Caught myself in this one. The dependency creeps in faster than I'd noticed and the laziness becomes the justification. Reviewing what comes out of the machine is the part I keep skipping. Useful read, thanks.
AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
341–350 of 656 posts
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#342> 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 do…
you don't need to build systems from scratch to acquire problem-solving skills. even routine maintenance problems require to dig into documentation, look at github issues, and do root-cause analysis. These skills are eliminated from reliance on AI and there is no fallback if one never acquired them in the first place.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#343what if it seems ai has literally replaced your thinking? Is there a way to unreplace it? im talking literally.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#344The 'Socrates worried about writing' analogy is usually deployed to dismiss concerns, but it misses an asymmetry which is writing preserved thought, it didn't generate it on demand. The real question is whether AI is closer to a pencil or a ghostwriter.
For junior engineers the distinction matters most. The reps are not just about getting the right answer, they are about building the intuition for when the answer is wrong. That's the hardest thing to transfer between people, and the thing AI is currently worst at self-verifying.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yeah I know. Which is why I wish we’d (the royal we) all stop pretending and lying about it haha.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... nobody in the field of "Software Engineering" is actually an Engineer if we go by a strict definitions. This is a pet peeve of mine, so while I understand what you mean, I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering! And since I've had this discussion before, I'll pre-emptively hazard a guess that the argument boils down to "rigor", and point out that a) economic fe…
> I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering! "Structured, mature, legally enforced, physically grounded standards based approach to the construction of repeatable, reliable, verifiable, artifacts under stable (to the degree that matters) external constraints". Some niche software development (e.g. NASA/JPL coding projects with special rules, practices, MISRA etc) can…
The only word doing any work at all in that definition is "artifacts", and the problem is that the methodology that is actually foundational to engineering need not be applied to physical objects. Further, it's not clear that this methodology shouldn't be rigorously applied to non-"artifacts" which that can cause equal or greater harms when created negligently.
The definition I always saw used was this one, I think:
> Engineering is the profession in which a knowledge of the mathematical and natural sciences gained by study, experience, and practice is applied with judgment to develop ways to utilize, economically, the materials and forces of nature for the benefit of mankind.
This sounds like it should exclude software design and development. Except it doesn't need to, and it's not really useful to exclude it simply because the definition isn't broad enough. The definition isn't engineering. The definition is trying to describe and encapsulate the reality of engineering. Nuclear and modern electrical engineers frequently never create anything physical in their careers whatsoever. Nuclear engineers manage power generation at facilities that others designed and built, while electrical engineers are frequently just dealing with signal processing. They are not less rigorous in their methodology.
The reality is that engineering is the methodical application of constraints to solve a problem. And it is the methodology that is the valuable aspect. The knowledge is necessary for each discipline, but it is itself fundamentally a prerequisite. There is a reason engineering is a single school of many disciplines.
Meanwhile, the reason that software engineering looks like half-art and half-guess has a lot more to do with software as a non-theoretical field of study only being about 60 years old in practical terms. The fundamental works of the field like The Art of Computer Programming haven't even been written yet.
Whatever happens to software development and operational systems administration in the next 50 years, however, both roles almost certainly would benefit society by becoming actual professions. Their responsibility to society as a whole has been allowed to be understated, and we're well past the days when a computer bug causing the kinds of deaths and damages such as we'd see from a civic work failure or automotive design flaw sounds unreasonable. Indeed, that actually sound fortunate given some of the software catastrophes that have occurred.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#347My director expects me to get things done at an accelerated rate. I don't have the time to read code and gain in depth understanding of issues he wants me to fix which requires me to understand multiple repos I have never touched.
I have no choice but let claude explore them for me and return me its summarized understanding. As next step, only claude can apply the required cross repo fixes, not me.
I just don't have the time. Meanwhile my skills as classical programmer atrophy, while my experience with and trust in claude go up...
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'd say that by purging stuff from the brain we are losing thinking itself. Thinking is manipulating ideas and concepts in your head, assembling and linking. The fewer things there is, the more primitive the result. You cannot juggle without object to juggle, connecting the dots result in trivial patterns when you have just a couple of dots.
It's true for all automation we do get more comfort. We build systems so that we humans have as little struggle as possible, not realising that struggle is the only reason for existence. By eliminating it, we are erasing ourselves from this world.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> We have people who can still do maths well after the introduction of the calculator. I assume by "do maths" you mean doing simple calculations, like adding a bunch of small numbers, in one's head. That's because in many situations it's more convenient to do so, than using a calculator. So the skill is preserved / practiced, because a calculator is too cumbersome to use. The skills of most people settle at the equil…
I would also argue, that most school system forbid the usage of a calculator the first couple of years (at least that's how it was Germany a few decades ago). The same with writing per hand. You can spell check by looking the word up and then manually correcting it.
Both require manual "labor" which leads to learning.
Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
#350> 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…
Almost none of my operational knowledge came from writing code but a lot sure came from the reading code in the debugging process.