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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#351

Post by netcan »

rimliu wrote: post #335
netcan wrote: post #318

Earlier 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.

A lot of paraimony between your statement and Socrates' comments on the transition to writing.

Interestingly, he placed a lot of importance on memory... where you emphasize manipulation of concepts.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#352

Post by TrackerFF »

23df wrote: post #203
TrackerFF wrote: post #95

For all we know, we're in the early stages of making traditional (software) engineering obsolete. As in, we don't know if the role of software engineer as we know it today will still exist in 10-15-20 years. I mean, right now we're at the stage where any user can get AI to make you software to solve very specific things - almost no technical knowledge needed. My prediction is that first will software engineers be ren…

Your prediction is... missing so much detail of how that prediction actually happens that it is pointless. This is my big dislike re. the discussion of LLMs and the effect of AI more broadly. Unless you bother to make an effort in going deeper why post it? Theres no value. The same stuff has been posted for months and even years at this point.

When GPT 3.5 was released, it could handle maybe a 500 LOC codebase. Experienced engineers were calling it cute, but zero threat to actual programmers.

Then it became thousands.

Now models can handle and operate on code bases with hundreds of thousands LOC, even low MLOC.

So in just 3.5 years we've gone from LLMs being cute toys, to being powerful enough to actually replace junior engineers. Even if we hit a new AI winter tomorrow, the proverbial damage is already done.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#353

Post by ookblah »

nunez wrote: post #303

> 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…

you learn by struggling and slogging through, even as a senior if your shit breaks it's on you to understand why. no LLM will shortcut that process for you (even asking LLMs why something is wrong requires you to actually understand it eventually, aka LEARNING). how that happens is up to the person.

i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier to do certain things. i don't think it's contradictory at all. half the people here will never have to wrangle the bullshit i dealt with 20 years ago and i'm sure when i was dealing with it there was another 20 years of bullshit before me lol.

if you vibe code your app with no regard for the underlying code you will pay the price for it at some point in the future, anybody worth their salt will slow down enough to figure it out the "artisanal" way.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#355

Post by pkphilip »

Just as the advent of palm-sized organizers reduced our ability to recall dozens and sometimes even 100s of phone numbers of friends etc, AI will reduce our ability to perform a range of functions.

I think the evidence for this is quite clear. Humans are NOT going to expend any energy - even mental energy, to think about something if they don't have to.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#356

Post by Rebuff5007 »

ookblah wrote: post #353
nunez wrote: post #303

> 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…

you learn by struggling and slogging through, even as a senior if your shit breaks it's on you to understand why. no LLM will shortcut that process for you (even asking LLMs why something is wrong requires you to actually understand it eventually, aka LEARNING). how that happens is up to the person. i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier…

I'd argue that the engineers of 20 years ago were better than the engineers of today because they were significantly more resource constrained and for example, would never use a 300mb javascript library for a profile page.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#357

Post by chokma »

phito wrote: post #348
rimliu wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Automation is also for reducing drudgery - the work that prevents us from meaningful struggle by taking up resources that can be better applied elsewhere. Not all struggle (or pain) is created equal.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#358

Post by logicchains »

luckystarr wrote: post #133

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…

AI does the easy/medium part, leaving only hard stuff and context switching, so naturally it's more exhausting, as the concentration of difficult-work-per-unit-time and context-switching-per-unit-time is much higher.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#359

Post by mleo »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #356
ookblah wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you learn by struggling and slogging through, even as a senior if your shit breaks it's on you to understand why. no LLM will shortcut that process for you (even asking LLMs why something is wrong requires you to actually understand it eventually, aka LEARNING). how that happens is up to the person. i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier…

I'd argue that the engineers of 20 years ago were better than the engineers of today because they were significantly more resource constrained and for example, would never use a 300mb javascript library for a profile page.

As a percentage of good to mediocre, maybe. Engineers of 40 years ago were probably better than engineers 20 years ago. Less of them and more constraints they had to deal with. Democratization of technology makes it easier for more people to use. It applies to programming as much as just using a computer.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#360

Post by prerok »

californical wrote: post #340
rimliu wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. These tools are very good at creating illusion of learning, without any learning. When you watch them do stuff, you think, yeah I got this. Once they are gone, you realize all your supposed skill is gone too. Getting a skill requires deliberate practice. You can use AI for that, but just using AI is not that.

Why no? It sounds like you agree with the person you replied to

There's an old Latin proverb "Scribere bis legere", which translates to "writing is reading twice".

In practice, what this means is that you can read some subject many times, but you would still struggle to reproduce the content by yourself. That is why, when learning, it is not sufficient to just read the material several times.

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