321–330 of 656 posts
Calculators and computers are creating engineers that can't think without them either. There are many problems with AI, but from my point of view, the title has not thought things through.
We teach kids basic maths before we give them calculators. University degrees certainly used to teach computing fundamentals without you having a computer in front of you.
AI isn’t creating the problem, it is just showing the problem. Those who did not want to learn before AI did so reluctantly, mixing Google and SO. Now they ask AI. An existing problem found a new solution. Personally, I really enjoy using AI. I have created my own cascade workflow to stop myself from “asking one more question”. Every session is planned. Claude and Codex can be annoying as hell (for different reasons)…
I also enjoy using AI. It makes it easier to get mundane work done quickly. Junior devs who never get tired is a great analogy. It's a force multiplier and for people with limited time (meetings, people management, planning etc.) they enable doing a lot in limited time. I can relate to more junior people being worried and/or some senior people concerns of quality though. I get a task done, review it, get another task done. I won't let it build something large on auto-pilot.
One thing that should be noted is that life was simpler back then. You could know the syntax of C or Pascal. You knew all the DOS calls or the standard libraries. You knew BIOS and the PC architecture. I still used reference manuals to look up some details I didn't have in my head.
Today software stacks tend to be a lot more complicated.
> 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…
Arithmetics is a very, very small subset of math.
The way I use AI now feels more exhausting than the programming I did for the last 20 years. I pose a problem, then evaluate proposals, then pick the one I think is the "right one"(tm), then see the AI propose a bunch of weird shit, then call it out, refine the proposal until it feels just about right (this is the exhausting part), then let it code the proposal. The coding will then run for 1-5 hours and produce some…
I feel this as well. I think it’s something to do with having to be more “on” as you slowly work with the LLM to define the problem and find a reasonable solution. There’s not much of a flow-state. You have to process mountains of output and identify the critical points, over and over, endlessly. And it will always be an off in this unsettling little way, even when it’s mostly quite good. It’s jarring. The strange so…
I figured out some patterns in the way it behaves and could put more guard-rails in place so they hopefully won't bite me in the future (spelled out decision trees with specific triggers, standing orders, etc.), but some I can't categorize right now.
1) perfect is the enemy of good
2) fake it till you make it
The analogies imagine difficult scenarios where the habit of taking shortcuts doesn't help. But most people most of the time don't run into those scenarios at all.
The eloquence with which this point gets (repeatedly) made is continuing to improve each next time I read it. However, I still feel like we haven't nailed it. That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse (e.g. "the medium is the message", "you ship your org chart", "9 mothers can't make a baby in a month"), in which the most pointed version of this critique packs a punch in just a few words that r…
I think AI can generally be utilized in two ways: 1) you use it to help write code that you still “own” and fully understand. 2) you use it as an abstraction layer to write and maintain the code for you. The code becomes a compile target in a sense. You would feel like it’s someone else’s code if you were asked to make changes without AI. I think 2) is fine for things like prototypes, examples, references. Things tha…
1) Day job 2) Side project
It would be unprofessional to treat the first like the second.
However my #1 productivity tool is still a custom code generator I have been using for years. It routinely generates 90+% of the code needed to write a typical biz web application, leaving just the business logic.
No AI. Just straightforward high-level-spec-to-server-client-DB code that is 100% trusted and proven in battle.
I can''t imagine telling them now to stop—use the Ersatz Intelligence instead of Actual Intelligence.