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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
271–280 of 656 posts
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... nobody in the field of "Software Engineering" is actually an Engineer if we go by a strict definitions. This is a pet peeve of mine, so while I understand what you mean, I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering! And since I've had this discussion before, I'll pre-emptively hazard a guess that the argument boils down to "rigor", and point out that a) economic fe…
“Accredited”
Most countries do not need accreditation for engineers.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#273[dead]
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think the occasional joke is fine but when you have too many then the comments get diluted. It's exactly that kind of thing that makes me hate Reddit and so many other places: spam.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
IDEs are free. Libraries are free. Languages are free. This is becoming more like an internet subscription where you’re at the mercy of Anthropic the same way you may be at the mercy of Comcast. I’m sure you can see the difference between a garbage collector and a nondeterministic slop generator But it feels good to equivocate, so here we are.
> IDEs are free. Libraries are free. Languages are free. This is becoming more like an internet subscription where you’re at the mercy of Anthropic the same way you may be at the mercy of Comcast. Ollama/llamafile/vllm/llama.cpp are free. Qwen/kimi/deepseek are free. Pi.dev/OpenCode are free. If you're using a SaaS AI subscription that's fine, but that's hardly the only option.
How much does the hardware to run them on cost? Especially to get decently sized models running at decent speeds.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#276The 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…
Isn't it the vehicle metaphor about bicycles for the mind? Not fully crystallized yet but I feel like someone will
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#277Earlier 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!
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…
> 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.
There's a good point in here along the lines of "if you need X in a month, and someone else has something that's 90% of what you want X to be, can you buy it from them before starting any crazy internal death marches instead?"
> 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.
This is quite possibly only a one-time switch from a changed baseline, though. Give it a few years and "the fastest way an LLM tool can do it" will be what gets tossed out a an estimate, and stakeholders will still want you to do it in a tenth the time...
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineer as a term has already drifted vastly since nobody in the field of "Software Engineering" is actually an Engineer if we go by a strict definitions. Engineers are accredited and in some countries even come with a title.
as an actual engineer i just feel sad. i should probably feel happy but i like solving problems. fml i have becomea luddite.
I get it. But there’s plenty of engineering to do in any serious system. I am in a very AI forward company using AI for everything, but I still am solving engineering problems every day.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#279Easier said than done. once you are given a lazy way to do things faster and easier and mostly better, it's hard to go back. this is by design. there is no turning point. this addiction is as strong as drugs I feel.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#280No, AI is not creating that group of people. They already existed. They were the people who would google for StackOverflow snippets and copy+paste them without even reading the entire snippet, much less understand them. Same people, new tool.
Many people by now have probably seen a teammate who used to be a good SWE, now spamming slop code that puts all the real work on the reviewer. That's the "second group."
Tell them no. Thats what I do. I have rejected multiple PRs that were too large and lacked proper design or alignment upfront. With code being so cheap, rejecting it should be just as cheaper. Set cultural standards that devs need to review their code before asking for reviews. Etc etc