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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

larsfaye.com

291–300 of 575 posts

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't it only a matter of time before the AI generated autocomplete will contain the correct solution? What then?

fucking is it? AI labs certainly want you to think so but they're running out of time and money. they've been telling me that the advancements of the last three months have made this a reality for the last five years. it's starting to feel a lot like Elon promising fully automated taxi services by next year... 11 years ago

next year I PROMISE!

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've gone through this with chess, and the days when a human can do anything to help AI there are long past; the human can only drag it down. It seems to me to be a form of the bitter lesson. I expect this will happen in every field where we don't add guardrails to require humans in the network. I have a hard time seeing regulation happening around this in the US but vanity may also serve, will CEOs be satisfied rul…

> the days when a human can do anything to help AI there are long past; the human can only drag it down. I disagree, currently a human guiding an AI agent is far better (more productive for less money) than an AI agent with very loose non-technical guidance and The Ralph Wiggum Loop. I don't know how much longer humans have, but I don't think they can be cut out of the loop entirely just yet.

In chess? That ended in ~2017.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year. When you factor in overhead and benefits, many companies were regularly paying that much for someone (many someones) to "read this Jira ticket and implement the feature". We are currently in the "centaur" phase where a human-AI combination produces the best output,…

We've gone through this with chess, and the days when a human can do anything to help AI there are long past; the human can only drag it down. It seems to me to be a form of the bitter lesson. I expect this will happen in every field where we don't add guardrails to require humans in the network. I have a hard time seeing regulation happening around this in the US but vanity may also serve, will CEOs be satisfied rul…

Have we really though?

This is not a silly question, because it's kind of silly:

Has an AI ever actually gone through all of the steps necessary to become a chess master? Go to competitions, raise in the ranks, take a plane to the masters, organize support and all the real life details necessary? Playing chess is just the small formal part here, and all of the obvious things humans obviously do, well...

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#295
Coding expertise was on a downward trend way before AI arrived. Does nobody remember how most "engineers" were literally copying and pasting snippets from StackOverflow they didn't understand, and the snippets usually had tons of bugs? How many of you know Assembly well? How many of you can decompile a program, or write your own compiler or VM? How many of you could pass a computer science course (that you didn't take at Uni)?

We've been hearing about the demise of skills since before the invention of the loom. The only skills we've truly lost are for things nobody uses or makes anymore. What actually happens is, we develop a new tool that's better than the old tool, and we get good at using the new tool. We then have a class of people whose job it is to maintain the new tools. We don't need that many of them because the whole point is to eliminate that labor.

Your jobs as software engineers are going away, it's that simple. Your new job is to use the AI tools to make products. Somebody else's job will be to make the AI a better software engineer.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are fundamentally short-term thinkers. Just imagine spraying neurotoxins on your lawn. You're "saved" from the "terror" of noticing more than one kind of grass, but of course you're incrementally increased the cancer risk for yourself, your children, and who knows who else. This is just one example; people do this constantly. Plastic fleece puts an untold amount of poison into the environment, but "I need to b…

All the issues you mention here have a death horizon: the people engaged in the behaviour will be dead when its effects are most acute. That they engage in it then isnt very mysterious. That doesnt clearly apply here

The problem is further away when the next quarter, which for some companies, might as well be in the year 3000.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#297
One interesting feature of vibe coding is that it allows you to write code in specialized areas where you have no expert knowledge. That makes the code effectively impossible to review in any useful way.

For example, I have a vibe coded Python monstrosity which I use for stitching together scans of large format negatives. The enlarging lens that I use for scanning has strong chromatic aberration in the red channel but is otherwise very sharp†. I got Codex to figure out some way of using the green and blue channels to sharpen the luminance while preserving the color information from the red channel. I sort of vaguely understand how this works, but not nearly well enough to review all the horrid numpy code that implements it.

For my use case, there is really no reason to look at the code, as I am only interested in the output. As disconcerting as it is, I feel that this is going to become more and more normalized. Looking at the code that your LLM generates will become like looking at the assembly output of your C compiler.

† This makes a lot of sense, if you think about the color of a darkroom safelight...

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#298

As a tech educator I 100% agree. LLMs are not going to become a "new compiler" where we don't have to worry about the code any more. There's a reason we trust deterministic systems. I've been worried about this a lot, I even created an agent skill called do-i-understand that's designed for novice devs (and experienced too, because atrophy) where the LLM asks you questions about the PR you're about to submit. I've fou…

A deterministic LLM is possible. Would you trust it?

they probably mean deterministic in the sense of traditional computer programs consisting of if-else decision points and ordinary cpu logic, as opposed to numerical models (which can of course be deterministic too, as you pointed out)

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#299

> JetBrains, a major player in developer tools, recently completed a study of junior and novice developers The article links to this as the study: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3632620.3671116 . It doesn't appear to be related to JetBrains in any way?

I originally found the paper through this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTUh0OO6Kmo

The video seemed to indicate it was a study they ran (she refers to the examples as "our subjects were two of twenty four participants"). It seems they are just citing the study. While it doesn't change the study or the takeaways, I'll update the post for clarification!

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the days when a human can do anything to help AI there are long past; the human can only drag it down. I disagree, currently a human guiding an AI agent is far better (more productive for less money) than an AI agent with very loose non-technical guidance and The Ralph Wiggum Loop. I don't know how much longer humans have, but I don't think they can be cut out of the loop entirely just yet.

In chess? That ended in ~2017.

Sorry, I thought we were talking about Human + LLM agent for software development. I misinterpreted your initial statement.
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