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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#241

Post by skydhash »

xnx wrote: post #189
lsy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining knowledge of “what you are doing”. With AI coding either you need to carefully review outputs and you aren’t saving any cognitive capacity, or you aren’t looking at the outputs and don’t know what you’re…

> AI coding isn’t an abstraction Isn't it an abstraction similar to how an engineering or product manager is? Tell the (human or AI coder) what you want, and the coder writes code to fulfill your request. If it's not what you want, have them modify what they've made or start over with a new approach.

With an abstraction, you literally move your thinking up a level. So you move up a floor up the tower and no longer have to think what's happening below. The moment something leaves your floor, its course is set. If a result come back, its something familiar, not something from the lower floor.

A human coder can be seen as an abstraction level because it will talk to the PM in product terms, not in code. And the PM will be reviewing the product. What makes this work is that the underlying contract is that there's a very small amount of iterations necessary before the product is done and the latter one should require shorter time from the PM.

We've already established using a LLM tool that way does not work. You can spend a whole month doing back and forth, never looking at code and still have not something that can be made to work. And as soon as you look at the code, you've breached the abstraction layer yourself.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#242

Post by Brajeshwar »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #208
gerdesj wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea why you were dv'd. It still takes roughly nine months to make a human baby, regardless of how many women or babies are involved!

Sometimes HN doesn't like jokes, which is okay. I didn't really contribute much to discussion, so I probably deserve some downvotes. I'm ok with it.

Actually, I like quite a lot of the subtle jokes on HN. It is harder to notice, fewer to find, and I don’t get it many a times. But when I get it (or someone explains it to me, perhaps out of pity), I chuckle, laugh, and laugh again. And I remember those comments.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#243

Post by SkyPuncher »

srcreigh wrote: post #53

Is it wise to understand everything that AI does for you? Let’s say a person has 10 units of learning per week. Is the author actually claiming that that person must not deliver any results beyond their 10 units? It makes some sense to have say 20 units of results and prioritize which ones to fully comprehend. I suspect APIs / libraries / languages / platforms will have more churn due to AI. New platform new system n…

It's really no different than managing people.

Managers simply cannot know all of the details of what their reports write. They have to build abstractions.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#244

Post by patrick-elmore »

joe_mamba wrote: post #5
CorbenDallas wrote: post #3

There are plenty of engineers, who simply can't think, AI will not change anything in this regard.

How do you graduate your engineering degree without being able to think? Even my colleagues who cheated their way through uni still needed critical thinking to do that and get away with cheating without being caught. People might hate this but being a good cheat requires a lot of critical thinking.

I've seen it happen multiple times. Engineering degrees are no different than a vast majority of degrees in that if you are good at the read and regurgitate cycle, you can make it through. Not only can you make it through, but you can do it with a very respectable GPA. They come out with a large dictionary of keywords in their arsenal, but no idea how to put them into practice. Some are able to put it into practice and tie it all together. As they see practical examples of those keywords in the real world, it starts falling like dominoes, and at an accelerating rate. For some, it never goes much beyond keywords. The dominoes fall, but it is slow, and they stop falling for extended periods of time for them. Not many mature engineering organizations can tolerate that sort of progression rate. They usually don't last very long at any one place, until they find a company where they can blend into the background due to a combination of company culture, and low complexity systems being worked on.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#245

Post by rdevilla »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #223
staticshock wrote: post #66

The eloquence with which this point gets (repeatedly) made is continuing to improve each next time I read it. However, I still feel like we haven't nailed it. That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse (e.g. "the medium is the message", "you ship your org chart", "9 mothers can't make a baby in a month"), in which the most pointed version of this critique packs a punch in just a few words that r…

Meaning is abstract. We can't express meaning: we can only signify it. An expression (sign) may contain the latent structure of meaning (the writer's intention), but that structure can only be felt through a relevant interpretation. To maintain relevance, we must find common ground. There is no true objectivity, because every sign must be built up from an arbitrary ground. At the very least, there will be a conflict…

> Meaning is abstract. We can't express meaning: we can only signify it. An expression (sign) may contain the latent structure of meaning (the writer's intention), but that structure can only be felt through a relevant interpretation.

I'm reminded immediately of the Enochian language which purportedly had the remarkable property of having a direct, unambiguous, 1-to-1 correspondence with the things being signified. To utter, and hear, any expression in Enochian is to directly transfer the author's intent into the listener's mind, wholly intact and unmodified:

    Every Letter signifieth the member of the substance whereof it speaketh.
    Every word signifieth the quiddity of the substance.

