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AI is making me dumb

jpain.io

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Re: AI is making me dumb

#291

Post by crimsontech »

nancyminusone wrote: post #134

Computers read my code, so I don't mind upsetting their feelings. But why would anyone use AI to write documents or articles? Do you really respect your recipients so little that you can't be bothered to share your own thoughts? I might as well get an AI to call my own mother on mother's day.

> Do you really respect your recipients so little that you can't be bothered to share your own thoughts?

> I might as well get an AI to call my own mother on mother's day.

One of the first copilot adverts I saw had a woman using it to write a speech for her daughters graduation, with speaker prompts instructing the woman to look at her daughter at one point in the speech.

Such a personal and important moment in both their lives, I was shocked that they even put it out and thought it was OK.

What next? "Too busy negotiating a critical business deal to attend the birth of your first child? Have copilot attend and email you a summary of it later."

Found the video: https://youtu.be/ebls5x-gb0s?t=224

Re: AI is making me dumb

#292

Post by bigstrat2003 »

RandallBrown wrote: post #191
thisisthenewme wrote: post #126

As a developer, I kind of feel like this all smells like job security. After using LLMs for a while, I have to admit it's pretty nice, and I like using it. I've been vibecoding a few apps, and it's a good dopamine hit to immediately see your ideas come to life. However, based on my experience, it will bite you if you trust it blindly. Even in my vibecoded projects, it keeps adding "features" without me asking for the…

> Eventually, there will be a lot of bugs, and developers will complain that we need additional human resources I just hope I can last that long.

That is where I'm at too. I agree with other posters that this looks a lot like the outsourcing craze around the turn of the century. Things looked very dire then too (I remember being in high school and being advised by adults that there would be no programming jobs left when I grew up), but it eventually swung back around. The trouble is, "eventually" is cold comfort if you're out of a job today. Anyone working in the tech business should be tightening their belts just in case they are the unlucky ones to be out of a job until the madness blows over.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#294

Post by ericmcer »

Rooster61 wrote: post #11

I can't relate that much to this. Every time I use AI to write code, I'm constantly fighting a feeling on the back of my neck that I need to look over everything it has done and supplement/alter it with my own code. That ick feeling counteracts the dopamine hit of having a working app after a few minutes of vibe coding, and I don't think that's going anywhere anytime soon. That said, I have experience. I could absolu…

Yesterday it got completely tangled trying to fix a dependency issue across different platforms in react-native. I had to manually undo Claude codes shit, read the docs and install deps in a certain order to make it work correctly.

I have no idea what a junior/non-tech person would have done. Like I have wrangled with JS dependencies for 10 years so so I very quickly identified Claude was about to create a tangled nightmare.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#295

Post by monkpit »

ddesotto wrote: post #176
ryandrake wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Claude only knows how to spew code. Every problem you want it to solve, it translates into "more code" rather than "less code". You have to very closely code review everything it does, otherwise your codebase is going to just grow and grow, and asymptotically approach 100% debt. I code review everything that Claude produces, and I'd estimate about 90-95% of the time, my reaction is WOW it works but…

I think this is more a by product of the way these models are architected. “One more token” i usually much more likely than a “STOP”. Knowing when to stop and doing more with less is something also very hard for human developers. For me what throws me off most of the time is the structure on the mid-level. It usually makes sense in the loc and maybe project level, but on the file and folder level it just loses refere…

> I think this is more a by product of the way these models are architected. “One more token” i usually much more likely than a “STOP”.

That’s not really how it works. An agent wouldn’t get halfway through _any_ implementation and just stop abruptly - it’s not as simple as rolling the dice until you land on “stop”.

It will stop when it believes, for whatever reason, the output has achieved whatever task was laid out. You’re welcome to refine what the definition of that task may be, or you can let it go off.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#297

Post by conradludgate »

nancyminusone wrote: post #134

Computers read my code, so I don't mind upsetting their feelings. But why would anyone use AI to write documents or articles? Do you really respect your recipients so little that you can't be bothered to share your own thoughts? I might as well get an AI to call my own mother on mother's day.

Hi, I do this at work.

It's not a one-shot prompt. I'm chatting with the agent for a while collecting knowledge and forming a substantive set of documentation or references. This takes a lot of time and effort to collect.

After this, I just get the agent to refine a doc for humans to read. I'm not very good at writing for humans, and it takes me far too much time that I usually give up and move onto other more important things instead. So it benefits everyone that I have vetted a set of documents in my expertise domain and shared them, even if not written by me they contain my ideas.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#298

Post by jiggunjer »

HeinrichAQS wrote: post #53

Understand you 100% - thats why I force myself to study maths as a "hobby" at a remote university. Its completly useless these days since I will probably never reach a level where I am better than current frontier models - but it sharpens my own mind, just by doing it. I would compare this to the same principle which applies to physical training - its not essentially required these days anymore to be physical active,…

Me too! I got interested in category theory and how to express a logical model of "workflows" as a category. Then ai told me workflows are a monoid and not to bother.

Re: AI is making me dumb

#299

Post by mekael »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #153
ferngodfather wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My brain is melting because I can barely keep up with learning how to figure out if I'm even doing what I'm trying to do. This is not a good thing. You should understand what your code does. Writing code nobody can understand is not a flex.

> You should understand what your code does. It is not hard to understand what a line of code does... It is hard to keep up with solving the problem I'm trying to solve...

What are you working on?

Re: AI is making me dumb

#300

Post by arian_ »

I'm 15 and learned to code with AI from the start. I genuinely don't know if I know how to program or if I just know how to talk to something that does.
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