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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

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Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#181

Post by the_sleaze_ »

DavidPiper wrote: post #155
xandrius wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're using it more towards vibe coding than AI-assisted coding: I use AI to write the stuff the way I want it to be written. I give it information about how to structure files, coding style and the logic flow. Then I spend time to read each file change and give feedback on things I'd do differently. Vastly saves me time and it's very close or even better than what I would have written. If the result is somethi…

I agree that being further along the Vibe end of the spectrum is the issue. Some of the other ways I use Claude don't have the same problems. > If the result is something you can't explain than slow down and follow the steps it takes as they are taken. The problem is I can explain it. But it's rote and not malleable. I didn't do the work to prove it to myself. Its primary form is on the page, not in my head, as it we…

I'm on the same path as you are it seems. I used to be able to explain every single variable name in a PR. I took a lot of pride in the structure of the code and the tests I wrote had strategy and tactics.

I still wrote bugs. I'd bet that my bugs/LoC has remained static if not decreased with AI usage.

What I do see is more bugs, because the LoC denominator has increased.

What I align myself towards is that becoming senior was never about knowing the entire standard library, it was about knowing when to use the standard library. I spent a decade building Taste by butting my head into walls. This new AI thing just requires more Taste. When to point Claude towards a bug report and tell it to auto-merge a PR and when to walk through code-gen function by function.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#182

Post by loeg »

sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

Being able to deliver junior-level work isn't the goal of training juniors.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#183

Post by zozbot234 »

ernst_klim wrote: post #96
tonfa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They aren't going away but for some they may become prohibitively expensive after all the subsidies end. Even if inference was subsidized (afaik it isn't when paying through API calls, subscription plans indeed might have losses for heavy users, but that's how any subscription model typically work, it can still be profitable overall). Models are still improving/getting cheaper, so that seems unlikely.

It probably is still subsidized, just not as much. We won't know if these APIs are profitable unless these companies go public, and till then it's safe to bet these APIs are underpriced to win the market share.

Third-party AI inference with open models is widely available and cheap. You're paying as much as proprietary mini-models or even less for something far more capable, and that without any subsidies (other than the underlying capex and expense for training the model itself).

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#184

Post by loeg »

torben-friis wrote: post #61
sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

Can you run an industry level LLM at home? If not, you're changing learning to cook for Uber only meals. And since the alternative is starving, Uber will boil the pot. Don't give up your self sufficiency.

The costs just aren't that high. They could be 10x higher and it still wouldn't be a huge deal.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#185

Post by pards »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #68
pards wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take away the agent, and Bob is still a first-year student who hasn't started yet. The year happened around him but not inside him. He shipped a product, but he didn't learn a trade. We're minting an entire generation of people completely dependent on VC funding. What happens if/when the AI companies fail to find a path to profitability and the VC funding dries up?

What will happen is pretty obvious. Those companies will either be classified as too important to fail and get government support or go bankrupt and will be bought for pennies on the dollar. For the customers nothing much will change since tokens are getting cheaper every year and the business is already pretty profitable. Progress will slow down massively till local open weight models catch up to pre-crash SotA and…

> the business is already pretty profitable

As of March 2026, OpenAI generates annual revenue exceeding $12 billion. However, the costs of running ChatGPT are around $17 billion a year.

Source: https://searchlab.nl/en/statistics/chatgpt-statistics-2026

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#186

Post by iterateoften »

wongarsu wrote: post #169
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. The first 10 rungs of the ladder will be removed, but we still expect you to be able to get to the roof. The AI won't get you there and you won't have the knowledge you'd normally gain on those first 10 rungs to help you move past #10.

There are a lot of people in academia who are great at thinking about complex algorithms but can't write maintainable code if their life depended on it. There are ways to acquire those skills that don't go the junior developer route. Same with debugging and profiling skills But we might see a lot more specialization as a result

They can’t write maintainable code because they don’t have real world experience of getting your hands dirty in a company. The only way to get startup experience is to build a startup or work for one

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#187

Post by loeg »

samusiam wrote: post #116
qsera wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The thing is, agents aren’t going away... Aren't they currently propped up by investor money? What happens when the investors realize the scam that it is and stop investing or start investing less...

> Aren't they currently propped up by investor money? Are Chinese model shops propped up by investor money? Is Google? Open weights models are only 6 months behind SOTA. If new model development suddenly stopped, and today's SOTA models suddenly disappeared, we would still have access to capable agents.

Well, the Chinese shops are propped up by the CCP instead.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#188

Post by [deleted] »

lelanthran wrote: post #131
mattmanser wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The authors point went a little over your head. It doesn't matter if Bob can be normal. There was no point to him being paid to be on the program. From the article: If you hand that process to a machine, you haven't accelerated science. You've removed the only part of it that anyone actually needed.

> It doesn't matter if Bob can be normal. There was no point to him being paid to be on the program. Yeah, I'm surprised at the number of people who read the article and came away with the conclusion that the program was designed to churn deliverables, and then they conclude that it doesn't matter if Bob can only function with an AI holding his hand, because he can still deliver. That isn't the output of the program;…

[deleted]

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#189

Post by sumeno »

stavros wrote: post #49
troupo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes. The famous theoretical mathematicians who immediately started on novel problems in theoretical mathematics without first learning and understanding a huge number of trivial things like how division works to begin with, what fractions are, what equations are and how they are solved etc. Edit: let's look at a paper like Some Linear Transformations on Symmetric Functions Arising From a Formula of Thiel and Willi…

Seems that teaching Bob trivial things would be a simple solution to this predicament.

That's what the program he just took was supposed to be for, learning not output. You've just reinvented the article from first principles, congrats

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#190

Post by CharlieDigital »

I recently saw a preserved letterpress printing press in person and couldn't help but think of the parallels to the current shift in software engineering. The letterpress allowed for the mass production of printed copies, exchanging the intensive human labor of manual copying to letter setting on the printing press.

Yet what did not change in this process is that it only made the production of the text more efficient; the act of writing, constructing a compelling narrative plot, and telling a story were not changed by this revolution.

Bad writers are still bad writers, good writers still have a superior understanding of how to construct a plot. The technological ability to produce text faster never really changed what we consider "good" and "bad" in terms of written literature; it just allow more people to produce it.

It is hard to tell if large language models can ever reach a state where it will have "good taste" (I suspect not). It will always reflect the taste and skill of the operator to some extent. Just because it allows you to produce more code faster does not mean it allows you to create a better product or better code. You still need to have good taste to create the structure of the product or codebase; you still have to understand the limitations of one architectural decision over another when the output is operationalized and run in production.

The AI industry is a lot of hype right now because they need you to believe that this is no longer relevant. That Garry Tan producing 37,000 LoC/day somehow equates to producing value. That a swarm of agents can produce a useful browser or kernel compiler.

Yet if you just peek behind the curtains at the Claude Code repo and see the pile of unresolved issues, regressions, missing features, half-baked features, and so on -- it seems plainly obvious that there are limitations because if Anthropic, with functionally unlimited tokens with frontier models, cannot use them to triage and fix their own product.

AI and coding agents are like the printing press in some ways. Yes, it takes some costs out of a labor intensive production process, but that doesn't mean that what is produced is of any value if the creator on the other end doesn't understand the structure of the plot and the underlying mechanics (be it of storytelling or system architecture).

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