    - John Dee, "A true & faithful relation of what passed for many yeers between Dr. John Dee ... and some spirits," 1659 [0].
The Tower of Babel is an allegory for the weak correspondence between human natural language and the things it attempts to signify (as opposed to the supposedly strong 1-to-1 correspondence of Enochian). The tongues are confused, people use the same words to signify different referents entirely, or cannot agree on which term should be used to signify a single concept, and the society collapses. This is similar to what Orwell wrote about, and we have already implemented Orwell's vision, sociopolitically, in the early 21st century, through the culture war (nobody can define "man" or "woman" any more, sometimes the word "man" is used to refer to a "woman," etc).

LLMs just accelerate this process of severing any connection whatsoever between signified and signifier. In some ways they are maximally Babelian, in that they maximize confusion by increasing the quantity of signifiers produced while minimizing the amount of time spent ensuring that the things we want signified are being accurately represented.

Speaking more broadly, I think there is much confusion in the spheres of both psychology and religion/spirituality/mysticism in their mutual inability to "come to terms" and agree upon which words should be used to refer to particular phenomenological experiences, or come to a mutual understanding of what those words even mean (try, for instance, to faithfully recreate, in your own mind, someone's written recollection of a psychedelic experience on erowid).

[0] https://archive.org/details/truefaithfulrela00deej/page/92/m...

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#246

Post by staticshock »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #223
staticshock wrote: post #66

The eloquence with which this point gets (repeatedly) made is continuing to improve each next time I read it. However, I still feel like we haven't nailed it. That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse (e.g. "the medium is the message", "you ship your org chart", "9 mothers can't make a baby in a month"), in which the most pointed version of this critique packs a punch in just a few words that r…

Meaning is abstract. We can't express meaning: we can only signify it. An expression (sign) may contain the latent structure of meaning (the writer's intention), but that structure can only be felt through a relevant interpretation. To maintain relevance, we must find common ground. There is no true objectivity, because every sign must be built up from an arbitrary ground. At the very least, there will be a conflict…

> What we really need is to recreate software from a subjective perspective.

What does "subjective" mean here? Are you talking about just-in-time software? That is, software that users get mold on the fly?

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#247

Post by habinero »

xnx wrote: post #189
lsy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining knowledge of “what you are doing”. With AI coding either you need to carefully review outputs and you aren’t saving any cognitive capacity, or you aren’t looking at the outputs and don’t know what you’re…

> AI coding isn’t an abstraction Isn't it an abstraction similar to how an engineering or product manager is? Tell the (human or AI coder) what you want, and the coder writes code to fulfill your request. If it's not what you want, have them modify what they've made or start over with a new approach.

No, because software engineering is more than . I've never had a full spec dropped on my desk lol. There's no abstraction.

Software engineering is a lot more social and communication-heavy than people think. Part of my job is to _not_ take specs at face value. You learn real quick that what people say they need and what they actually need are often miles apart. That's not arrogance, that's just how humans work.

A good product manager understands the biz needs and the consumer market and I know how to build stuff and what's worked in the past. We figure out what to build together. AIs don't think and can't do this in any effective way.

Also, if you fuck up badly enough that you make your engineers throw out code, you're gonna get fired lol

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#248

Post by [deleted] »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #24

There are plenty of engineers that couldn't work without a modern IDE or in languages without memory management. Or without the ability to use a library from GitHub / their package manager. It doesn't feel THAT much different to me. "Engineer" as a term might drift. There are "web developers" that can only use webflow / wordpress.

[deleted]

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#249

Post by fragmede »

gerdesj wrote: post #183
bluefirebrand wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, 9 women can't make 9 babies in a month either

No idea why you were dv'd. It still takes roughly nine months to make a human baby, regardless of how many women or babies are involved!

You're assuming all women in your cohort start not pregnant. However, given a random sampling of women across the entire human race, if you have approximately 14,000 women, statistics says you'll have a baby in a month. That is to say, the chances of one of those woman being 8 months pregnant reaches close enough to 1, given about 14,000 randomly selected women.

Also, you can get a baby tonight if you steal one from the maternity ward.

The real question is, how do LLMs turn the mythical man month on its head. If we accept AI generated code, can an agentic AI swarm make software faster simply by parallelizing in a way that 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month because they're am AI, not human, and communicate in a different way.

The pitfall of AI coding is that previously every shiny tangent that was a distraction, is now a rabbit hole to be leaped into for an afternoon, if you feel like it. It's like that ancient Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. Everybody can recreate an MVP of Twitter in a weekend now when previously that was just a claim a certain type of people made.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#250

Post by traderj0e »

spacechild1 wrote: post #162
vips7L wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer Science.

I see. Computer Science is not an engineering degree and it is not about programming. That's what Software Engineering degrees are for.

Many of the top schools don't have software/computer engineering degrees, rather people who want to be SWEs get CS degrees.
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