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The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

theargumentmag.com

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Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#211

Post by crazygringo »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #200
crazygringo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good lord, I'm not glad. It was horrible . Because it wasn't about "figuring things out for yourself." I mean, if the answer was available in a programming language or library manual, then debugging was easy. No, the problem was you spent 95% of your debugging time working around bugs and unspecified behavior in the libraries and API's . Bugs in Windows, bugs in DLL's, bugs in everything. Very frequently something ju…

>I'm so happy people today don't suffer the way we used to suffer. TBF Ali bugs in some framework you're using still happens. The problem wasn't eliminated, just moved to the next layer. Those debugging skills are the most important part of working with legacy software (which is what nearly all industry workers work in). It sucks but is necessary for success in this metric.

My point wasn't that the bugs don't exist anymore. Obviously they still do.

My point is that I can frequently figure out how to work around them in 5 minutes rather than 2 days, because someone else already did that work. I can find out that a different function call is the answer, or a weird flag that doesn't do what the documentation says, or whatever it is.

And my problem of it taking two days to debug something is eliminated, usually.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#212

Post by johnnyanmac »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #23
jacquesm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not necessarily typical.

Discussing this in terms of anecdotes of whether people will use these tools to learn, or as mental crutches.. seems to be the wrong framing. Stepping back - the way fundamental technology gets adopted by populations always has a distribution between those that leverage it as a tool, and those that enjoy it as a luxury. When the internet blew up, the population of people that consumed web services dwarfed the populat…

>those that leverage it as a tool, and those that enjoy it as a luxury.

Well the current vision right now seems to be for the readers to scroll AI TikTok and for writers to produce AI memes. I'm not sure who really benefits here.

That's my primary problem as of now. It's not necessary used as some luxury tool or some means of entertainment. It's effectively trying to outsource knowledge itself. Using ChatGPT as a Google substitute has consequences to readers, and using it to cut corners for writers has even worse consequences. I don't think we've had tech like this that can argued as dangerous on both sides of the aisle simultaneously.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#213

Post by Ekaros »

rurp wrote: post #121
Narciss wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually thinking about this the other day while vibe coding for a side project. I am a lead engineer, but I’ve been using AI in much of my code recently. If you were to ask me to code anything manually right now, I could do it, but it would take a bit to acclimate to writing code line by line. By “a while”, I mean maybe a few days. Which means that if we were to do a coding interview without LLMs, I would prob…

Expecting senior job applicants to have regained basic coding skills seems reasonable to me. I would be skeptical of an applicant who hadn't made the level of effort you're describing before applying.

A few days to brush up those skills really should not be too much to ask. I am against leetcode as much as anyone. But maybe just maybe refamiliarising yourself with well fundamentals is not bad idea. At least on the most prominent technologies you advertise.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#214

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

svat wrote: post #176
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #57

Despite the magazine being named the Argument , this article falls into the typical pattern of claiming "the problem isn't X, it's Y", and then spending the rest of the article body building support for Y, but never once making any argument that refutes X.

Typically, such articles can be charitably interpreted as saying "I worry more about Y than X", rather than as literally making two separate claims (that X isn't a problem, and that Y is). So as a reader if you're trying to get value out of the article, you can focus on evaluating Y, and ignore X that the article does not address. In this particular case, the article is even explicit about this: > While we have no id…

I agree that may be the charitable interpretation. But so often these points are phrased in a way that directly attempts to dismiss someone else's concerns ("the real danger with AI isn't the thing you're worried about, it's the thing I'm worried about!"). I feel like they shouldn't be doing that unless they're going to present some kind of reasoning that supports both pillars of that claim.

There's nothing stopping them from simply saying "an under-recognized problem with AI is Y, let me explain why it should be a concern".

Expressing the article as an attack on X, when in fact the author hasn't even put five minutes of thought into evaluating X, is just a click bait strategy. People go in expecting something that undermines X, but they don't get it.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#215

Post by johnnyanmac »

crazygringo wrote: post #211
johnnyanmac wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm so happy people today don't suffer the way we used to suffer. TBF Ali bugs in some framework you're using still happens. The problem wasn't eliminated, just moved to the next layer. Those debugging skills are the most important part of working with legacy software (which is what nearly all industry workers work in). It sucks but is necessary for success in this metric.

