Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 656 posts

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#291

Post by linsomniac »

wasabinator wrote: post #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…

I agree, nobody should be telling you, specifically, how you are going to use AI in programming.

I think a lot of people are getting caught up in the discussion about how we, generally as technologists, are going to use AI. And it is looking like the industry is moving towards what used to be programmers now being team leads or project managers of AI teams.

So it's probably best for you to try to not get involved in those discussions, and when someone says "you" assume they mean "you (generally)"?

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#292

Post by snickerbockers »

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!

9 pregnant women produce one baby/month on average (assuming no miscarriages or late births,etc).

On paper your CPU can execute at least one instruction per core per cycle but that's on average too, if you actually only have one instruction to run it takes several cycles.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#294

Post by raincole »

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…

"Bicycle of the Mind" has been cited to death.

The problem is that it was coined so early that we are way past the aphorism stage now.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#295

Post by 1ncorrect »

sirsau wrote: post #281
1ncorrect wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I always welcome, and look forward to, being proven wrong.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#296

Post by pona-a »

p_stuart82 wrote: post #111
Waterluvian wrote: post #76

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…

the thing is it doesn't even feel like mortgaging. shipping, features going out, everything looks fine. then something breaks and you realize you can't debug your own code without asking the model again.

It feels like an addiction. Normal coding requires sustained attention, you can sense how deep you are in the progress and when you're too tired to continue, but with LLMs the next feature always feels like another prompt away, having sessions go well into the early morning/late-night. You rationalize you can quit, that you've been reading the source and each diff enough to "understand" the codebase. But the truth is when the rate limit runs out, you'll be absolutely helpless, crawling back for extra-usage, until you finally see the total bill at the end of the month.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#297

Post by beej71 »

Unmotivator2677 wrote: post #49

That why I don't use AI for any personal projects, I like to keep my mind sharp. Unless it's a projects that incorporates AI in some way, but don't use AI to code it. But at work I don't care, I do what I am paid for, if my manager wants me to entirely vibe code using Claude, his choice, I will not be the one paying for technical dept that creates.

100% agree.

In the middle ground:

I'm putting together exercises for a C/Systems programming class I'm teaching in the fall.

Partway through this, for some reason [cough procrastination cough], I thought it would be fun to implement them in Scheme. My Scheme was already poor, and what meager skills I had are completely rusty. I used Claude to great effect as a tutor for that, but didn't have it code any of the solutions at all, of course. I could tell I was leveling up fast as I coded the things up.

Gotta use it in the right way if one wants to sharpen ones skills.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#298

Post by beej71 »

kajaktum wrote: post #194

I am rebuilding numba. It is very hard for me to imagine doing it by hand. I tried it a couple of years ago but it was excruitiangly painful. It was slow and messy. So many small things that gets stacked on top of each other over years of abstraction. I am doing it again using LLM. Legitimately, things that would have taken weeks is now done overnight. I still have to look at the code, at the generated C output, stil…

> Is this replacing my thinking?

I'm extremely confident the answer is yes.

But we have to judge how much value that particular thinking has.

As an instructor, I've implemented linked list functionality a zillion times. I'm on the long tail of skills-gain from each reimplementation. But every time I implement it, I'm gaining a little more.

Now, is it worth it? Probably not. The time spent on that marginal gain would be better spent implementing something more novel by hand. So punting to an LLM, while it costs me, might be a net gain in that case. But implementing another compiler? Hell yeah, that would be replacing my thinking. I've only ever made one PL/0 compiler plus that one yacc thing in compiler theory class, and those were a long time ago.

We should quantify the loss of thinking when we decide how much to punt the code creation to someone or something else.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#299

Post by beej71 »

sheepscreek wrote: post #6

AI is creating problems. This isn’t one of them. Engineers are going to now think at a higher level of abstraction. No one misses coding in assembly.

This isn't just another translation layer, though. It's squishy and stochastic. It's more like saying "managers think at a higher level of abstraction". Which is true, but it's not the same as compiled code.

GenAI is like a non-deterministic compiler. Just like your manager's reports except with less logical thinking skill. I'd argue this is still problematic.

Post reply on HN