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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#361

Post by Anamon »

prescriptivist wrote: post #255
archagon wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A new technology comes out — admittedly one that’s extraordinarily capable at some things — and suddenly conventional software engineering is “more or less obviated at this point”? I’m sorry, but that’s really fucking dumb. Do you think LLMs are actually intelligent? Do you think their capabilities exceed the quality of their training corpus? Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build ne…

> Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough? All I'm saying is you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent. It's not that I don't see value in the craft; it's just that value is less important. As far as the new paradigms, the new frameworks, new s…

So how will progress be made in our field, in your scenario of the future?

It's both an obvious consequence of how they operate, and an easily observable reality, that even the best models utterly fail at any task that is even slightly outside of the space spanned by their training set. In this future, software in 2022 was as good and as capable as it was ever going to get. In which case -- fuck, I had higher hopes for what computers and software would be able to achieve when I started in this business 20 years ago, than this sorry state of affairs. We were finally getting some traction on the idea that we urgently need to work on security, reliability, stability, etc., and suddenly we're all supposed to be excited about heading full speed the other way.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#362

Post by Anamon »

peteforde wrote: post #344
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, glad to hear I was mistaken, but it certainly seemed like about halfway through your first response you went off the rails and decided to take my question as some sort of personal affront. It was not the strangest response I've had on HN, but one of the strangest. I could go through with a full analysis of why I thought "this guy is having problems", but that would take a long time and as you say you aren't I gue…

I like remus' comment to your previous message; you're telling a guy with a chainsaw who is busy chopping down trees at lightning speed that he should stop and defend his daily experience against some studies that suggest tree chopping speeds are not what they seem. At some point you just have to shrug and get back to work chopping down 3-5x more trees than you did last year.

Writing software is not chopping trees, though.

For instance, there is a lot of evidence (and intuition, frankly) to the argument that while LLM increase superficial, short-term productivity, they also cause an extreme accumulation in technical debt that may more than wipe out any initial, fast progress down the line.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#363

Post by salawat »

duggan wrote: post #79
salawat wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a baseline value in going fast. Maybe to the people writing the invoices for the infra you're renting, sure. Or to the people who get paid to dig you out of the consequences you inevitably bring about. Remember, the faster the timescale, the worse we are wired to effectively handle it as human beings. We're playing with a fire that catches and spreads so fast, by the time anyone realizes the forest is catchi…

> We're playing with a fire that catches and spreads so fast, by the time anyone realizes the forest is catching and starting to react, the entire forest is already well on the way to joining in the blaze. I suspect this has been said in one form or another since the discovery of fire itself.

Even if it is as perennial as contempt for descendents, when the fact is that signals are getting so fast they trigger downstream responses faster than a neuron can finish it's refractory period renders it not exactly a trivially dismissable observation.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#364

Post by therealdrag0 »

maltelau wrote: post #328
therealdrag0 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh accuracy and reliability is a different topic hashed out many times on HN. This thread is about productivity. I’m a staff engineer and I don’t know a single person not using AI. My senior engineers are estimating 40% gains in productivity.

And every time the issue is side-stepped by chatbot proponents. Accuracy and reliability are necessary to know real productivity. If you have produced code that doesn't work right, you haven't "produced" anything (except in the economic sense of managing to get someone to pay for it). For example, if you produce 5x more code at 5% reliability, the net result is a -75% change in productivity (ignoring the overhead cos…

We’ve all been waiting for the reliability shoe to drop for, what, a year now?

It’s only slop of you don’t understand the code, prompt, and result, and skip code reviews. You can have large productivity gains without reducing quality standards.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#365

Post by peteforde »

Anamon wrote: post #362
peteforde wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like remus' comment to your previous message; you're telling a guy with a chainsaw who is busy chopping down trees at lightning speed that he should stop and defend his daily experience against some studies that suggest tree chopping speeds are not what they seem. At some point you just have to shrug and get back to work chopping down 3-5x more trees than you did last year.

Writing software is not chopping trees, though. For instance, there is a lot of evidence (and intuition, frankly) to the argument that while LLM increase superficial, short-term productivity, they also cause an extreme accumulation in technical debt that may more than wipe out any initial, fast progress down the line.