My point wasn't that the bugs don't exist anymore. Obviously they still do. My point is that I can frequently figure out how to work around them in 5 minutes rather than 2 days, because someone else already did that work. I can find out that a different function call is the answer, or a weird flag that doesn't do what the documentation says, or whatever it is. And my problem of it taking two days to debug something i…

>My point is that I can frequently figure out how to work around them in 5 minutes rather than 2 days

Guess I'm just dumb then. I'm still taking days to work around some esoteric, underdocumented API issues in my day-to-day work.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#216

Post by pessimizer »

port11 wrote: post #182
daxfohl wrote: post #165

The education system is already a relic of the past. All the points mentioned in the article assumes that a classroom full of students writing five-paragraph essays on The Red Badge of Courage in 12-point TNR with one-inch margins, hastily graded by an overworked, underpaid public school teacher is still the best way to teach kids in 2025 about critical thinking. I picture going forward we'll have much more personali…

It's ironic we assume a technology that hallucinates random garbage will be any better than underpaid and overworked teachers. The solution, to me, would be better paid and better supported teachers.

Underpaid, overworked, and also often the unemployable dregs who would take such a horrible job. In the US we destroyed education by whining about taxes and public employee unions, and cutting the legs out from under it with charters, but that doesn't mean that the teachers that are left are worth anything; in fact it makes it more likely they aren't.

If there's anything I'm both hoping that LLMs will replace, and also think of as one of the most vitally important reasons to have locally running, open models, it's teaching. I'm from the age when teaching was "good," and it was bad. The reason why people remember the teachers they were in love with was because of how distinct they were from the rest.

Teachers can be used to teach hard things, like socialization, cleaning, cooking, and how to do backflips.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#217

Post by pojzon »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #203
visarga wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time goes forward, in the future when will you be in a situation you can't access a LLM? Better use LLM as much as possible to learn the skills of controlling agents, scaffolding constrains, docs, breaking problems in such a way that AI can solve them. These are the skills that matter now. We don't practice much using the assembler either, or the slide ruler. I also lost the skill to start an old Renault 12 which I o…

>in the future when will you be in a situation you can't access a LLM? In an interview setting, while in a meeting, if you're idling on a problem while traveling or doing other work, while you are in an area with weak reception, if your phone is dead? There are plenty of situations where my problem solving does not involve being directly at my work station. I figured out a solution to a recent problem while at the do…

Apple will most likely inject LLM model into iphone directly. It wont be amazing but it will work for most things.

Sad truth is future will most likely invalidate all „knowledge” beside critical thinking.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#218

Post by Ekaros »

spaceballbat wrote: post #161
ben_w wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Senior" was already a weird title, given it could have been anything from 3-10 years of experience even back in 2021. I've seen people with 10 years experience blindly duplicate C++ classes rather than subclass them, and when questioned they seemed to think the mere existence of `private:` access specifiers justified it. There were two full time developers including him, and no code review, so it's not like any of t…

The jump from junior to senior means you can self start and have created enough of a network to seek out help. Junior used to be a 1-3 year training period. Senior to principal means you have signififcant positive impact across the company: upper management relies on you to define the roadmap. Most people hang out in ‘senior’ for their entire careers because they never have that drive to stand out. Thats why there ar…

I always wondered why don't we have just developer level. That is for those with say 5-7 years of experience. That are skilled enough to do their bit on their own, but might not yet fully see the big picture on whole application scale for whole thing...

Straight from junior to senior just feels weird jump. Junior and Senior sound like adjectives to me. Qualifiers. And there should be some middle point in between where bulk of the workforce doing the actual job should be.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#219

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

mcny wrote: post #83
jstanley wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.

I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions t…

Oh, yeah.

SO is infamous for treating question-askers badly.

I have used LLMs for some time, and have no intentions of ever going back to SO. I get tired of being insulted.

> The only stupid question is the one you don't ask.

- A poster on my old art teacher's studio wall.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#220

Post by johnnyanmac »

0x696C6961 wrote: post #118
Herring wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlei…

I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make. Do you think a senior developer needs a basic understanding of the language they use or not?

I think you're approaching the quote the wrong way. It's more like "a C++ developer should be able to look at Javascript and ascertain the gist of what's happening, even if they can't finely dissect the exact issues on a language level."

Though the quote is more broad than that. It's really saying "a C++ developer should be able to write up a report, participate in an interview panel, plan a small party for Jane's birthday this Friday, and be able to make conversation with the external partner coming in today". Few of us are simply just writing code all day.

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