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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#361

Post by ohyoutravel »

varjag wrote: post #360
Adexintart wrote: post #358

This is a useful framing. The exoskeleton metaphor captures it well — AI amplifies what you can already do, it doesn't replace the need to know what to do. I've found the biggest productivity gains come from well-scoped tasks where you can quickly verify the output.

All metaphors are flawed. You may still need a degree of general programming knowledge (for now) but you don't need to e.g. know Javascript to do frontend anymore. And as labs continue to collect end-to-end training done by their best paying customers, the need for expert knowledge will only diminish.

You’re talking to an LLM, FYI.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#362

Post by stpedgwdgfhgdd »

sensanaty wrote: post #299
ukuina wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you assume there isn't? Enterprise (+API) usage of LLMs has continued to grow exponentially.

I work for one of those enterprises with lots of people trying out AI (thankfully leadership is actually sane, no mandates that you have to use it, just giving devs access to experiment with the tools and see what happens). Lots of people trying it out in earnest, lots of newsletters about new techniques and all that kinda stuff. Lots of people too, so there's all sorts of opinions from very excited to completely ind…

I build a code reviewer based on the claude code sdk that integrates with gitlab, pretty straightforward. The hard work is in the integration, not the review itself. That is taken care of with SDK.

Devs, even conservative ones, like it. I’ve built a lot of tooling in my life, but i never had the experience that devs reach out to me that fast because it is ‘broken’. (Expired token or a bug for huge MRs)

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#363

Post by falcor84 »

thwarted wrote: post #221
falcor84 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is a level of magnitude difference between coordinating AI agents and humans - the AIs are so much faster and more consistent than humans, that you can (as Steve Yegge [0] and Nicholas Carlini [1] showed) have them build a massive project from scratch in a matter of hours and days rather than months and years. The coordination cost is so much lower that it's just a different ball game. [0] https://steve-yeg…

> But there is a level of magnitude difference between coordinating AI agents and humans And yet, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47048599 > One of the tips, especially when using Claude Code, is explictly ask to create a "tasks", and also use subagents. For example I want to validate and re-structure all my documentation - I would ask it to create a task to research state of my docs, then after create a ta…

Yes, but you can do this at the top level, and then have AI agents do this themselves for all the low level tasks, which is then orders of magnitude faster than with human coordination.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#364

Post by topocite »

jimbokun wrote: post #217
kiba wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jevon's paradox means this is untrue because it means more work not less.

Jevon’s Paradox is an important observation but I don’t think it’s an immutable law of the universe,

It is a 19th century economic observation around the use of coal.

It is like saying the PDF is going to be good for librarian jobs because people will read more. It is stupid. It completely breaks down because of substitution.

Farming is the most obvious comparison to me in this. Yes, there will be more food than ever before, the farmer that survives will be better off than before by a lot but to believe the automation of farming tasks by machines leads to more farm jobs is completely absurd.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#366

Post by swah »

eCa wrote: post #257
fdefitte wrote: post #163

[dead]

> That's not augmentation, that's a completely different game Not saying that this comment is ai written, but this phrasing is the em-dash of 2026.

That's absolutely correct, I fear.. In english those looks bad/funny/lazy...

But in code, its probably ok. Its idiomatic code, I guess.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#367

Post by falcor84 »

jimbokun wrote: post #201
falcor84 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is a level of magnitude difference between coordinating AI agents and humans - the AIs are so much faster and more consistent than humans, that you can (as Steve Yegge [0] and Nicholas Carlini [1] showed) have them build a massive project from scratch in a matter of hours and days rather than months and years. The coordination cost is so much lower that it's just a different ball game. [0] https://steve-yeg…

Then why aren’t we seeing orders of magnitude more software being produced?

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#368

Post by nashashmi »

gregoriol wrote: post #365

I see it more like the tractor in farming: it improved the work of 1 person, but removed the work from many other people who were in the fields doing things manually

That analogy also means there was more waste involved and less resource extraction.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#369

Post by Sharlin »

alphazard wrote: post #174
paulryanrogers wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift. And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others.

> This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift. I think there are people who want to use software to accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to use software. The people who only use software because the world around them has forced it on them, either through work or frie…

> I think there are people who want to use software to accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to use software.

Typically people feel they're "forced" to use software for entirely valid reasons, such as said software being absolutely terrible to use. I'm sure that most people like using software that they feel like actually helps rather than hinders them.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#370

Post by mrbungie »

jychang wrote: post #320
lpapez wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you only realized how ridiculous your statement is, you never would have stated it.

It's also literally factually incorrect. Pretty much the entire field of mechanistic interpretability would obviously point out that models have an internal definition of what a bug is. Here's the most approachable paper that shows a real model (Claude 3 Sonnet) clearly having an internal representation of bugs in code: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit... Read the entire section around thi…

Was this "paper" eventually peer reviewed?

PS: I know it is interesting and I don't doubt Antrophic, but for me it is so fascinating they get such a pass in science.

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