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Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

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Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#311

Post by daveguy »

ragequittah wrote: post #136
witx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly don't know what you're talking about if you think compilers are a good analogy.

They really are though. There seems to be some confusion about "determinism" as if everyone writes perfect code and every compiler interprets that code perfectly. There's bugs and nondeterminism in every step of the chain with human coders and, say, a .NET compiler too. The idea that we've got coding down to a pristine and exact science and AI is some random chaos element that muddies it makes no sense to me after se…

When it comes to non-determinism, the occasional bug or optimization difference in a compiler is not even in the same category as the 50+% chance of a different answer every time that you get with llms.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#312

Post by bsoles »

dorgo wrote: post #294
maplethorpe wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve been trying to ask people a different question: sure, we’re more productive now but to me, the AI era is only serving to plunge us deeper than ever into producing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. And for what? What’s it all for? Many devs here have stated that the fun part for them is seeing the end product, not the act of creating it. Using AI is an act of need satisfaction. Unfortunately, cloning a…

> AI's greatest feature is that it obfuscates provenance. maybe because people see AI not just as a clever packet manager, but also, to some degree, as a problem solving engine. Similar to humans.

It is why I feel dirty after AI generates a piece of clever code: I know I am stealing somebody's IP without attribution. And the AI companies benefit from this, not the real people behind the training data.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#313

Post by bsoles »

LtWorf wrote: post #300
davidcelis wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, we're all more productive now, but… I’ve been trying to ask people a different question: sure, we’re more productive now but to me, the AI era is only serving to plunge us deeper than ever into producing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. And for what? What’s it all for? I became a software engineer because I have a lot of fun writing code, thinking through and solving complicated problems, and experie…

Many developers became developers because of the paycheck, but they never particularly enjoyed the job, so if instead of working they can twiddle their thumbs waiting for the agent to make attempts at fixing their ticket, they prefer it that way.

I can clearly identify this kind of developers at work by their mindless enthusiasm for AI. Development is just another job before they can move into "management" and make all-knowing statements all day long.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#314

Post by orbital-decay »

danaris wrote: post #296
orbital-decay wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a misconception. Context window of humans is measured in seconds and limited to single-digit amount of entities. Human attention is truly ephemeral, with a ridiculously short span. What you're talking about cannot be emulated by putting everything into the context, you need models with deeper cognitive capabilities, and the longer your context the smarter it needs to be. It can be done by increasing the depth…

If there's an actual neurological attention window that you're referring to, that's as ephemeral as you say, it is not analogous to the context window of an LLM. When I'm working on a problem, I can explicitly apply knowledge I gained decades ago to that problem. Not just "oh, it's somehow encoded in the training data"; not "oh, it's all mixed in there somewhere"; I can call up the memories, understand how to apply t…

Yes, that's my entire point and I'm well aware about LLM internals. Reread the comment above, I'm responding to a person who suggested to increase the context window of an LLM to make it less different, saying it will never work.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#315

Post by roamerz »

mpalmer wrote: post #91
roamerz wrote: post #87

Of course. If you don’t use something it atrophies not only in non use but in losing interest in keeping up with the state of the art in said tech. What we gain though is for people don’t possess that knowledge in the first place, now have this superpower. I know several individuals who have vast experience in specific disciplines and they are now able to solve real problems where there were previously struggling and…

All the benefits you're describing apply to the present moment; people with knowledge, self-discipline and expertise can leverage LLMs to great effect. How many people like this will exist in a decade? Two?

Wouldn’t it be like any other tool? When I started programming it was writing code in a text editor, masm to compile and a dso to debug. That progressed to higher level languages and libraries where gradually the amount of end product I could produce in a week would take a year (or 10) in assembly. What CC can do is similar. So to your question: My skillsets evolve and instead of using some developer tools directly I become an expert on utilizing LLMs.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#316

Post by LtWorf »

bsoles wrote: post #313
LtWorf wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many developers became developers because of the paycheck, but they never particularly enjoyed the job, so if instead of working they can twiddle their thumbs waiting for the agent to make attempts at fixing their ticket, they prefer it that way.

I can clearly identify this kind of developers at work by their mindless enthusiasm for AI. Development is just another job before they can move into "management" and make all-knowing statements all day long.

*ask AI to write all-knowing statements for them :D

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#317

Post by LtWorf »

nilirl wrote: post #299
LtWorf wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. I've seen many bad developers become awful architects whose plans are completely impossible to put in practice. How do you know your higher level skills are actually any good?

I don't know but I'm less wrong than I used to be. More focused, better at reasoning about context. Maybe good architects learn by starting as awful architects? Consider giving them more time.

I think you aren't necessarily the best person to evaluate yourself. Unless you are some kind of superior human being.

Is 6 years enough to think they won't improve?

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#318

Post by roamerz »

vkou wrote: post #95
mpalmer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the benefits you're describing apply to the present moment; people with knowledge, self-discipline and expertise can leverage LLMs to great effect. How many people like this will exist in a decade? Two?

Meanwhile the people with mountains of money can leverage them to enough effect to make even bigger mountains of money, by hiring less-than-skilled people who will do way more with it than they could without it.

yeah agreed they will definitely be doing that.

Alternatively I hope to see this giving opportunities to innovative individuals that can build something with just an idea and twenty bucks.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#319

Post by nilirl »

LtWorf wrote: post #317
nilirl wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know but I'm less wrong than I used to be. More focused, better at reasoning about context. Maybe good architects learn by starting as awful architects? Consider giving them more time.

I think you aren't necessarily the best person to evaluate yourself. Unless you are some kind of superior human being. Is 6 years enough to think they won't improve?

What's your point? That it's not a skill? Having a system behave acceptably as it grows does not count? Getting paid for it does not count?

Fine. Don't do it. Wait till you get a certification. No one's forcing you to think about these things.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#320

Post by danaris »

orbital-decay wrote: post #314
danaris wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's an actual neurological attention window that you're referring to, that's as ephemeral as you say, it is not analogous to the context window of an LLM. When I'm working on a problem, I can explicitly apply knowledge I gained decades ago to that problem. Not just "oh, it's somehow encoded in the training data"; not "oh, it's all mixed in there somewhere"; I can call up the memories, understand how to apply t…

Yes, that's my entire point and I'm well aware about LLM internals. Reread the comment above, I'm responding to a person who suggested to increase the context window of an LLM to make it less different, saying it will never work.

I suppose that's one read of themafia's comment.

My read of it was "this is why humans are fundamentally different from LLMs", not "this is how you fix LLMs to be like humans".

It's still hard to see how you can argue that humans' "context window", looked at in even a vaguely similar manner to that of LLMs, is tiny.

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