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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#211

Post by dieselgate »

egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

Reminds some of something a friend said towards the end of college: “it’s only like 12 thousand dollars a year to learn everything there is to know”

Take it with a grain of salt..

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#212

Post by ontouchstart »

FitchApps wrote: post #200
ontouchstart wrote: post #183

I am running local offline small models in the old fashioned REPL style, without any agentic features. One prompt at a time. Instead of asking for answers, I ask for specific files to read or specific command line tools with specific options. I pipe the results to a file and then load it into the CLI session. Then I turn these commands into my own scripts and documentation (in Makefile). I forbid the model wandering…

This. I'm also using an LLM very similarly and treat it like a knowledgeable co-worker I can ask for an advice or check something. I want to be the one applying changes to my codebase and then running the tests. Ok, agents may improve the efficiency but it's a slippery slope. I don't want to sit here all day watching the agents modify and re-modify my codebase, I want to do this myself because it's still fun though n…

And you don't know what might trigger AI into overthinking. ;-)

https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/bc301a60067f687b65dad64...

(This is an ongoing experiment, it doesn't matter what model I use.)

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#213

Post by doug_durham »

_dwt wrote: post #123
noemit wrote: post #3

Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…

I am going to try to put this kindly: it is very glib, and people will find it offensive and obnoxious, to implicitly round off all resistance or skepticism to incuriosity. Perhaps to alienate AI critics even further is the goal, in which case - carry on. But if you are genuinely confused by the attitudes of your peers, try asking not "what do I have that they lack" ("curiosity"?) but "what do they see that I don't"…

Underlying this and similar arguments is the presumption that the "old way" was perfect. You or your colleagues weren't doing one mistake per 100 successful commits. I have been in an industry for decades, and I can tell you that I do something stupid when writing code manually quite often. The same goes for the people that I work with. So fear that the LLM will make mistakes can't really be the reason. Or if it is the reason, it isn't a reasonable objection.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#214

Post by mihaelm »

asciii wrote: post #195
gavinray wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of the "MongoDB is WebScale" video: as of this moment I officially resigned from my job as software engineer and will take up work on the farm shoveling pig shit and administering anal suppositories to sick horses because that will be a thousand times more tolerable than being in the same industry as dipshits like you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Amazing to re-watch > "I cannot wait to castrate a 3000 pound bull as it kicks my head in" How I feel about merging an AI-generated PR these days and waiting for the issues

> "You turn it on and it scales right up"

is my favorite quote from the video.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#215

Post by ValentineC »

input_sh wrote: post #31
theshrike79 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "most engineers" not "most engineers we've hired". But also "most engineers" aren't very good. AIs know tricks that the average "I write code for my dayjob" person doesn't know or frankly won't bother to learn.

Even speaking from a pure statistical perspective, it is quite literally impossible for "AI" that outputs world's-most-average-answer to be better than "most engineers". In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what percentage of engineers it's better than: all it does is it consumes as much data as possible and returns the statistically most probable answer, therefore it's gonna be better than roughly 50% of engineers.…

> Maybe you can claim that it's better than 60% of engineers because bottom-of-the-barrel engineers tend to not publish their works online for it to be used as training data, but for every one of those you have a bunch of non-engineers that don't do this for a living putting their shitty attempts at getting stuff done using code online, so I'm actually gonna correct myself immediately and say that it's about 40%.

And there are a bunch of engineers from certain cultures who don't know what they don't know, but believe that a massive portfolio of slop is better than one or two well-developed projects.

I can only hope that the people training the good coding models know to tell AI that these are antipatterns, not patterns.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#216

Post by doug_durham »

wk320189 wrote: post #102

Strangely we never hear gushing pieces on how great gcc is. If you have to advertise that much or recruit people with AI mania, perhaps your product isn't that great.

You must be new to Hacker News. There have been plenty of pieces praising the GCC toolchain.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#217

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

dist-epoch wrote: post #58
holyra wrote: post #38

what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.

The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita. And then add on top the environmental impact of all of the money that programmer gets from programming - travels around the world, buying large houses, ... If you care about the environment, you should want AI's re…

this is genocidal, on a human-wide scale.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#218

Post by axus »

_dwt wrote: post #123
noemit wrote: post #3

Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…

I am going to try to put this kindly: it is very glib, and people will find it offensive and obnoxious, to implicitly round off all resistance or skepticism to incuriosity. Perhaps to alienate AI critics even further is the goal, in which case - carry on. But if you are genuinely confused by the attitudes of your peers, try asking not "what do I have that they lack" ("curiosity"?) but "what do they see that I don't"…

I read the parent comment as calling the majority of AI users "incurious", and not referring to us who resist AI for whatever reasons. The curious AI users can obtain self-improvement, the incurious ones want money or at least custom software without caring how its made.

I don't want the means of production to be located inside companies that can only exist with a steady bubble of VC dollars. It's perfectly reasonable to try AI or use it sparingly, but not embrace it for reasons that can be articulated. Not relevant to parent commenters point, though. Maybe you are "replying" to the article?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#219

Post by red_hare »

Right now I'm working two AI-jobs. I build agents for enterprises and I teach agent development at a university. So I'm probably too deep to see straight.

But I think the future of programming is english.

Agent frameworks are converging on a small set of core concepts: prompts, tools, RAG, agent-as-tool, agent handoff, and state/runcontext (an LLM-invisible KV store for sharing state across tools, sub-agents, and prompt templates).

These primitives, by themselves, can cover most low-UX application business use cases. And once your tooling can be one-shotted by a coding agent, you stop writing code entirely. The job becomes naming, describing, and instructing and then wiring those pieces together with something more akin to flow-chart programming.

So I think for most application development, the kind where you're solving a specific business problem, code stops being the relevant abstraction. Even Claude Code will feel too low-level for the median developer.

The next IDE looks like Google Docs.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#220

Post by ValentineC »

thefounder wrote: post #49

The issue is that you become lazy after a while and stop “leading the design”. And I think that’s ok because most of the code is just throwaway code. You would rewrite your project/app several times by the time it’s worth it to pay attention to “proper” architecture. I wish I had these AIs 10 years ago so that I could focus on everything I wanted to build instead to become a framework developer/engineer.

> I wish I had these AIs 10 years ago so that I could focus on everything I wanted to build instead to become a framework developer/engineer.

I think frameworks (especially those that have testing built-in) are even more important as guardrails now.

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