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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#191

Post by gavinray »

simonw wrote: post #186
TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a developer who was made redundant, and I'm now casting around for an entirely new job because, likewise, I have no interest in working with AI. It sounds boring, and the concept squicks me out, to be honest.

Out of interest what kind of fields are you looking at? I expect there are going to be a bunch of people in similar situations to you over the next few years, I'm interested to know where they end up.

I'm reminded of the "MongoDB is WebScale" video:

    as of this moment I
    officially resigned from my job as
    software engineer and will take up work
    on the farm shoveling pig shit and
    administering anal suppositories to sick
    horses because that will be a thousand
    times more tolerable than being in the
    same industry as dipshits like you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#192

Post by mvaliente2001 »

lich_king wrote: post #142
egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

I'm conflicted about this. On one hand, I think LLMs make it easier to discover explanations that, at least superficially, superficially "click" for you. Sure, they were available before, but maybe in textbooks you needed to pay for (how quaint), or on websites that appeared on the fifth page of search results. Whatever are the externalities of that, in the short term, that part may be a net positive for learners. On…

One factor in favor of the use of LLM as a learning tool is the poor quality of documentation. It seems we've forgotten how to write usable explanations that help readers to build a coherent model of the topic at hand.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#193

Post by prescriptivist »

_dwt wrote: post #123
noemit wrote: post #3

Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…

I am going to try to put this kindly: it is very glib, and people will find it offensive and obnoxious, to implicitly round off all resistance or skepticism to incuriosity. Perhaps to alienate AI critics even further is the goal, in which case - carry on. But if you are genuinely confused by the attitudes of your peers, try asking not "what do I have that they lack" ("curiosity"?) but "what do they see that I don't"…

I don't think that people who don't want to use these tools or clean old ways are incurious. But I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point. Not in the future, but now. It's just that the adoption of these tools isn't evenly distributed yet.

I think there's a place for thoughtful dialogue around what this means for software engineering, but I don't think that's going to change anything at this point. If developers just don't want to participate in this new world, for whatever reason, I'm not judging them, but also I don't think the genie is going back in the bottle. There will be no movement to organize labor to protect us and there be no deus ex machina that is going to reverse course on this stuff.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#194

Post by driverdan »

yanis_t wrote: post #35

They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction. Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the sam…

Writing software isn't like a small bakery with fixed demand. There are always more features to build and improvements to do than capacity allows. For better or worse software products are never finished.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#195

Post by asciii »

gavinray wrote: post #191
simonw wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest what kind of fields are you looking at? I expect there are going to be a bunch of people in similar situations to you over the next few years, I'm interested to know where they end up.

I'm reminded of the "MongoDB is WebScale" video: as of this moment I officially resigned from my job as software engineer and will take up work on the farm shoveling pig shit and administering anal suppositories to sick horses because that will be a thousand times more tolerable than being in the same industry as dipshits like you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Amazing to re-watch

> "I cannot wait to castrate a 3000 pound bull as it kicks my head in"

How I feel about merging an AI-generated PR these days and waiting for the issues

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#196

Post by mgraczyk »

egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

I learn a lot faster now with LLMs.

You could learn the windows APIs much faster if you wanted to learn them

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#197

Post by 20k »

mgraczyk wrote: post #196
egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

I learn a lot faster now with LLMs. You could learn the windows APIs much faster if you wanted to learn them

How is this faster than just reading the documentation? Given that LLMs hallucinate, you have to double check everything it says against the docs anyway

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#199

Post by ValentineC »

lich_king wrote: post #142
egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

I'm conflicted about this. On one hand, I think LLMs make it easier to discover explanations that, at least superficially, superficially "click" for you. Sure, they were available before, but maybe in textbooks you needed to pay for (how quaint), or on websites that appeared on the fifth page of search results. Whatever are the externalities of that, in the short term, that part may be a net positive for learners. On…

> On one hand, I think LLMs make it easier to discover explanations that, at least superficially, superficially "click" for you.

The other benefit is that LLMs, for superficial topics, are the most patient teachers ever.

I can ask it to explain a concept multiple times, hoping that it'll eventually click for me, and not be worried that I'd look stupid, or that it'll be annoyed or lose patience.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#200

Post by FitchApps »

ontouchstart wrote: post #183

I am running local offline small models in the old fashioned REPL style, without any agentic features. One prompt at a time. Instead of asking for answers, I ask for specific files to read or specific command line tools with specific options. I pipe the results to a file and then load it into the CLI session. Then I turn these commands into my own scripts and documentation (in Makefile). I forbid the model wandering…

This. I'm also using an LLM very similarly and treat it like a knowledgeable co-worker I can ask for an advice or check something. I want to be the one applying changes to my codebase and then running the tests. Ok, agents may improve the efficiency but it's a slippery slope. I don't want to sit here all day watching the agents modify and re-modify my codebase, I want to do this myself because it's still fun though not as much fun as it was pre-AI
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