321–330 of 409 posts
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I see this sentiment quite often. The Economist chose the "word of the year"; it is "slop". Everybody hates AI slop. And lots of people who use AI coding assistants go through a phase of pushing AI slop in prod. I know I did that. Some of it still bites me to this day. But here's the thing: AI coding assistants did not exist two years ago. We are critical of them based on unfounded expectations. They are tools, and t…
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Just the headline sounds like a YouTube brain rot video title: "I spent 200 days in the woods" "I Google translated this 200 times" "I hit myself with this golf club 200 times" Is this really what hacker news is for now?
There are fundamental differences. Many people expect a positive gradient of quality from AI overhaul of projects. For translating back and forth, it is obvious from the outset that there is a negative gradient of quality (the Chinese whispers game).
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I have mentored and worked with a junior dev. And the only way to get her to do anything useful and productive was to spell things out. Otherwise she got wrapped around the axle trying to figure out the complex things and was constantly asking for my help with basic design-level tasks. Doing the grunt work is how you learn the higher-level stuff. When I was a junior, that's how it was for me. The senior gave me somet…
I have never worked with junior devs as incompetent as you describe, having worked at AWS, Splunk/Cisco, among others. At AWS even interns essentially got assigned a full project for their term and were just told to go build it. Does your company just have an absurdly low hiring bar for juniors? > Giving juniors full autonomy is a great way to end up with an unmaintainable mess that is a nightmare to work with withou…
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Note I'm not saying one is better than the other, but my takes: 1. The problem solving is in figuring out what to prompt, which includes correctly defining the problem, identifying a potential solution, designing an architecture, decomposing it into smaller tasks, and so on. Giving it a generic prompt like "build a fitness tracker" will result in a fully working product but it will be bland as it would be the average…
> The problem solving is in figuring out what to prompt, which includes correctly defining the problem, identifying a potential solution, designing an architecture, decomposing it into smaller tasks, and so on Coding is just a formal specification, one that is suited to be automatically executed by a dumb machine. The nice trick is that the basic semantics units from a programming language are versatile enough to giv…
If you really believe this, I'd never want to hire you. I mean, it's not wrong, it's just ... well, it's not even wrong.
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You are hitting the nail on the head. We are not being hired to write code. We are being hired to solve problems. Code is simply the medium.
I believe wage work has a significant factor in all this. Most are not paid for results, they're paid for time at desk and regular responsibilities such as making commits, delivering status updates, code reviews, etc. - the daily activities of work are monitored more closely than the output. Most ESOP grant such little equity that working harder could never observably drive an increase in its value. Getting a project…
This gets us to the rule number one of being successful at a job: Make sure your manager likes you. Get 8 layers of people whose priority is just to be sure their manager likes them, and what is getting done is very unlikely to have much to do with shareholder value, customer happiness, or anything like that.
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How is this different than testing the temperature?
It isn't, and it reflects how deeply LLMs are misunderstood, even by technical people
And if an LLM is consistent, even with a high temp, it could give the same PR the same grade while choosing different words to say.
The tokens are still chosen from the distribution, so a higher probability of the same grade will result in the same grade being chosen regardless of the temp set.