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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#321

Post by RivieraKid »

xvector wrote: post #204
delbronski wrote: post #172

AI is starting to look like a net negative for humanity. I remember the early days of OpenAI. I was super excited about it. There was a new space to uncover and learn about. I was hopeful. Now I have this love/hate relationship with it. Claude Code is amazing. I use it everyday because it makes me so much more efficient at my job. But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day. A…

> But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day. I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities. You can do so much more now. We are more limited by our ideas at this point than anything else. Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial work gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated." Why…

> I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities.

I really don't understand this way of thinking. Don't you think that AI could replace senior engineers? Sure, companies will be able to do bigger / better / more ambitious stuff - but without any software engineers.

> Why is it BS? I'm shocked that anyone with a love and passion for technology can feel this way. Have you not seen the long history of automation and what it has brought humanity?

I definitely think that AI will be a net benefit for society but it could easily end up being be bad for me.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#322

Post by somelamer567 »

I remember how annoying Ray 'Nerd Rapture' Kurzweil was twenty years ago with his "Singularity" stuff, and quietly thankful that he isn't anywhere near as in-my-face today as he was back in the day.

As bad as the AI hype wave is now, I can't help but wonder if it could have been even worse.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#323

Post by dirk94018 »

Management is cargo culting the tooling without grasping what AI is actually good at. Because they don't look at it. Meanwhile smart blue collar guys are only limited by their willingness to ask questions. Because they do. It's the difference between the performance of work and work. The most fascinating aspect about AI may just be what it tells us about people, work, and society.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#324

Post by abcde666777 »

The topic of AI triggers people in various ways - anxiety and uncertainty about the future, frustration with excessive hype, and the debate between people on each side of the fence.

It will calm down once the dust starts to settle and there's some kind of consensus on how the chips have fallen.

Also there is an irony that talking about being sick of talking about AI is still talking about AI.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#325

Post by bGl2YW5j »

eloisant wrote: post #271
djeastm wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is going to look like without as much manual experience?

When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience. Then the same happened with languages that managed memory. And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls. And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.

I reckon there's a limit to how long this abstraction can go on before not understanding underlying mechanisms will seriously hamstring you.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#326

Post by mindcrime »

OK, if you take "talking about AI" to mean just talking about "three different people’s (almost identical) Claude code workflow and yet another post about how you got OpenClaw to stroke your cat and play video games" then sure, that would be pretty boring.

But I don't see it that way. I've been fascinated by AI since I was a little kid (watching Max Headroom, Knight Rider, Whiz Kids, Wargames, Tron, Short Circuit, etc in the 80's) up through college in the 1990's when I first read about the 1956 Dartmouth AI workshop that kicked the field off, and up to today where we have the most powerful AI systems we've had. Every single bit of this stuff is wildly fascinating to me, but that's at least in part because I recognize (or "believe" if you will) that there's a lot more to "AI" than just "LLM's" or "Generative AI".

I still believe there are plenty of neural network architectures that haven't been explored yet, plenty more meat on the bone of metaheuristics, all sorts of angles on neuro-symbolic AI to work on, etc. And even "Agents" are pretty exciting when you go back and read the 90's era literature on Agents and realize that the things passing for "Agents" right now are a pretty thin reflection of what Agents can be. Really understanding MAS's involves economics, game theory, computer science, maybe even a hint of sociology.

As such, I still find AI fascinating and love talking about it... at least in the right context and with the right people. :-)

And besides... as they[1] say: "Swarm mode is sick fun".

[1]: https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/...

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#328

Post by deadbabe »

_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

If you have to really understand software development to be a good user of AI, we’re screwed. All the best users of AI we’ll ever have already exist I think.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#329

Post by bGl2YW5j »

wrs wrote: post #219
delbronski wrote: post #172

AI is starting to look like a net negative for humanity. I remember the early days of OpenAI. I was super excited about it. There was a new space to uncover and learn about. I was hopeful. Now I have this love/hate relationship with it. Claude Code is amazing. I use it everyday because it makes me so much more efficient at my job. But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day. A…

Well, on the other hand, software isn’t all about checking emails. I know someone who worked for a nonprofit that made pregnancy health software that worked over text messaging. Its clients were women in Africa who didn’t have much, but they had a cell phone, so they could get reminders, track vitals, and so forth. They had to find enough funding to pay several software engineers to build and maintain that system. If…

This is awesome. It's sad that examples like this are few and far between.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#330

Post by Terr_ »

gAI wrote: post #213
_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

Agreed, though I prefer "Fae Folk" to vampires.

If LLMs were vampires, they'd be better at counting, if they were fae, they'd be better at legalistic logic. :p
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