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Leave Me Behind

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Re: Leave Me Behind

#261

Post by [deleted] »

ori_b wrote: post #253
unknownfuture wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that you think building is just coding. What do you think architects do? Or interior designers? Or civil engineers?

Interesting that you think coding just typing. Code is just a language where the problem is specified in fine detail; the biggest value proposition of an LLM is being able to hand-wave and let some other tool take care of guessing at detail, where you can't be bothered to specify it in full. And, part of the process of specifying in full forces you to rethink design assumptions. Architecture certainly isn't building,…

[deleted]

Re: Leave Me Behind

#262

Post by prerok »

unknownfuture wrote: post #242
prerok wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the jury is still out, I would still say you are both right already. The amount of slop produced even in company setting is staggering and I don't like it one bit that neither the submitter nor the reviewer of the PR paid due dilligence. And I am only complaining because it then becomes my problem. So, then I have to start nagging people to clean that up. I can say with 100% certainty that the problems I face…

Very well said. I also think reading and reviewing code is a skill that connected to but very much independent of the writing of code, and the use of coding agents requires us to be far more skilled and diligent at it. So put another way, people who were good at coding without agents may in fact be a poor fit with them, which means the entire industry is experiencing a dislocation between skills we have and skills we…

Indeed, however I would also point out that senior engineers have already been expected to be good at reading code: they were expected to evaluate the code quality of other contributors, so they had to be able to do that.

In fact, from my personal experience, going from junior to mid to senior, that was the hardest thing. Reading the code and thinking if what they did was really correct and will not have additional undesired side-effects was hard to become efficient at (it didn't help that we were working in C back then).

So, really, I think that for juniors it's actually much harder because if they want to do due dilligence they have to do the same evaluation but without the years of experience working with that code base. I can understand, even if I don't like it, that they just submit the output of the LLM for the senior to review.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#263

Post by nomel »

aspenmartin wrote: post #186
ary wrote: post #167

There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider. We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think t…

> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unint…

> Also I wonder how many folks honestly look in the mirror and think: how does the median programmer differ from an LLM.

Once you step out of pure-software orgs, it becomes clear that most would benefit from having AI write code. There's a huge moat between most people and the point where they can afford/find the effort of someone that can write software.

These people, that only care about practical results rather than somewhat tangential things like "elegance" and "maintainability", are going to benefit tremendously.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#264

Post by cautiouscat »

fasterik wrote: post #247

It seems to me that the article is creating a false dichotomy where either you don't use AI at all, or you delegate every aspect of the work to AI. This simply isn't how it works in practice. You get to choose how much of the work you delegate to AI. There's still an enormous amount of space for human expertise, community, and enthusiasm for technology. The public debate around AI makes me think of the cognitive dist…

> This simply isn't how it works in practice. You get to choose how much of the work you delegate to AI. There's still an enormous amount of space for human expertise, community, and enthusiasm for technology.

I agree, especially with my own projects. Except you don't always get to choose in the workplace. Now that teams are being measured by PR throughput and token usage, you will look "worse" next to the person who is totally vibecoding. My fear is that if I don't vibecode, I'll be passed up for promotion.

The indicators that vibecoding may be bad, are lagging. What I mean is that issues that come up from vibecoding whether its performance, service degradation, massive data migrations etc. will always show up later.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#265

Post by nine_k »

customguy wrote: post #258
nine_k wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like people complaining about "poor quality plastic trinkets" that replaced well-made household items. Of course high-quality things can be (and are) made of plastic. The problem is that you can still make a very cheap passable thing out of plastic, that would be uneconomical to make out of metal or wood. Same with code: by using AI, one can produce passable software trinkets very cheaply, that would be uneconim…

> It's like people complaining about "poor quality plastic trinkets" that replaced well-made household items. Actually, people had to be made to see it as cheap so they would throw away and re-buy more. https://desis.osu.edu/seniorthesis/index.php/2024/09/15/crea... > “It was a really difficult sell to the American public in the post-war period, to inculcate people into a throwaway living,” she says. “That is not wha…

I agree, "AI" is being pushed beyond reason, in an attempt to make it look like what it's not, or at least not yet. And yes, people do act irrationally due to that, see all that tkenmaxxing and layoffs. I don't think it will last in this inebriated state forever.

But it's worth noting that there's a new substance enabled by AI, the "slop", that is flushing violently into our world right now. Pretending it's not there, and that we won't see more of it, is perilous.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#266

Post by satvikpendem »

slopinthebag wrote: post #249
satvikpendem wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the question. For one thing I use local models mainly, but even if I didn't, I'd be buying the tokens from cloud model providers, not the prepackaged, fully complete software itself. I buy the tokens to make what I want. It's actually quite similar to buying the services of a programmer off Upwork to build something for me, only with LLMs it's way cheaper and faster, with a shorter feedback loop.

