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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#221

Post by mgraczyk »

20k wrote: post #208
simonw wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human teachers make mistakes too. If you aren't consuming information with a skeptical eye you're not learning as effectively as you could be no matter what the source is. The trick to learning with LLMs is to treat them as one of multiple sources of information, and work with those sources to build your own robust mental of how things work. If you exclusively rely on official documentation you'll miss out on things…

If I have to treat LLMs as a fallible source of information, why wouldn't I just go right to the source though? Having an extra step in between me and the actual truth seems pointless WinAPI docs are pretty accurate and up to date

Because it will take you years to read all the information you can get funneled through an LLM in a day

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#222

Post by gavmor »

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…

When AI screws up, it's "stupid." When AI succeeds, I'm smart.

It's some cousin of the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#223

Post by mgraczyk »

20k wrote: post #197
mgraczyk wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learn a lot faster now with LLMs. You could learn the windows APIs much faster if you wanted to learn them

How is this faster than just reading the documentation? Given that LLMs hallucinate, you have to double check everything it says against the docs anyway

Yes you have to be careful, but the LLM will read and process core and documentation literally millions of times faster than you, so it's worth it

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#224

Post by JBorrow »

Maybe I'm entirely out of the loop and a complete idiot, but I am really not sure at all what people mean when they talk about this stuff. I use AI agents every day, but people who say they spend 'most of my time writing agents and tools' must be living in an absolutely different world.

I don't understand how people are making anything that has any level of usefulness without a feedback loop with them at the center. My agents often can go off for a few minutes, maybe 10, and write some feature. Half of the time they will get it wrong, I realize I prompted wrong, and I will have to re-do it myself or re-do the prompt. A quarter of the time, they have no idea what they're doing, and I realize I can fix the issue that they're writing a thousand lines for with a single line change. The final quarter of the time I need to follow up and refine their solution either manually or through additional prompting.

That's also only a small portion of my time... The rest is curating data (which you've pretty much got to do manually), writing code by hand (gasp!), working on deployments, and discussing with actual people.

Maybe this is a limitation of the models, but I don't think so. To get to the vision in my head, there needs to be a feedback loop... Or are people just willing to abdicate that vision-making to the model? If you do that, how do you know you're solving the problem you actually want to?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#225

Post by simonw »

20k wrote: post #208
simonw wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human teachers make mistakes too. If you aren't consuming information with a skeptical eye you're not learning as effectively as you could be no matter what the source is. The trick to learning with LLMs is to treat them as one of multiple sources of information, and work with those sources to build your own robust mental of how things work. If you exclusively rely on official documentation you'll miss out on things…

If I have to treat LLMs as a fallible source of information, why wouldn't I just go right to the source though? Having an extra step in between me and the actual truth seems pointless WinAPI docs are pretty accurate and up to date

Because it's faster.

If the WinAPI docs are solid you can do things like copy and paste pages of them into Claude and ask a question, rather then manually scan through them looking for the answer yourself.

Apple's developer documentation is mostly awful - try finding out how to use the sips or sandbox-exec CLI tools for example. LLMs have unlocked those for me.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#226

Post by sdevonoes »

red_hare wrote: post #219

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 pro…

You think prompting is here to stay? Sql has survived a long period of time. Servlets haven’t. We moved from assembly to higher languages. Flash couldn’t make it. So, im not sure for how long we will be prompting. Sure it looks great right now (just like Flash, servlets and assembly looked back then) but I think another technology will emerge that perhaps is based on promps behind the curtains but doesn’t look like the current prompting.

I would say prompting is not here to stay. It’s just temporary “tech”

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#227

Post by _dwt »

prescriptivist wrote: post #193
_dwt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think that people who don't want to use these tools or clean old ways are incurious. But I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point. Not in the future, but now. It's just that the adoption of these tools isn't evenly distributed yet. I think there's a place for thoughtful dialogue around what this means fo…

Well, no, not with that attitude there won’t! I am not trying to insinuate that there is a conspiracy, or that posts like yours are part of it, but there has been a huge wave of posts and comments since February which narrow the Overton window to the distance between “it’s here and it’s great” and “I’m sad but it’s inevitable”.

Humanity has possessed nuclear weapons for 80 years and has used them exactly twice in anger, at the very beginning of that span. We can in fact just NOT do things! Not every world-beating technology takes off, for one reason or another. Supersonic airliners. Eugenics. Betamax.

The best time to air concerns was yesterday. The next best time is today. I think we technologists wildly overestimate public understand and underestimate public distrust of our work and of “AI” specifically. We’ve got CEOs stating that LLMs are a bigger deal than nuclear weapons or fire(!) and yet getting upset that the government wants control of their use. We’ve got giddy thinkpieces from people (real example from LinkedIn!) who believe we’ll hit 100% white collar unemployment in 5 years and wrap up by saying they’re “5% nervous and 95% excited”. If that’s what they really think, and how they really feel, it’s psychopathic! Those numbers get you a social scene that’ll make the French Revolution look like a tea party. (“And honestly? I’m here for it.”)

So no, while I _think_ you’re correct, I don’t accept the inevitability of it all. There are possibilities I don’t want to see closed off (maybe data finally really is the new oil, and that’s the basis for a planetary sovereign wealth fund. Maybe every man, woman, and child who ever wrote a book or a program or an internet comment deserves a royalty check in the mail each month!) just yet.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#228

Post by recursive »

nitwit005 wrote: post #159
rel_ic wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of like saying a kid can never become a better programmer than the average of his teachers. IMHO, the reasons not to use AI are social, not logical.

The AI doesn't know what good or bad code is. It doesn't know what surpassing someone means. It's been trained to generate text similar to its training data, and that's what it does. If you feed it only good code, we'd expect a better result, but currently we're feeding it average code. The cost to evaluate code quality for the huge data set is too high.

The training data includes plenty of examples of labelled good and bad code. And comparisons between two implementations plus trade-offs and costs and benefits. I think it absolutely does "know" good code, in the sense that it can know anything at all.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#229

Post by eggsandbeer »

dieselgate wrote: post #211
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..

[dead]

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#230

Post by overgard »

I don't agree with the headline of "we're all AI engineers now", but I do agree that AI is more of a multiplier than anything. If you know what you're doing, you go faster, if you don't, you're just making a mess at a record pace.

I'm not sure how this sustains though; like, I can't help but think this technology is going to dull a lot of people's skills, and other people just aren't going to develop skills in the first place. I have a feeling a couple years from now this is going to be a disaster (I don't think AGI is going to take place and I think the tools are going to get a lot more expensive when they start charging the true costs)

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