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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#221

Post by keeda »

reconnecting wrote: post #4

> I think AI tools are more like Iron Man's suit. There's an interesting repository with 63600 stars on GitHub (1). The developer of the repository is No 1 at the GitHub's trending contributors list (2). However, it seems like the application isn't what it's described to be (3), and the developers, on their end, are unable to clearly answer whether this is real or not, as it's just messy LLM output. Proof that the su…

> Proof that the suit alone doesn't make anyone Iron Man.

I do believe that is a running theme in the Iron Man comics and movies.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#222

Post by Supermancho »

wiseowise wrote: post #85
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

> I had an Iron Man moment Iron Man created Jarvis whose capabilities are way beyond any models in the near future. So it wasn’t an Iron Man moment.

>> I had an Iron Man moment

> Iron Man created Jarvis whose capabilities are way beyond any models in the near future. So it wasn’t an Iron Man moment.

Like an LLM, you misunderstood the context. The voyeuristic experience doesn't require fiction to be reality.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#223

Post by chasd00 »

lelanthran wrote: post #182
chasd00 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My guess is that technical expertise matters less over time, and the ability to specify the desired outcome is eventually the only thing that becomes important if you look at LLMs based coding as another step up in programming abstraction then it's clear this is the case. Think about the progression of programming languages. Over time, we go further and further from the hardware and closer and closer to specifying…

> if you look at LLMs based coding as another step up in programming abstraction then it's clear this is the case. Think about the progression of programming languages. Over time, we go further and further from the hardware and closer and closer to specifying the desired outcome. The terminology, structure, and completeness of a user story that guides a codingagent to the desired output, and only the desired output,…

in the case of tools like claudecode there's no copy/pasting. Claudecode updates files directly, runs tests, starts/stops server, everything else on its own (with your permission).

I guess to take it a step further, you can lay your requirements in order with guidance in a markdown file called 'myprogram.md'. Then tell ClaudeCode to read that file and do what it says. In that way, myprogram.md, actually your requirements doc, is the programming language being turned into the 1s and 0s the computer understands.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#224

Post by wccrawford »

I think that it's not a multiplier on skills.

It's a reducer of time.

For less experienced developers, it's an immediately reduction at the start of a project. But then they will almost certainly have problems later when their initial decisions come back to haunt them.

For senior devs, it's like having a junior or mid-level dev that will instantly do things within their capability, so long as it's explained to them well enough. This junior dev will do things fairly smartly, but any important decisions left to them will be wholly or subtly wrong. And the subtle ones are the worst ones, because they're so hard to detect.

But if that senior dev sets the guidelines well enough, and notices the problems, development is so, so, so much faster. It's wild.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#225

Post by ajross »

tomgp wrote: post #153
adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.

I think this is true, it's like a close relation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#:~:text=%5B14...

It's worth pointing out that Crichton coined that term during a period in his life where he was rapidly descending into conspiracy and iconoclastic thought, and this is of a piece with that.

Gell-Mann's observation was a sincere and thoughtful caution about the way we transmit information about complicated ideas. Crichton's "amnesia effect" is an excuse to ignore media you dislike.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#226

Post by zephen »

techblueberry wrote: post #220
zephen wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a well-known trope that LLMs are prediction engines. But, to get the best out of them, you really have to consider what that means in the small. They are predicting, to a first order of approximation, what you want or expect them to answer. Its response to your first prompt is hilarious, because the LLM completely misunderstood you and based its prediction on what it thought you wrote. Its response to your seco…

Yeah I think this concerns me in two fronts and this specific tendency may be the line in the sand separating LLMs from AGI. On the getting work done front, if what you’re trying to do is remotely subjective, than you really need to be sure you’re asking it the right thing and not expecting it to correct you and provide capital T truth. On the social element. Like wow using it as a therapist or a mentor or to bounce…

> What a huge trap if you expect it to correct you with a semblence of objective reality.

Yes, as a few cases have shown, people can go off the deep end, and the LLM goes right there along with them.

The LLM has no understanding of objective reality. It's even worse than any one of the blind men trying to describe an elephant, because it has no true experience of either the thing, or the other thing it is trying to compare it to.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#227

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

I'm trying to test if vibe coding can actually scale... And man is it painful.

AI is great at creating slop that almost works.

But, my god, it is terrible at following clear as day instructions on how to cleanup slop.

It wrote 150k lines of code that almost works in 2 months. It's taken 1 month to delete about 2000 lines of broken architecture and fix it, and it still hasn't gotten it done, despite nonstop repeated efforts to do something not that hard.

I definitely could've fixed it less time then I've spent prompting at this point (but no way I'd have gotten the other 150k lines). But doing it myself is not the point. It's to see if it can actually scale.

The answer is yes... But my god is it agonizing.

The creating garbage part that almost works is fun.

The inevitable cleanup is not.

And unfortunately I don't see this aspect materially improving in the short term.

If you want it to code you something about 5-10k lines of code that's already been done 1000 times before or only slightly different, it's great.

Most people want more than that.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#228

Post by judahmeek »

vanuatu wrote: post #129
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant I’m not seeing this. And based on what we’re seeing at the university level, I’m not expecting to.

I wonder how much of this is due to poor incentives at the university level? I've seen this work well at a job when there's a feedback loop for juniors that incentivized them to learn with more scope and compensation

How did that business evaluate that the juniors were actually mastering concepts they had not known before?

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#229

Post by keeda »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35
snide wrote: post #7

I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification. What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI…

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant I’m not seeing this. And based on what we’re seeing at the university level, I’m not expecting to.

I think the key word is ability, and I fully agree with that. Using GenAI as a teaching aid can supercharge learning, especially as it makes it very easy to learn by doing. The problem is that people use GenAI to do and hence don't learn.

(The preliminary research so far supports this: using AI to do the hard assignments produces poor learning outcomes, but using AI as a tutor, or even just for help with the hard assignments, produces slightly better learning outcomes.)

I think what you're seeing is the effect of the incentives of the system. The system uses simplistic numbers like grades as proxies for actual learning, and these grades heavily influence students' job prospects, and so you're simply seeing Goodhart's Law in action. Given how easy current methods of skill assessment are to game with AI, my guess is the entire system has to be overhauled.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#230

Post by judahmeek »

renticulous wrote: post #89
snide wrote: post #7

I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification. What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI…

There are other axes as well. Companies with AI will move faster than those without. AI itself could subsume what we collectively consider as Engineering Taste. AI is faster at what it does. So even if a junior costs less on his own than AI. Paying extra for AI means gaining first mover advantage.

> AI itself could subsume what we collectively consider as Engineering Taste.

Only if AI feeds on more taste than garbage.

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