I think their point is that you aren't really doing the implementing, Claude (or any model really) is. If you genuinely find prompting LLMs to be fun, then by all means go for it.

What I find fun is getting the output to exactly what I want. I don't care whether I'm personally implementing something or not, and that's what many in this thread seem not to understand.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#267

Post by unknownfuture »

satvikpendem wrote: post #266
slopinthebag wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their point is that you aren't really doing the implementing, Claude (or any model really) is. If you genuinely find prompting LLMs to be fun, then by all means go for it.

What I find fun is getting the output to exactly what I want. I don't care whether I'm personally implementing something or not, and that's what many in this thread seem not to understand.

I'm just gonna hop in and say: I get it.

If I spend a weekend standing up a self-hosted media system or something, I doubt anyone would dispute that's a fun building exercise.

If I do the same thing but use an LLM to build out instead, somehow it's not.

Yeah it's not the same kind of building as what we might have done pre-LLM but it need not be any less satisfying or rewarding.

The real disconnect seems to be the classic dichotomy: people who see coding as the point and the purpose, vs people who just want an outcome.

And that's fine!

I'm just don't understand why the one camp feels the need to deride the other.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#268

Post by shepherdjerred »

the_biot wrote: post #194
innodendo wrote: post #145

My experience programming is so much different than theirs makes me wonder what I missed out on. I have always programmed on my own, and I can't even think about a single time I have talked to a person in depth about programming (both online and in person). It sounds fun and exciting, but unfortunately I have simply never had the opportunities in life to do so. For me, AI is the first time I have ever been able to ge…

You know it's random nonsense, and yet you still take it on faith that it "gives you answers". That's what makes me despair about all the AI nonsense: it's the death of intellect. Not the death of deep thinking, but of common sense. I can't wait for the day until all these people collectively snap out of it, and go "what the hell were we thinking with these chatbots".

AI can give good answers to design/architecture problems.

Have it do research (HN, Stack Overflow, technical blogs) and summarize.

Why do you think this wouldn't work?

You'll still need to be capable of understanding and judging the output, and it might miss some options, but it is certainly no worse than pre-AI.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#269

Post by chipotle_coyote »

cousin_it wrote: post #135

I think this post is either LLM-written, or written in a standard blogpost style of today which is increasingly becoming LLM-like. Sam Kriss had a good recent post pointing out some of the "tells": https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...

There seems to be a "spot the LLM" game happening on HN in particular in which literally every damn linked post has a comment accusing it of being written by an AI. Do we not understand that definitionally every AI "tell" comes from humans? Hell, Sam Kriss's article complains about florid writing and then goes on to cite Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy as examples of writers who "pull the same cheap tricks" as AI and with all respect to Mr. Kriss I just can't even. The theme of this article veers dangerously close to "if you use a weird metaphor you're probably using an LLM because surely no human would ever write 'I'm literally the size of a dry martini.'" I'm sorry, Sam, but humans have written weird fucking shit for a very long time without LLMs.

And what "tells" are in this article, anyway? It reads very straightforwardly; it does not, in fact, have any weird metaphors. Em dashes are not actually a tell, but using the wrong characters for em dashes (the article uses " - ", e.g., space hyphen space) seems pretty human. Last but, I would argue not least, I am willing to give the author of an article about not wanting to program with LLMs the benefit of the doubt here. "The orphan-punching machine fills me with existential angst and dread, and the only way for me to communicate this to the audience is to let it punch a few orphans for me."

Now, if you'll excuse me, all this is making me need to be literally the size of a high-proof daiquiri.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#270

Post by unknownfuture »

ori_b wrote: post #253
unknownfuture wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that you think building is just coding. What do you think architects do? Or interior designers? Or civil engineers?

Interesting that you think coding just typing. Code is just a language where the problem is specified in fine detail; the biggest value proposition of an LLM is being able to hand-wave and let some other tool take care of guessing at detail, where you can't be bothered to specify it in full. And, part of the process of specifying in full forces you to rethink design assumptions. Architecture certainly isn't building,…

No, coding is the act of reifying all the things that actually matter--the requirements, the visual design, the system design, etc--into a form that a computer can execute.

The biggest value proposition of an LLM is being able to focus on the truly high-value activities while allowing the machine take care of much of that reification.

That you think architecture or interior design isn't building tells you prefer to downplay or devalue any work that isn't hands on construction. It's an interesting perspective, but it's one I'll never be able to understand or agree with.

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