness have declined. Obesity is at an all time high. If you're in the US, there is a 40% chance you are obese. Your body likely contains very little muscle mass, you are extremely likely to die of side effects of metabolic syndrome. People are seeing the advent of machines to replace all physical labor and transportation, not gradually like in the 20th century, but within…

>And guess what, people's overall health and fitness have declined.

Have you seen what physical labor does to a man's body? Go to a developing country to see it. Their 60 year olds look like our 75 year olds.

Sure, we're not as healthy as we could be with proper exercise and diet. But on the long run, sitting on your butt all day is better for your body than hard physical labor.

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