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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

281–290 of 656 posts

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#281
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ‘AI’ doesn’t exist, and LLMs have vanishingly narrow legitimate justifiable use cases. … I’m yet to identify any application of a LLM which can rationally be mistaken for intelligence. What’s the opposite of AI psychosis? Burying your head in the sand? Because anyone who could write this unironically today is certainly afflicted.

No one who is impressed by the current applications of LLMs should be in any way involved with making decisions which affect those not similarly cognitively impaired. It’s no different to religions or economics.

Hard to argue with you when disagreeing with your point makes me cognitively impaired.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#282
post #41

Huberman: Your brain has a region that only grows when you do things you don't want to do ...or as I interpret it your brain grows only when it does things that are difficult. If you remove the difficulty, it will atrophy into a hum of a mindless chit-chat. Engineering the data structures and control flows from scratch is a completely different than asking an LLM to scaffold them for you.

Huberman is a grifter.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#283

I think AI can generally be utilized in two ways: 1) you use it to help write code that you still “own” and fully understand. 2) you use it as an abstraction layer to write and maintain the code for you. The code becomes a compile target in a sense. You would feel like it’s someone else’s code if you were asked to make changes without AI. I think 2) is fine for things like prototypes, examples, references. Things tha…

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#284
Is anyone tired of being told what AI is supposed to mean for the individual? As a software guy it's supposed to mean I am now a team lead of sorts. However all the people I see crowing about this never sought to become team leads in their career, nor did I.

Yet now suddenly everyone is supposed to want to become a team lead of sorts (ie. the agents becoming your team). I don't want to do that, I treat an AI agent as a pair in a pair programming unit. Nothing more, nothing less. If someone wants to treat it differently, good on them, but they have no place telling what works for thee works for me.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#285
post #128

Earlier 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…

> I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering! "Structured, mature, legally enforced, physically grounded standards based approach to the construction of repeatable, reliable, verifiable, artifacts under stable (to the degree that matters) external constraints". Some niche software development (e.g. NASA/JPL coding projects with special rules, practices, MISRA etc) can…

>* ... legally enforced ...*

Other than that part (most countries in the world do not have regulations or licensing requirements for most engineering disciplines) I would agree. But I would also point out the set of software projects that meet that definition is much larger than those you listed.

As mentioned, it's a matter of economics, so the rigor scales with the pain it can cause if something that goes wrong. Hence any software that has a high blast radius is that rigorously built, probably even more. There are entire categories (not just individual examples!) of such projects. An obvious category are platforms that run or build other applications: OS kernels, databases, compilers, frameworks, cloud platforms (yes those 9's are an industry standard), and so on.

Then there are those regulated ones like automotive, aviation and medical software. There is even a case to be made for critical financial software.

Another less obvious category applies to any large software services company that has oncall engineers, because the high cost of engineers quickly climbs and quality processes quickly get installed, which basically amount to those critera you listed.

That internal LoB app with 5 users? That level of rigor simply does not make economic sense. Which is probably what you mean by:

> 99.9% of the time though, software "engineering" is an ad hoc, mix and match, semi-random, always changing requirements and environments, half-art half-guess, process, by unlicensed practicioners, that is only regulated at some minor aspects of its operation (like GDPR, or accessibility requirements), if that.

To that I'll say, as someone whose first site outage as an intern was an actual industrial manufacturing factory (not an AbstractFactoryFactory!) a surprisingly large fraction of projects in other engineering disciplines match that description ;-)

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#287
post #128

Earlier 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…

It's a pet peeve because the truth hurts. We (most of us) aren't doing anything that resembles engineering.

I'd agree that applies to people, or more accurately specific projects, but not the discipline of software engineering as a whole.

Even most of the projects I personally have worked on simply did not need "engineering" as such, but other projects where uptime was critical and the cost of failure was high, there was a much higher level of rigor.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#288
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didnt work for the prod data that the AI nukes in spite of prompts saying "DON'T FUCKING GUESS", just like that in all caps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911524 What makes you think it will work for you?

That I don't let agents run wild in a production environment?

You let them write code that runs in prod, which is the same thing with extra steps.

Unless you review that code carefully, and then we're back to the point about it not saving you any cognitive overhead.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems overly pessimistic about education. Book learning isn't everything, but a physics textbook could be seen as the compression of centuries of experience.

Book learning to me seems like a compression of knowledge that had to be acquired through many years of experimentation and observation. But knowledge is not an experience itself. Take juggling for example - something that was on HN homepage last week. You can learn everything you need to know about juggling though a post or a book or an educational video. But can you juggle after all that book learning? Not at all -…

Juggling is a nice example. Maybe one could phrase it as, you can learn how to learn to juggle from a book.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need a 4.0 to graduate. And even if you got one, a lot of grades are composed of tests, not projects. You can just memorize your way through things if you were dedicated enough. It's not really that hard to get a degree in engineering if your only goal is the degree itself.

That does seem to depend on countries and universities.

I do have to say I was appalled by some of the tests I had as an exchange student in the US (will not name the Uni in question but ranked around 60 in us rank). I remember a computer graphics test where a lot of questions were of the type "Which companies created the consortium maintaining the opengl specification?"... it was fully possible to obtain a passing grade just by rote memorization of facts. So I have no trouble believing that in the US it's possible in some unis to get a software engineering degree without understanding or critical thining

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