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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

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Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#201

Post by menaerus »

antirez wrote: post #53
systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

I think that who says that you need to be accustomed to the current "tools" related to AI agents, is suffering from a horizon effect issue: these stuff will change continuously for some time, and the more they evolve, the less you need to fiddle with the details. However, the skill you need to have, is communication skills. You need to be able to express yourself and what matters for your project fast and well. Many…

I am using Google Antigravity for the same type of work you mention, such as many things and ideas I had over the years but I couldn't justify the time I needed to invest into them. Pretty non-trivial ideas and yet with a good problem definition communication skills I am getting unbelievable results. I am even intentionally sometimes being too vague in my problem definition to avoid introducing the bias to the model and the ride has been quite crazy so far. In 2 days I've implemented several substantial improvements that i had in my head for years.

The world changed for good and we will need to adapt. The bigger and more important question at this point isn't anymore if LLMs are good enough, for the ones who want to see, but, as you mention in your article, is what will happen to people who will get unemployed. There's a reality check for all of us.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#202

Post by simonw »

JackSlateur wrote: post #5

"Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" AI is both a near-perfect propaganda machine and, in the programming front, a self-fulfilling prophecy: yes, AI will be better at coding than human. Mostly because humans are made worse by using AI.

> Mostly because humans are made worse by using AI.

I'm confident you are wrong about that.

AI makes people who are intellectually lazy and like to cheating worse, in the same way that a rich kid who hires someone to do their university homework for them is hurting their ability to learn.

A rich kid who hires a personal tutor and invests time with them is spending the same money but using it to get better, not worse.

Getting worse using AI is a choice. Plenty of people are choosing to use it to accelerate and improve their learning and skills instead.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#203

Post by smikhanov »

dist-epoch wrote: post #130
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

It's just a reiteration of the age-old conflict in arts: - making art as you thing it should be, but at the risk of it being non-commercial - getting paid for doing commercial/trendy art choose one

People who love thinking in false dichotomies like this one have absolutely no idea how much harder it is to “get paid for doing commercial/trendy art”.

It’s so easy to be a starving artist; and in the world of commercial art it’s bloody dog-eat-dog jungle, not made for faint-hearted sissies.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#204

Post by conorcleary »

conorcleary wrote: post #200
falloutx wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you are very high up the chain like Linus, i think doing vibe coding gives you more feedback than any average dev. So they are having a positive feedback loop. For most of us vibe coding gives 0 advantage. Our software will just sit there and get no views and producing it faster means nothing. In fact, it just scares us that some exec is gonna look at this and write us for low performance because they saw someone…

Less a 'chain' or hierarchy than a lecture hall with cliques. Many of the 'influencers', media personalities, infamous, famous, anyone with a recognizable name - for the most part - was introduced to the tsunami wave of [new tech] at the same time. They may come with advantages, but it's how they get back to the 'top' (for your chain) vs. staying up there.

For a while now I've felt that there's an apathy in: there's more content being created than consumed.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#205

Post by martin-t »

martin-t wrote: post #133
RadiozRadioz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel similarly for a different reason. I put my code out there, licensed under the GPL. It is now, through a layer of indirection, being used to construct products that are not under the GPL. That's not what I signed up for. I know the GPL didn't have a specific clause for AI, and the jury is still out on this specific case (how similar is it to a human doing the same thing?), but I like to imagine, had it been mad…

If you want, I made a coherent argument about how the mechanics of LLMs mean both their training and inference is plagiarism and should be copyright infringement.[0] TL;DR it's about reproducing higher order patterns instead of word for word. I haven't seen this argument made elsewhere, it would be interesting to get it into the courtrooms - I am told cases are being fought right now but I don't have the energy to fo…

And HN does its thing again - at least 3 downvotes, 0 replies. If you disagree, say why, otherwise I have to assume my argument is correct and nobody has any counterarguments but people who profit from this hate it being seen.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#206

Post by quitit »

systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

You're right, it's difficult to get "left behind" when the tools and workflows are being constantly reinvented.

You'd be sage with your time just to keep a high-level view until workflows become stable and aren't advancing every few months.

The time to consider mastering a workflow is when a casual user of the "next release" wouldn't trivially supersede your capabilities.

Similarly we're still in the race to produce a "good enough" GenAI, so there isn't value in mastering anything right now unless you've already got a commercial need for it.

