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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#311

Post by staticshock »

fragmede wrote: post #249
gerdesj wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You're assuming all women in your cohort start not pregnant. However, given a random sampling of women across the entire human race, if you have approximately 14,000 women, statistics says you'll have a baby in a month. That is to say, the chances of one of those woman being 8 months pregnant reaches close enough to 1, given about 14,000 randomly selected women. Also, you can get a baby tonight if you steal one from…

I just looked up "may you live in interesting times" and learned that it is not, in fact, originally Chinese. Per wikipedia:

> The nearest related Chinese expression translates as "Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#312

Post by daemin »

cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #43
andsoitis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any human can read the code an AI produces.

Nope, not anymore. Many already forgot how to do that and it's not a joke. And putting aside the vanishing skill, there is also an issue of volume.

I agree that the problem is volume, even more so than correctness.

All that LLMs and other generative models have done is enable an order of magnitude more stuff to be created cheaply. This then puts the onus and cost on the consumer of that output, hence why everyone is exhausted after a day of work that just involves looking over output. This volume of output will cause people to stop looking at all of the output and just trust the randomly generated code, and in time the quality will suffer.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#313

Post by nunez »

dannersy wrote: post #140

No one uses it this way, despite what people say. They hit any sort of wall and then ask the robot. Thought ends.

These services are designed for that engagement loop. If they were designed to be tools to help you think, they would be much less front and center, like autocomplete or refactor tools in IDEs. This reminds me of how Google used BERT models (precursor to LLMs) to highlight relevant snippets of web pages in search results based on a search query. "Assistant-" type LLMs would be more like that (or early implementations of code assistants, like Roo or Aider).

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#314

Post by YZF »

nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

One thing worth mentioning is that even before AI only some small subset of engineers have experienced building systems from scratch or inventing new ways of doing things or root causing complex problems or even writing a lot of code. Most software engineering is maintenance or mundane or not productive.

Even in a world where there's a lot of AI generated code there can still be people that have enough exposure to doing hard things. Definitely at this point in time where AI can't really do all those hard things anyways - but even after it'll be able to.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#315

Post by nunez »

girvo wrote: post #156
dannersy wrote: post #140

No one uses it this way, despite what people say. They hit any sort of wall and then ask the robot. Thought ends.

Same way everyone gives lip service to reviewing output. I know for a fact that at work most don't, not deeply/properly. You basically can't and hit the volume that's been demanded.

it's practically impossible when Claude flings like 1000-line diffs to your face and the tests are green

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#316

Post by daemin »

traderj0e wrote: post #257
cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, not anymore. Many already forgot how to do that and it's not a joke. And putting aside the vanishing skill, there is also an issue of volume.

You could say the same thing about compiled code, actually it's worse because anything a compiler spits out is very hard to understand even for those who understand assembly.

You don't need to look at the entire program at the assembly level to figure out parts that you want to optimise or prove for correctness. You do need to look at all the code the LLM generates in order to understand it.

You can learn to understand the patterns that compilers spit out and there are many tools out there to aid in that understanding. You can't learn to understand what an LLM spits out because by design it is non-deterministic and will vary in form and function for each pull of the lever.

You can learn to understand how high level concepts in code map down to assembly language and how compilers transform constructs in one language to another. You can't know that about LLMs because they generate non-deterministic output based on processing of huge low-precision tables.

It's not even a close comparison.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#317

Post by mtrifonov »

stavros wrote: post #20

Skills you don't need, atrophy. Skills you need, don't. It's very simple, and the "you won't have the skills you used to need but don't need any more!" line of reasoning is tired and invalid.

Half-agree. "Skills you need, don't atrophy" assumes you know which skills you need. You usually don't, until something happens and the skill that would've caught it is the one you stopped maintaining.

Most "I didn't realize I needed that" moments arrive after the atrophy is already done.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#318

Post by netcan »

nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

Myopic is inevitable, to some extent. It's very hard to project this stuff.

Socrates wrote about what was being lost as philosophy was becoming written rather than oral...and he was right.

We can't even understand what was lost. Many methods of learning and thinking became entirely lost. You could say they were redundant, and they were. But... writing largely replaced oral traditions. It didn't just augment them.

He was that old school coder who had the skills to do philosophy and be an intellectual without writing. Writing was an augmentation for him. But for the new cohort... it was a new paradigm and old paradigm skills became absent.

It is very hard to imagine skilled coders becoming skilled without need pressing that skill acquisition. The diligent student will acquire some basic "manual coding" skill... but mostly the skill development will be wherever the hard work is.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#319

Post by YZF »

joe_mamba wrote: post #5
CorbenDallas wrote: post #3

There are plenty of engineers, who simply can't think, AI will not change anything in this regard.

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.

The practice of software engineering is not what they teach in university.

I would say that today's graduates are IMO a bit better than a few decades ago but there are still many graduating who are just not good at writing computer software and don't really have the aptitude for that (or maybe the interest in getting good). That's what happens when the pipeline of people coming in are people who want to make money and the institution is mostly a degree factory.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#320

Post by krilcebre »

chii wrote: post #305
nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

> I don't see how that's possible, but maybe I'm thinking too myopically. you are thinking too myopically. We have people who can still do maths well after the introduction of the calculator. We have people who can still spell after the introduction of spell check. The junior only need to train without using AI to gain the skills needed - that's called education. If they choose to rely on AI solely, and gimp their ow…

Yes but currently I don't know of a single company in my area that doesn't make you use AI daily because of the supposedly increased productivity. That means that juniors also absolutely have to use AI, probably sabotaging their learning process in the long run.
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