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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

#231

Post by [deleted] »

reactordev wrote: post #143
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.

This is the juxtaposition the general public is in. They don’t have advanced tech skills to know any better so they see an output that they can’t produce from their skills and think it’s great. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What does the code look like?

[deleted]

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#232

Post by JumpCrisscross »

keeda wrote: post #229
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 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 as…

> using AI as a tutor, or even just for help with the hard assignments, produces slightly better learning outcomes

Source? The few people I’ve seen try to do this wind up with a terrible understanding of the material, with large knowledge gaps and one or two fundamental fuckups. In every case, an introductory textbook would have been better. (It would also have been harder.)

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#233

Post by yawnxyz »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #130
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…

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.

this is why people still enjoy eating at Olive Garden and Chipotle and Sweetgreen

basically the AI-slop version of food, yet still they thrive

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#234

Post by keeda »

runarberg wrote: post #58
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 This is a testable hypotheses with severe lack of citations. Intuition would argue the opposite. We learn by using our brains, if we offload the thinking to a machine and copy their output we don‘t learn. A child does not learn multiplication by using a calculator, and a language learner will not learn a new language by…

Actually, you're both right. Using AI as a supplementary learning aid -- i.e. students use AI as a personalized tutor but still do the assignments themselves -- produces better outcomes. But using AI as a crutch -- i.e. using it to do the assignments -- produces worse outcomes.

There is even preliminary research evidence for this, e.g. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X2...

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#235

Post by block_dagger »

> You could give me Jimi Hendrix’s exact guitar but it would sound very different if I tried to play it!

Guitars do not think. AI does. The analogies that try to paint AI as "just another inanimate tool" are way off base, and so is the conclusions of this article.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#236

Post by rustyminnow »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #193
hollowturtle wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is a maintenance deadend for LLMs it's notorious codebases start accumulating enormous amount of tech debt and that it gets almost impossible to unravel it even with the best agent

I've never seen it happen. You say this and it's likely one anecdotal claim. At the same time there's counter points like Bun getting rewritten in rust. This is talk and talk is cheap. Prove it, otherwise it's still a million dollar question... unanswered. HN is notoriously mentally deficient when it comes to AI. They were wrong about self driving cars (I sit in AI cars daily), they were wrong about AI getting used f…

Bun getting rewritten in Rust is not really the counter point you think it is. The rust version hasn't shipped yet, so there hasn't even been a chance to see if the code can be maintained. It's an impressive feat no doubt, but until they've maintained it on a months to years timeline, it's also just talk with no evidence.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#237

Post by tj-teej »

block_dagger wrote: post #235

> You could give me Jimi Hendrix’s exact guitar but it would sound very different if I tried to play it! Guitars do not think. AI does. The analogies that try to paint AI as "just another inanimate tool" are way off base, and so is the conclusions of this article.

I think the better analogy is "you could give me an afternoon in the studio with Jimi Hendrix's sound engineer and the record we create would sound very different from Jimi's albums."

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#238

Post by ok_dad »

lelanthran wrote: post #180
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…

> What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, You don't learn by reading, you learn by doing. In this case, simply reading the output of an LLM isn't going to substantially educate you.

You’re not as senior as you think if you think reading code isn’t worth it. Do you think novelists just write novels from nothing? They read books. Software developers need to read software, too. When was the last time you read the code for the best open source software in your industry? I routinely read the libraries I use.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#240

Post by lelanthran »

jvanderbot wrote: post #48
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 wonder how much of this is momentum. At the moment, we understand the basic tech, could reasonably DIY, but choose not to knowing full well there's a mess of understandable code somewhere we could go clean up but dont want to. We accept fast iterations because we know roughly the shape of how it "should be" and can guide an automated framework towards that. This is especially true on our own projects or something w…

The blog post is spot on: AI is exactly like an Iron Man suit - if you never take it off your muscles will atrophy to nothing!
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