21–30 of 234 posts
Here is a disturbing look at what the absolute knobs at Y Combinator (and elsewhere) are preaching/pushing, with commentary from Primeagen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riyh_CIshTs Watch the whole thing, it's hilarious. Eventually these venture capitalists are forced to acknowledge that LLM-dependent developers do not develop an understanding and hit a ceiling. They call it "good enough". The use of LLMs for const…
That's probably the mechanism by which AI will take over many jobs: 1. Skilled people do a good job, AI does a not-so-good job. 2. AI users get dumbed down so they can't do any better. Mediocrity normalized. 3. Replace the AI users with AI.
Conversely: Some people want to insist that writing code 10x slower is the right way to do things, that horses were always better, more dependable than cares, and that nobody would want to step into one of those flying monstrosities. And they may also find that they are no longer in the right field.
For example, in one of my recent blog posts I wanted to use Python's Pillow to composite five images: one consisting of the left half of the image, the other four in quadrants (https://github.com/minimaxir/mtg-embeddings/blob/main/mtg_re...). I know how to do that in PIL (have to manually specify the coordinates and resize images) but it is annoying and prone to human error and I can never remember what corner is the origin in PIL-land.
Meanwhile I asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet this:
Write Python code using the Pillow library to compose 5 images into a single image:
1. The left half consists of one image.
2. The right half consists of the remaining 4 images, equally sized with one quadrant each
Point (c) above is also why I despise the "vibe coding" meme because I believe it's intentionally misleading, since identifying code and functional requirement issues is an implicit requisite skill that is intentionally ignored in hype as it goes against the novelty of "an AI actually did all of this without much human intervention."
"Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them." I've tolerated writing my own code for decades. Sometimes I'm pleased with it. Mostly it's the abstraction standing between me and my idea. I like to build things, the faster the better. As I have the ideas, I like to see them implemented as efficie…
This is something that I struggle with for AI programming. I actually like writing the code myself. Like how someone might enjoy knitting or model building or painting or some other "tedious" activity. Using AI to generate my code just takes all the fun out of it for me.
It's also making the sleazy and lazy one thrive a bit more, which is quite painful when passionated devs which are also great colleagues don't gain any real leverage from chatgpt.
It's just especially poignant/painful because developers are being hoisted by their own petard, so to speak.
That said, the author is probably right that it has made me dumber or at least less prolific at writing boilerplate.
LLMs also take away the motivation from students to properly concentrate and deeply understand a technical problem (including but not limited to coding problems); instead, they copy, paste and move on without understanding. The electronic calculator analogy might be appropriate: it's a tool appropriate once you have learned how to do the calculations by hand. In an experiment (six months long, twice repeated, so a on…
What do you think is the big difference between these tools and calculators?
What do you think is the big difference between these tools and *outsourcing*?
AI, depending on how you use it, gives you a different role. So take that as a clue: if you are less interested in building things and more interested into getting results, maybe a product management role would be a better fit.