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AI is turning us into glue

lincoln.swaine-moore.is

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Re: AI is turning us into glue

#31

Post by rglover »

7speter wrote: post #23
rglover wrote: post #9

Really enjoyed this post. > Putting aside existential risks, I don't see a future where a lot of jobs don't cease to exist. I'm personally betting on the plateau effect with LLMs. There are two plateaus I see coming that will require humans to fix no matter what we do: 1. The LLMs themselves plateau. We're already seeing new models get worse, not better at writing code (e.g., Sonnet 3.5 seems to be better than 3.7 at…

The thing about being an “AI mess fixer” will be that you’ll still need experience that fuels the creativity to solve problems generated by the AI.

Yup. The people who fit this role well will be the types that do this work for fun anyways, purely out of enjoyment or curiosity. I don't expect those types to completely disappear, they'll just be incredibly rare (i.e., the Pareto Principle or some bastardization of it).

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#32

Post by abletonlive »

rglover wrote: post #24
abletonlive wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like a "if i say it enough, people will agree and it will be true" kind of comment. Almost none of these propositions check out or even make sense. I literally can't distinguish between reddit commenters and HN commenters. An unoriginal HN complaint but frustrating to witness over time. 1. Plateau != Regress. Why point to regressions as evidence of plateau? Why only look at a single model and minor version…

Like I said, in the short-term this will sound false, but in the long-term I expect it to be frighteningly accurate. > I literally can't distinguish between reddit commenters and HN commenters. No need to condescend. I have a fair amount of experience building with and using these tools daily. I'm not just some "reddit idiot." > So in this fantasy everybody is vibe coding code that lasts for 10+ years and everybody s…

> I'm extrapolating. Look at what happened in the wake of the industrial revolution. Most people don't know how to fix or create anything today

Most people didn't know how to fix or create anything back then either. Except now we have more productivity than ever, more people working than ever, more output than ever.

People are fixing and creating out the ass in this society. We might not all be factory workers but people are making a ton of things in general. There is more music being made than ever, more movies being made than ever, more small businesses etc.

There is more information about how to fix things disseminated to the general population now than ever. It's just that what we build now is often so incredibly complex that fixing it is non-trivial or impractical. That's not a regression of society or our abilities or interests. There are videos on tiktok about fixing electric toothbrushes that have over 100k views and over a thousand comments. https://www.tiktok.com/@thetruestreviews/video/7458130570321...

None of what you say checks out and starting off with what is basically "it doesn't make any sense now but i predict in 10 years it will make sense" is a lazy way to defend your point.

> But when you track human laziness over time, it leads to deterioration and incompetence.

Again, none of this tracks with reality. Who is tracking laziness? In your world the general population is lazy and incompetent yet we are generally producing more and still advancing STEM

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#33

Post by eacapeisfutuile »

abletonlive wrote: post #21
rglover wrote: post #9

Really enjoyed this post. > Putting aside existential risks, I don't see a future where a lot of jobs don't cease to exist. I'm personally betting on the plateau effect with LLMs. There are two plateaus I see coming that will require humans to fix no matter what we do: 1. The LLMs themselves plateau. We're already seeing new models get worse, not better at writing code (e.g., Sonnet 3.5 seems to be better than 3.7 at…

This feels like a "if i say it enough, people will agree and it will be true" kind of comment. Almost none of these propositions check out or even make sense. I literally can't distinguish between reddit commenters and HN commenters. An unoriginal HN complaint but frustrating to witness over time. 1. Plateau != Regress. Why point to regressions as evidence of plateau? Why only look at a single model and minor version…

That’s an uninformed perspective. We can’t be ”set as a civilization” by locking in whatever our current progress is. ML models don’t inherently progress anything. So yes if we stop doing that then in 10 years people will not have stopped learning how to code, but possibly stopped actually thinking for themselves which in turn would lead to not progressing neither our ML models or civilization.

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#34

Post by eacapeisfutuile »

arctek wrote: post #28
myhf wrote: post #7

Why do articles like this always say things like "I've used LLMs to get some stuff done faster" and then go on to describe how LLMs get them to spend more time and money to do a worse job? You don't need LLMs to frustrate you into lowering your standards, the power to do that was within you all along.

Has anyone actually measured this yet? Much of this feels like when they did studies on people who take mushrooms for example feel like they are more productive, but when you actually measure it they aren't. It's just their perception. To me the biggest issue is that search has been gutted out and so for many questions the best results come from asking an LLM. But this is far different from using it to generate entir…

No, there’s been a couple of attempts but no one would call those outcomes conclusive.

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#36

Post by eacapeisfutuile »

spencerflem wrote: post #10
spacebanana7 wrote: post #6

AI is unlikely to take away jobs from software engineers. There’s no natural upper bound on the amount of software people can consume - unlike cars, food or houses. Software engineers ultimately are people with “will to build”. Just as hedge fund people have a “will to trade”. The code or tooling is just a means to an end.

Huh, I have the opposite feeling- that people already have most of the software they want a this point.

640k should be enough for anybody

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#37

Post by eacapeisfutuile »

stavros wrote: post #30

So there's a wrong way and a right way to code with LLMs. The wrong way is to ask the LLM to write a bunch of code you don't understand, and to keep asking it to write more and more code to fix the problems each iteration has. That will lead to a massive tower built on sand, where everything is brittle and collapses at the slightest gust of wind. The right way is to have it autocomplete a few lines at a time for you.…

That level of autocomplete has been around for many years before LLM for pretty much any used language

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#38

Post by eacapeisfutuile »

holtkam2 wrote: post #20

Hot take: we were already glue. We take in ideas / directives from product people and turn that into instructions for a computer to use to build a software package. The only difference in a “vibe coding” world is that now these “instructions” that we pass to the computer are in English, not Java.

Not entirely, because the snippets you get when vibe coding are derived from actual coding.

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#39

Post by hnhn34 »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #17
spencerflem wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I have the opposite feeling- that people already have most of the software they want a this point.

Think about your browsing history over the last year. You’ve probably consumed an obscene amount of React components, maybe millions. Your car has way more code than a decade ago and so does your TV. These things might make you miserable but it’s still “demand” in the economic sense of the term. It keeps developers employed.

>Think about your browsing history over the last year. You’ve probably consumed an obscene amount of React components, maybe millions.

Yeah, most of which are rehashes of the same thing, and most of them on the same ~10 websites.

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#40

Post by stavros »

eacapeisfutuile wrote: post #37
stavros wrote: post #30

So there's a wrong way and a right way to code with LLMs. The wrong way is to ask the LLM to write a bunch of code you don't understand, and to keep asking it to write more and more code to fix the problems each iteration has. That will lead to a massive tower built on sand, where everything is brittle and collapses at the slightest gust of wind. The right way is to have it autocomplete a few lines at a time for you.…

That level of autocomplete has been around for many years before LLM for pretty much any used language

Well, I guess I must have missed it in my thirty years of development.
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