A writing for the ages. I've found most of the LLM skeptics are either being hypocritical or just being gate-keepy (we dont want everyone to write code)
My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
21–30 of 1001 posts
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#22One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.
The other side of the coin is that if you give it a precise input, it will fuzzily interpret it as something else that is easier to solve.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#23I think the hardest part is not spending the next 3 months of my life in a cave finishing all the hobby/side projects I didn't quite get across the line.
It really does feel like I've gone from being 1 senior engineer to a team that has a 0.8 Sr. Eng, 5 Jrs. and one dude that spends all his time on digging through poorly documented open source projects and documenting them for the team.
Sure I can't spend quite as much time working on hard problems as I used to, but no one knows that I haven't talked to a PM in months, no one knows I haven't written a commit summary in months, it's just been my AI doppelgangers. Compared to myself a year ago I think I now PERSONALLY write 150% more HARD code than I did before. So maybe, my first statement about being 0.8 is false.
I think of it like electric bikes, there seems to be indication that people with electric assist bikes actually burn more calories/spend more time/go farther on an electric bike than those who have manual bikes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22141....
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#24What this boils down to is an argument for slop. Yeah, who cares about the quality, the mediocrity, the craft... get the slop, push it in, call it done. It mostly works in the golden path, it's about 6 or 7 orders of magnitude slower than hand-written software but that's ok, just buy more AWS resources, bill the client, whatever.
I can maybe even see that point in some niches, like outsourcing or contracting where you really can't be bothered to care about what you leave behind after the contract is done but holy shit, this is how we end up with slow and buggy crap that no one can maintain.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#25Machine translation and speech recognition. The state of the art for these is a multi-modal language model. I'm hearing impaired veering on deaf, and I use this technology all day every day. I wanted to watch an old TV series from the 1980s. There are no subtitles available. So I fed the show into a language model (Whisper) and now I have passable subtitles that allow me to watch the show. Am I the only one who remem…
Old TV series should have closed captions available (which are apparently different from subtitles), however the question of where to obtain aside from VHS copies them might be difficult.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#26There's a huge caveat i don't see often, which is that it depends on your language for programming. IE. AI is reallllly good at writing Next.js/Typescript apps, but not so much Ruby on Rails. YMMV
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#27tptacek, curious question: what agent / stack do you currently use?
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#28I develop space-borne systems, so I can't use the best LLM's for ITAR/etc reasons, but this article really makes me feel like I'm missing out. This line in particular makes me wonder if my skills are becoming obsolete for general private industry:
> People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. They also:
Every once in a while I see someone on X posting how they have 10 agents running at once building their code base, and I wonder if in 3 years most private industry coders will just be attending meetings to discuss what their agents have been working on, while people working on DoD contracts will be typing things into vim like a fool
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#29So we replace the task of writing tedious boilerplate with the task of reading the AI's tedious boilerplate. Which takes just as long. And leaves you with less understanding. And is more boring.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#30> pull in arbitrary code from the tree, or from other trees online, into their context windows,
I guess this presupposes that it is ok for 3rd parties to slurp up your codebase? And possibly (I guess it ostensibly depends on what plan you are on?) using that source code for further training (and generating that same code for others)?
I imagine in some domains this would not be ok, but in others is not an issue.