This all reminds me of a time when people were putting in serious effort to learn Palm Pilot's Graffiti handwriting recognition, only for the skill to be made redundant even before they were proficient at it.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#207

Post by embedding-shape »

phicoh wrote: post #198
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

The problem I see is not so much in how you generate the code. It is about how to maintain the code. If you check in the AI generated code unchanged then do you start changing that code by hand later? Do you trust that in the future AI can fix bugs in your code. Or do you clean up the AI generated code first?

Depends on what you do. When I'm using LLMs to generate code for projects I need to maintain (basically, everything non-throw-away-once-used), I treat it as any other code I'd write, tightly controlled with a focus on simplicity and well-thought out abstractions, and automated testing that verify what needs to be working. Nothing gets "merged" into the code without extensive review, and me understanding the full scope of the change.

So with that, I can change the code by hand afterwards or continue with LLMs, it makes no difference, because it's essentially the same process as if I had someone follow the ideas I describe, and then later they come back with a PR. I think probably this comes naturally to senior programmers and those who had a taste of management and similar positions, but if you haven't reviewed other's code before, I'm not sure how well this process can actually work.

At least for me, I manage to produce code I can maintain, and seemingly others to, and they don't devolve into hairballs/spaghetti. But again, requires reviewing absolutely every line and constantly edit/improve.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#208

Post by williamcotton »

martin-t wrote: post #120
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

> programmer who actually do like the actual typing It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding. LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying to solve any of the problems. You get an overview, you get a sense of what it's about and most importantly you get a false sense of understanding. But if you try to actually solve the problems, you engage completely different parts of your brain. It's a…

Lately I've been writing DSLs with the help of these LLM assistants. It is definitely not vibe coding as I'm paying a lot of attention to the overall architecture. But most importantly my focus is on the expressiveness and usefulness of the DSLs themselves. I am indeed solving problems and I am very engaged but it is a very different focus. "How can the LSP help orient the developer?" "Do we want to encourage a functional-looking pipeline in this context"? "How should the step debugger operate under these conditions"? etc.

  GET /svg/weather
    |> jq: weatherData
    |> jq: `
      .hourly as $h |
      [$h.time, $h.temperature_2m] | transpose | map({time: .[0], temp: .[1]})
    `
    |> gg({ "type": "svg", "width": 800, "height": 400 }): `
      aes(x: time, y: temp) 
        | line() 
        | point()
    `
I've even started embedding my DSLs inside my other DSLs!

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#209

Post by ruszki »

CraftingLinks wrote: post #187
adityaathalye wrote: post #27

Don't fall into the "Look ma, no hands" hype. Antirez + LLM + CFO = Billion Dollar Redis company, quite plausibly. /However/ ... As for the delta provided by an LLM to Antirez, outside of Redis (and outside of any problem space he is already intimately familiar with), an Apples to Apples comparison would be he trying this on an equally complex codebase he has no idea about. I'll bet... what Antirez can do with Redis…

Keep believing. To the bitter end. For such human slop codebases AI slop additions will do equally fine. Add good testing and the code might even improve over the garbage that came before.

Generating also the tests happens a little bit too often for any kind of improvement. simonw posted here a generated “something” the other day, which he didn’t know whether it’s really working or not, but he was happy that his generated, completely unchecked tests are green, and yet some other root commenter here praises him.

It needs a lot of work to not be skeptical, when when I try it, it generates shit, especially when I want something completely new, not existing anywhere, and also when these people when they show how they work with it, it always turns out that it’s on the scale of terrible to bad.

I also use AI, but I don’t allow it to touch my code, because I’m disgusted by its code quality. I ask it, and sometimes it delivers, but mostly not.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#210

Post by nkrisc »

svara wrote: post #150
martin-t wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> programmer who actually do like the actual typing It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding. LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying to solve any of the problems. You get an overview, you get a sense of what it's about and most importantly you get a false sense of understanding. But if you try to actually solve the problems, you engage completely different parts of your brain. It's a…

We've been hearing this a lot, but I don't really get it. A lot of code, most probably, isn't even close to being as challenging as a maths textbook. It obviously depends a lot on what exactly you're building, but in many projects programming entails a lot of low intellectual effort, repetitive work. It's the same things over and over with slight variations and little intellectual challenge once you've learnt the bas…

And so in the future if you want to add a feature, either the LLM can do it correctly or the feature doesn’t get added? How long will that work as the TUI code base grows?
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