Tech workers were pretty anti union for a long time, because we were all so excellent we were irreplaceable. I wonder if that will change.
We are going to see techluddites this year
AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
241–250 of 608 posts
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#242Tech workers were pretty anti union for a long time, because we were all so excellent we were irreplaceable. I wonder if that will change.
Too late. Actors' unions shut Hollywood down 3 years ago over AI. SWEs would have had to make their move 10 years ago to be able to live up to this moment.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs. LLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing, it's not surprising there is crossover.
Not so sure about that. There are many distinct LLM "smells" in that comment, like "A is true, but it hides something: unrelated to A" and "It's not (just) C, it's hyperbole D".
I personally love that phrasing even if it's a clear tell. Comparisons work well for me to grasp an idea. I also love bullet points.
So yeah, I guess I like LLM writing.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#244I agree!
“Why LLM-Powered Programming is More Mech Suit Than Artificial Human”
https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-progra...
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there is a level of magnitude difference between coordinating AI agents and humans - the AIs are so much faster and more consistent than humans, that you can (as Steve Yegge [0] and Nicholas Carlini [1] showed) have them build a massive project from scratch in a matter of hours and days rather than months and years. The coordination cost is so much lower that it's just a different ball game. [0] https://steve-yeg…
Then why aren’t we seeing orders of magnitude more software being produced?
This question remains the 900-pound gorilla of this discussion
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so sure about that. There are many distinct LLM "smells" in that comment, like "A is true, but it hides something: unrelated to A" and "It's not (just) C, it's hyperbole D".
Sure, but you can read articles that predate LLMs which have the same so called tells.
> Sure, but you can read articles that predate LLMs which have the same so called tells.
Not with such a high frequency, though. We're looking at 1 tell per sentence!
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s been a minute and a half and I don’t see the evidence you can task an agent swarm to produce useful software without your input or review. I’ve seen a few experiments that failed, and I’ve seen manic garbage, but not yet anything useful outside of the agent operators imagination.
Agent swarms are what, a couple of months old? What are you even talking about. Yes, people/humans still drive this stuff, but if you think there isn't useful software out there that can be handily implemented with current gen agents that need very little or no review, then I don't know what to tell you, apart from "you're mistaken". And I say that as someone who uses three tools heavily but has otherwise no stake in…
The next thing after agent swarms will be swarm colonies and people will go "it's been a month since agentic swarm colonies, give it a month or two". People have been moving the goal posts like that for a couple years now, it's starting to grow stale. This is like self driving cars which were going to be workingin 2016 and replace 80% of drivers by 2017, all over again. People falling for hype instead of admitting that while it appears somewhat useful, nobody has any clue if it's 97% useful or just 3% useful but so far it's looking like the later.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you purposely write this to sound like an LLM?
It's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs. LLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing, it's not surprising there is crossover.
You're absolutely right, that isn't just good writing — that's poetry! Do you need further assistance?
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#249There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…
This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift. And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others.
>This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift.
It's true that at first not everyone is just as efficient, but I'd be lying if I were to claim that someone needs a 4-year degree to communicate with LLM's.
Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
#250There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…
> The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI.
Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's just really good at saying things which sound plausible.