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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#171

Post by muldvarp »

zaphar wrote: post #147
muldvarp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But saying "LLMs are not good at architecture so software engineering has a bright future" is _also_ extrapolation.

Anyone who claims to know the correct strategy to be best positioned for the future is lying or misinformed. The most you can reasonably say is that for the moment an LLM in the hand of an non-expert or naive user is unlikely to produce high quality results or create an absurd boost in productivity. We can make reasoned decisions now and continue to monitor things. It would be just as unwise to ignore the progression…

I think be both agree that the future of software engineering is very uncertain right now (and likely will be for years). For me personally that alone is enough to recommend not investing money and time to get into software engineering anymore.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#172

Post by jmalicki »

ryandrake wrote: post #168
therouwboat wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a joke? Smartest people on the planet never thought about telling AI to just write better code?

Kind of wild that you have to tell an LLM things like "do it right" and "make the code maintainable" and "don't make mistakes". Shouldn't that be the default? I wouldn't accept a calculator application that got math wrong unless you pressed a button labeled "actually solve the problem."

> Kind of wild that you have to tell an LLM things like "do it right" and "make the code maintainable" and "don't make mistakes". Shouldn't that be the default?

It's not the default, because the training data is full of unmaintainable code done wrong with mistakes. People literally complain that LLMs write too many tests or add comments.

If instead of "do it right", you give it specific actionable advice of how to right code, it does surprisingly well. Newer frontier models also do a great job of mimicking the style and rigor of the surrounding codebase without prompting, if you're working in an established codebase, for better or worse.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#175

Post by hypfer »

sarreph wrote: post #18

I agree with the author that -- right now -- we're still in the part of the AI adoption / product development curve that it's an extreme force multiplier. I like to think of it as a normal distribution, the further away a programmer is to the right of the mean, the more their benefit. It's almost like it's their standard deviation squared (σ²). So someone like Matt Perry (as OP mentioned), who is a >99.99% programmer…

Cafés are no proper workspace though.

They're full of noise and distractions. They offer no ergonomics, no proper screens, no nothing.

Anything that happens or doesn't happen there is mostly irrelevant to relevant software at large.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#176

Post by ios-contractor »

Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

I used AI to write code (features) then I used AI to refactor the architecture using best practices and get rid of the technical debt. I don't remember the last time I modified code by hand honestly.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#177

Post by danielmarkbruce »

dataflow wrote: post #161
adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

I'm confused, this doesn't make sense. The target they're iterating on (UI) is the same one whose quality they're assessing, not a different one (source code). You're suggesting that (a) their UI skills are lacking (based on what? isn't UI exactly what they were iterating on and trying to improve?), and (b) that a real UI expert would've somehow felt the UI they were working on was consistently garbage, despite how m…

It's not confusing. It makes sense.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#178

Post by danielmarkbruce »

ios-contractor wrote: post #176
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

I used AI to write code (features) then I used AI to refactor the architecture using best practices and get rid of the technical debt. I don't remember the last time I modified code by hand honestly.

This is the part people are missing. I spend 30-40% of my time "vibe coding" doing "vibe clean up". It's fine, I'm still 10x more productive than I ever was.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#179

Post by MichaelZuo »

tomgp wrote: post #153
adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

I think this is true, it's like a close relation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#:~:text=%5B14...

This!

People are never perfectly even in intelligence across all possible disciplines.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#180

Post by lelanthran »

snide wrote: post #7

I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification. What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI…

> What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant,

You don't learn by reading, you learn by doing.

In this case, simply reading the output of an LLM isn't going to substantially educate you.

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