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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

#181

Post by nomel »

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…

> But it was instantly a maintenance dead end.

I gave up on this recently. It achieved the goal now, and in a year or two, when you actually want to add whatever feature, the SOTA AI will probably be able to clean it up as it does so. What does "maintain" even mean anymore?

If you don't agree, how many years into the future do we need until you would agree?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#182

Post by lelanthran »

chasd00 wrote: post #160
idopmstuff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree with this. I think takes like OP's would be much more interesting if they staked out a position in the future. I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that someone with a great deal of technical expertise is going to be a hugely more effective LLM user today. The question that really matters is whether that will continue to be the case. My guess is that technical expertise matters less over time, and th…

> My guess is that technical expertise matters less over time, and the ability to specify the desired outcome is eventually the only thing that becomes important if you look at LLMs based coding as another step up in programming abstraction then it's clear this is the case. Think about the progression of programming languages. Over time, we go further and further from the hardware and closer and closer to specifying…

> if you look at LLMs based coding as another step up in programming abstraction then it's clear this is the case. Think about the progression of programming languages. Over time, we go further and further from the hardware and closer and closer to specifying the desired outcome. The terminology, structure, and completeness of a user story that guides a codingagent to the desired output, and only the desired output, is the new programming language.

But that entire narrative follows from one, single, very big "If". It is not a given that AIs are a step up in abstraction.

Like, copying the answers in a test isn't considered an abstraction, I don't consider copy-pasting AI into your codebase an abstraction.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#183

Post by dbingham »

nomel wrote: post #181
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…

> But it was instantly a maintenance dead end. I gave up on this recently. It achieved the goal now, and in a year or two, when you actually want to add whatever feature, the SOTA AI will probably be able to clean it up as it does so . What does "maintain" even mean anymore? If you don't agree, how many years into the future do we need until you would agree?

The problem is that people keep saying this, but the code keeps being bad. Every time I commit myself to trying to build something with AI, I end up wasting a ton of time and backing it out or completely rewriting it without the AI. The code it generates just isn't where it needs to be.

And people have been saying this exact thing for years now. Someone said this very thing two years ago. And we're still at the "maintenance dead end" stage. So let me flip it back on you: how many years are we going to pour an obscene amount of resources into this thing that is always going to be able to clean up its own messes "in a year or two" before we realize its a dead end (at best) and we need to be using those resources elsewhere? And, similarly, what happens to you when the SOTA AI in two years can't clean up the code it wrote for you two years ago, but people are depending on it and your still on the hook for maintaining it?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#184

Post by simonw »

runarberg wrote: post #166
simonw wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to me like one of those things where people go into it with widely different initial assumptions. 1. AI is for cheating and doing the work for you. Obviously it won't help you learn faster because you won't have to do any thinking at all. 2. AI is an always-available question answering machine. It's like having a teaching assistant who you can ask about anything at any time . This means you can greatly acc…

This is also a testable hypothesis. I would like to see usage statistics before making assumptions here but my gut feeling is that an overwhelming AI usage (like > 90%) would fall into your category 1. But even with category 2. I think that still does not absolve AI as a cheating machine. Doing research is a skill and if you ask AI to do the research for you that is a skill a junior developer simply never learns.

This is interesting and relevant: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095947522...

"The expertise reversal effect is present when instructional assistance leads to increased learning gains in novices, but decreased learning gains in experts."

There's a whole lot of depth to the question of how AI tools support or atrophy learning for different levels of expertise.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#185

Post by michaelchisari »

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…

Without proper training, what looks good may be trash. I always thought pixel art generated by diffusion models looked damn good. Then I started watching and reading reviews by actual pixel artists, and all they saw was flaws. And it wasn't just nitpicking, it was things that were fundamentally wrong, difficult to fix and would look awful and amateurish and distracting to the player in production.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#187

Post by tayo42 »

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."

The default isn't necessarily what ever you consider maintianable or do it right, which are ambiguous terms anyway.

You never wrote quick exploratory code? One off scripts? How is the Ai suppsed to know unless you tell it.

If you tell another person to write some code, how are they suppsed to know? If you have your boss come to you and ask you to write some code to do some data analysis are you going to spend weeks writing units tests and perfect abstractions? Or do it quick and get the data and result?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#188

Post by djeastm »

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…

>I think the only real case to be made is that AI's sense of immediate pleasure can neuter people away from running into friction. AI natives likely won't understand friction and question it.

This is key, I think, and gets overshadowed by people being offended by seeing bad vibecode or claims of 10x speeds, etc.

The most important learning that happens is not when we ask and get the answer to our question right away. It's when we stretch ourselves to seek out the answer, fail a few times, think deeply, then perhaps after a nap, solve the problem. That kind of knowledge is priceless because it not only gets you an answer it gets you some errant paths you can use to avoid problems in future problem solving as well as getting you increased trust in your own thinking.

If the next generations skip this step, they'll always think answers are supposed to be easy to find and will find themselves more and more dependent on AI and less and less confident in their own brains.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#189

Post by vunderba »

michaelchisari wrote: post #185
dataflow wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Without proper training, what looks good may be trash. I always thought pixel art generated by diffusion models looked damn good. Then I started watching and reading reviews by actual pixel artists, and all they saw was flaws. And it wasn't just nitpicking, it was things that were fundamentally wrong, difficult to fix and would look awful and amateurish and distracting to the player in production.

Much of this comes from the fact that, as is true for almost everything, an LLM (generative model etc) presents itself as an expert. It'll very confidently produce results that, to a layperson, look quite good. But the more of an expert you are in a field, the more apparent the cracks become.

AI pixel art looks particularly bad because most users don’t even go through the effort of downscaling and then upscaling it using something as simple as nearest-neighbor scaling, which by itself will squash out a lot of high-frequency noise that manifests in the form of terrible looking "fringing". Proper grid alignment also makes a big difference. It’s not perfect by a long shot, but it helps.

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