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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#171

Post by overgard »

hintymad wrote: post #65

In 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…

Even if you like them, I don't think there's any reason to believe what people from these companies say. They have every reason to exaggerate or outright lie, and the hype cycle moves so quickly that there are zero consequences for doing so.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#172

Post by calvinmorrison »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #166
alphazard wrote: post #158

There'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/synchroniz…

This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift. And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others.

no but if the old '10x developer' is really 1 in 10 or 1 in 100, they might just do fine while the rest of us, average PHP enjoyers, may go to the wayside

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#173

Post by overgard »

gip wrote: post #147
hintymad wrote: post #65

In 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…

My prediction: soon (e.g. a few years) the agents will be the one doing the exploration and building better ways to write code, build frameworks,... replacing open source. That being said software engineers will still be in the loop. But there will be far less of them. Just to add: this is only the prediction of someone who has a decent amount of information, not an expert or insider

I really doubt it. So far these things are good at remixing old ideas, not coming up with new ones.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#174

Post by alphazard »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #166
alphazard wrote: post #158

There'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/synchroniz…

This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift. And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others.

> This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift.

I think there are people who want to use software to accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to use software. The people who only use software because the world around them has forced it on them, either through work or friends, are probably cognitively excluded from building software.

The people who seek out software to solve a problem (I think this is most people) and compare alternatives to see which one matches their mental model will be able to skip all that and just build the software they have in mind using AI.

> And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others.

I think engineers greatly over-estimate the value of code reuse. Trying to fit a round peg in a square hole produces more problems than it solves. A sign of an elite engineer is knowing when to just copy something and change it as needed rather than call into it. Or to re-implement something because the library that does it is a bad fit.

The only time reuse really matters is in network protocols. Communication requires that both sides have a shared understanding.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#175

Post by overgard »

oxag3n wrote: post #32

> We're thinking about AI wrong. And this write up is not an exception. Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there’s 90% less demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a spectrum." So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in near future (6-12 months accor…

The funny thing is I think these things would work much better if they WEREN'T so insistent on the agentic thing. Like, I find in-IDE AI tools a lot more precise and I usually move just as fast as a TUI with a lot less rework. But Claude is CONSTANTLY pushing me to try to "one shot" a big feature while asking me for as little context as possible. I'd much rather it work with me as opposed to just wandering off and writing a thousand lines. It's obviously designed for anthropic's best interests rather than mine.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#176

Post by krackers »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #30
m_ke wrote: post #4

It's the new underpaid employee that you're training to replace you. People need to understand that we have the technology to train models to do anything that you can do on a computer, only thing that's missing is the data. If you can record a human doing anything on a computer, we'll soon have a way to automate it

Sure, but do you want abundance of software, or scarcity? The price of having "star trek computers" is that people who work with computers have to adapt to the changes. Seems worth it?

Abundance of services before abundance of physical resources seems like the worst of both worlds.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#177

Post by overgard »

jacquesm wrote: post #39
oxag3n wrote: post #32

> We're thinking about AI wrong. And this write up is not an exception. Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there’s 90% less demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a spectrum." So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in near future (6-12 months accor…

Not without some major breakthrough. What's hilarious is that all these developers building the tools are going to be the first to be without jobs. Their kids will be ecstatic: "Tell me again, dad, so, you had this awesome and well paying easy job and you wrecked it? Shut up kid, and tuck in that flap, there is too much wind in our cardboard box."

Couldn't agree more, isn't that the bizarre thing? "We have this great intellectually challenging job where we as workers have leverage. How can we completely ruin that while also screwing up every other white collar profession"

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#178

Post by overgard »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #22
cesarvarela wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs have a large quantity of chess data and still can't play for shit.

Not anymore. This benchmark is for LLM chess ability: https://github.com/lightnesscaster/Chess-LLM-Benchmark?tab=r... . LLMs are graded according to FIDE rules so e.g. two illegal moves in a game leads to an immediate loss. This benchmark doesn't have the latest models from the last two months, but Gemini 3 (with no tools) is already at 1750 - 1800 FIDE, which is approximately probably around 1900 - 2000 USCF (about…

They have literally every chess game in existence to train on, and they can't do better than 1800?

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#179

Post by overgard »

alphazard wrote: post #158

There'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/synchroniz…

Well, without the self soothing I think what's left is pitchforks.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#180

Post by Gormo »

hintymad wrote: post #92
therealpygon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe people who have dedicated their lives to open source will simply want to stop working on it, no matter how much is or is not written by AI. I also have to agree, I find myself more and more lately laughing about just how much resources we waste creating exactly the same things over and over in software. I don’t mean generally, like languages, I mean specifically. How many trillions of times has a form…

> I don’t believe people who have dedicated their lives to open source will simply want to stop working on it, no matter how much is or is not written by AI. Yeah, hence my question can only be hypothetical. > I wonder what all we might build instead, if all that time could be saved If we subscribe to Economics' broken-window theory, then the investment into such repetitive work is not investment but waste. Once we s…

> If we subscribe to Economics' broken-window theory, then the investment into such repetitive work is not investment but waste. Once we stop such investment, we will have a lot more resources to work on something else, bring out a new chapter of the tech revolution. Or so I hope.

I'm not sure I agree with the application of the broken-window theory here. That's a metaphor intended to counter arguments in favor of make-work projects for economic stimulus: the idea here is that breaking a window always has a net negative on the economy, since even though it creates demand for a replacement window, the resources that are necessary to replace a window that already existed are just being allocated to restore the status quo ante, but the opportunity cost of that is everything else the same resources might have bee used for instead, if the window hadn't been broken.

I think that's quite distinct from manufacturing new windows for new installations, which is net positive production, and where newer use cases for windows create opportunities for producers to iterate on new window designs, and incrementally refine and improve the product, which wouldn't happen if you were simply producing replacements for pre-existing windows.

Even in this example, lots of people writing lots of different variations of login pages has produced incremental improvements -- in fact, as an industry, we haven't been writing the same exact login page over and over again, but have been gradually refining them in ways that have evolved their appearance, performance, security, UI intuitiveness, and other variables considerably over time. Relying on AI to design, not just implement, login pages will likely be the thing that causes this process to halt, and perpetuate the status quo indefinitely.

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