221–230 of 328 posts
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I find this hard to parse, maybe because English is not my first language. Do senior SWEs provide more value than they provide principles, or do they provide more value than principles do?
He means "Principal engineers", its a title for higher up engineers.
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You’re fucked once you have to start getting AI to produce code for languages you’ve never actually worked in. You will have to write code to understand deeply what goes on at the low level. Without a solid understanding of the low level, you won’t truly know what optimal solutions look like on a high level. You will be flying by the seat of your pants, churning out code that works but has bad low level quirks sprink…
Your argument has many, many leaps but I infer your point. The lack of attention does reduce the overall correctness of the system. But, and unfortunately, in most situations the loss of correctness is more than made up for by the speed gains. Unless you're building software that could kill someone, it's hard to reject the improved speed. The cost of delay is usually more damaging than the cost of incorrectness.
If that doesn’t apply, you are just writing toy apps or front ends that are of no real significance, so yes you could carry on with incorrect code in those cases, but it’s not much of a career either.
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If I ask my buddy for help I'm not considering that part of research or learning I consider that leaning on their potential expertise. You're not learning shit on how to build a house just because you ask your friend to build one for you. If we're talking about research as in actually attempting to learn and get to the heart of a matter then yes. You should be cross referencing everything.
My point is if you ask your friend/LLM how to build a house and then build a house then you've learned how to build a house. I've build a lot of "houses" recently that I wouldn't have attempted if I didn't have a friend/LLM to ask.
So did you build a house, or did you build a house?
Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.
Are you learning, or are you simply consuming?
I think we're missing long form studies that show if it's possible to learn deeply from compressed AI generated summaries of topics.
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You're either using it wrong, or work somewhere that sucks. I'm having a ton of fun coding with AI. I feel like I am learning a whole new branch of the programming skill tree. LLMs and their harnesses are like a mew set of constraints to work around when designing systems, but if you get them right you can build bigger, better things than ever before. I say all of this as someone who spent the last two days rebuildin…
What's an example of "bigger and better" and what projects did you have before?
This year I'm building and IoT data management platform and I've already built two demos of the product and am adding a bunch of features for a third. Nothing is vaporware about it. All in about 4 months.
The big wins have been system config, debugging, and exploration. I was able to build an Arrow Flight SQL backend to use as an interface and try it out with some use cases, decide it wasn't going to work, and replace it with something else, all in about two weeks. Would have taken far longer before, if I would have been able to do it at all. I knew nothing about Flight SQL before trying it out.
I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…
> Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Literally: the context window. With the human you have a window that possibly extends up to _years_. With your language model you have maybe a few megabytes which is always preceded by instructions from the model maker.
The context window is the working memory, which is not ‘years’ for humans either.
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> i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before You want us to believe you couldn't overcome the puddle-deep challenge of installing an IDE and using Pip or Node in the past, but now you're actually learning how to write functions? Cool for you if true I guess but I'm pretty seriously skeptical
I can sort of buy this, honestly. When was the last time you picked up a new language with unfamiliar tooling? Especially something older that won't hold your hand. A lot of the most miserable parts of getting started coding have nothing to do with programming and everything to do with like, trying to apt-install the right compiler version or figure out which build headers you need or some other equally trivial bulls…
I started learning Monogame with C# literally yesterday after being a chiefly JavaScript dev for over a decade. I'm having a lot of fun learning it from scratch with no AI
I'll concede that before yesterday it had been a while though
> Especially something older that won't hold your hand
Python and JavaScript are two of the most "will hold your hand" languages these days aren't they?
> A lot of the most miserable parts of getting started coding have nothing to do with programming and everything to do with like, trying to apt-install the right compiler version or figure out which build headers you need or some other equally trivial bullshit that gets in the way of writing code.
I agree but absolutely not for these two languages in particular
You can open the developer tools in any major browser and start typing in JavaScript right there if you want
Python you can install it and write it right in any editor
The upfront burden for both languages is absolutely trivial imo
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And you're gonna review that voluminous academic literature in a field you're not familiar with, right?... That is my point: an LLM can be great if you know the field and can spot errors. Or, to a lesser extent, if you have some automatic feedback loop that the model can't easily game ("does this code pass unit tests?"). It's a lot less great if there's a risk that you won't detect the early drift.
Sifting through information to separate truth from fiction is a modern, experience-based skill that I’ve developed YES. However, your perspective on how LLMs are used might be too narrow. While no one is suggesting using an AI to find a one-shot cure for Alzheimer's, LLMs are incredibly effective tools when paired with textbooks to master subjects like undergraduate physics.
I agree that they can be helpful for explaining things if you're stuck. But since you used the example of physics, the majority of hard won physics knowledge comes from working lots of problems yourself.
Too many people are already used to LLMs circumventing the laborious aspects of things, so it takes a certain person to withhold from just having the LLM solve the problem for you when you're stuck.
Until we can figure out to teach people to fight against their instincts, then I don't think LLMs will lead to better long term outcomes.
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> Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. You aren't learning anything. Learning involves doing . We've known this for ages: simply reading a maths book without drilling on the problems will not get a student to pass. Best case scenario, you're reading stuff. For users of coding agents, they're not even doing that.
Learning by doing is often more effective because it naturally involves forced recall. But it's not the only way to learn and not even the only way to do a lot of forced recall. It's downright crazy to say you aren't learning anything by reading. You likely won't retain that high a % of the content without repeated drilling, but it's not like nonfiction exists for no reason!
How much of a nonfiction book can you recall a few months after reading it? Probably very little.
However, I haven't taken a calculus class in nearly a decade and I still know how to solve derivatives and integrals.
Point being: there's levels to this, and reading is not nearly as effective as drilling exercises.
I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…
intellectual work (or really any discipline with a 'skills tree' that you can progress up or down) degrades over time without practice. same way that, if you don't run for a while, you're not going to be able to hit your last PR when you pick it back up. it's definitely easier to catch up after some time away than it would be if you'd never developed the skills in the first place or didn't have a natural talent, but…
My friend said being an engineer is not just writing code, but designing and architecting the system. I agree, but we are also moving that to AI. We are offloading the thought process to a LLM, which confirms our biases and tells us what we want to hear.
Essentially, we are also losing the software architecture and design skills because we aren't talking to other engineers/architects/designers who may approach the problen in a complete different way; we are just asking the AI to confirm our thoughts.