One of the things I really don’t understand about the “learn or youll be left behind” sentiment is it also comes from people saying “we’re building PhDs in a box!” It cannot both be the case that AI is something challenging enough to use that a current software engineer can’t learn how to use it and that the promises of these tools are fulfilled.
Leave Me Behind
201–210 of 344 posts
Re: Leave Me Behind
#202For me it's incomprehensible how a tool that allows you to be 100 times more productive is derided as something we should never use for the sake of craftmanship. Same as shoemakers or horseback messengers 100 years ago. Those who fund the next Nike or FedEx will be the winners of this new race. AI is a tool, an exceptional tool for providing solutions.
"100 times more productive" is such a wild exaggeration. Do you understand that productivity is not equal to lines of code written? Yeah, AI can write many lines of code very quickly. Productivity is about making something economically valuable. Are you producing 100 times more value with AI than you were without AI? Is your business making 100 times more money? Are you being paid 100 times as much?
The factories that replaced shoemakers actually produced physical shoes that real humans wore. What is your AI producing, other than garbage bug-filled software that no one wants or needs? What real-life human problems is it solving?
Re: Leave Me Behind
#203There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider. We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think t…
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unint…
It's like people complaining about "poor quality plastic trinkets" that replaced well-made household items. Of course high-quality things can be (and are) made of plastic. The problem is that you can still make a very cheap passable thing out of plastic, that would be uneconomical to make out of metal or wood.
Same with code: by using AI, one can produce passable software trinkets very cheaply, that would be uneconimical to produce by paying poor-quality human developers.
The floor has moved downwards, allowing to produce a flood of new, trash-quality, disposable code very cheaply. It does not mean that we'll have to use only that code. But unfortunately we'll have to live with it, too.
Re: Leave Me Behind
#204There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider. We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think t…
I suspect you are right that LLM-generated software will likely negatively impact people's lives. The flip side of this is there is going to be a lot of software generated that would have never been possible before. And for some use cases, some crappy software is better than no software. I think it's hard to predict whether on net this will be a good or bad thing.
>And for some use cases, some crappy software is better than no software
The best use case i've seen for AI is people generating random one shot projects for themselves, which is honestly so cool. You can make some basic app that does something very specific, that would have taken objectively a lot longer to make by hand. This is when 'crappy' software is more than good enough for a specific problem
Re: Leave Me Behind
#205There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider. We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think t…
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world.
I genuinely don't know if that's true and I doubt you do, either. It's all feels right now.
What I do know is I run a couple of personal projects and I can say they are of objectively higher quality now that I'm using AI to build out proper CI pipelines, expand test coverage, produce higher quality architectures, etc.
Why?
Because in the past I didn't have the capacity to invest in that kind of hardening, but with AI, now I do.
Of course you'll probably make the claim that my code is probably crap, the tests suck, etc, because you've already made up your mind. But having been in the industry for 25 years, I can tell you definitively that you'd be wrong about that.
Now, what'll happen to the median codebase? God only knows. Maybe I'm especially diligent.
But given we're really only 6-12 months into the agentic coding era, I think the only conclusion you can make is that the jury is still out.
Re: Leave Me Behind
#206There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider. We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think t…
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unint…
>> Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people.
> Could not agree more. So why do you think humans are inherently better at this?
Because humans are capable of empathy
Re: Leave Me Behind
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unint…
>> Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people. > Could not agree more. So why do you think humans are inherently better at this? Because humans are capable of empathy
Given the UIs I've experienced over the years, I'd dispute that assumption...
Re: Leave Me Behind
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. It can also be your brain if you let it, so…don’t let it. It’s an absolutely fantastic educational tool if you choose to use it that way.
So are you saying we should ... ... Put down the duckie[0]? [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acBixR_JRuM
Curse you for this ear worm of a song, but also my brain keeps wanting to interpret this as "duck... You're bad at your job and will never amount to anything. Your mother is ashamed of you and you're the reason your father is an alcoholic." hahaha
Re: Leave Me Behind
#209Re: Leave Me Behind
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unint…
>> Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people. > Could not agree more. So why do you think humans are inherently better at this? Because humans are capable of empathy
Why is that a prerequisite? There are entire philosophies about what makes good design for UI's etc. Why can't models figure this out? Why do you feel this is some sort of mystical thing out of reach?