If you aren't reviewing the changes its proposing, you deserve what's coming to you.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#366

Post by rl3 »

overgard wrote: post #287
rl3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps execution is cheap now and ideas aren't? Personally I'm quite pleased with this inversion.

Believe me mate, everyone has ideas. Even if you have a good one I guarantee a thousand other people have thought of it first.

I hope so. Thing is, ideas compose. After a certain point statistics tend to work in one's favor in that regard.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#367

Post by rl3 »

bena wrote: post #94
rl3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps execution is cheap now and ideas aren't? Personally I'm quite pleased with this inversion.

Ideas are always cheap. Eventually you will have to tell people what the idea is, even if it is at product launch. And then, if execution is as cheap and easy as they claim, then anyone can replicate the idea without having to engage with the person in the first place. Ideas will never not be cheap.

>Ideas will never not be cheap.

Never say never. Besides, there's still non-technical moats aplenty.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#368

Post by tern »

godelski wrote: post #360
tern wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, based on where this is going, I suspect we might agree more than it appears in this short exchange. As for the point about complexity, I will meditate on it. My first cut is that what you're getting at is something like: you're using "complexity" in the technical sense of the word, in which case we're in the realm of so-called "wicked problems" and such. There is some kind of 'making sense' that goes beyond…

I agree and think we're mostly on the same page fwiw. But there are parts I disagree with. We are more aligned than misaligned. But I do want to clear some things up > you're using "complexity" in the technical sense of the word Unfortunately complexity is a bit more complex than this and I think it's leading to some miscommunication. Even in technical settings complexity is overloaded. Something can be computational…

Yeah, I know what you mean. I do my best to check myself and also run things by people I trust, but there's an ever-present risk I'm going insane.

As a test, I've been attempting an incredibly complex project that goes far beyond my abilities as a kind of deliberate worst-case-scenario. It's more or less a programming language for a very specific purpose that compiles to a custom bytecode and runs on a custom runtime with specific performance guarantees.

I've spent part of the last month iterating on a formal model of the system and various specifications. Along the way, I teach myself how to understand and critique the part of the system I'm working on, however I also deliberately keep things just beyond my understanding by opportunistically pulling in concepts from various sources ... algebraic topology, obscure corners of PL, concepts plucked from similar systems. It's a complete monstrosity with, now, hundreds of supporting documents, research spikes, processed references, critique passes, etc.

If I'm able to complete this project and have it work as expected, I think I'll have learned a lot about what is or isn't possible. If the current design does in fact work, I'm fairly confident I'll have advanced the state of the art in the niche field I'm working in.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#369

Post by hansmayer »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #364
maltelau wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And every time the issue is side-stepped by chatbot proponents. Accuracy and reliability are necessary to know real productivity. If you have produced code that doesn't work right, you haven't "produced" anything (except in the economic sense of managing to get someone to pay for it). For example, if you produce 5x more code at 5% reliability, the net result is a -75% change in productivity (ignoring the overhead cos…

We’ve all been waiting for the reliability shoe to drop for, what, a year now? It’s only slop of you don’t understand the code, prompt, and result, and skip code reviews. You can have large productivity gains without reducing quality standards.

> It’s only slop of you don’t understand the code, prompt, and result, and skip code reviews. You can have large productivity gains without reducing quality standards.

So essentially like delegating all work to a beginner programmer only 10x more frustrating? Well, that's not what I would classify under "Pocket PhD" or "Nation of PhDs in a datacenter", which is the bullshit propaganda the AI CEOs are relentlessly pushing. We should not have to figure this out for them - they were saying this will write ALL code in 6 months from "now", the last time "now" being January 2026, so in little over 4.5 months. No, we should not be fixing this mess, f*k understanding the prompts and doing the code reviews of the AI slop. Why does it not work as advertised?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#370

Post by javadhu »

noemit wrote: post #32
javadhu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on the curiosity part, I have a non CS background but I have learned to program just out of curiosity. This led me to build production applications which companies actually use and this is before the AI era. Now, with AI I feel like I have an assistant engineer with me who can help me build exciting things.

I'm currently teaching a group of very curious non-technical content creators at one of the firms I consult at. I set up Codex for them, created the repo to have lots of hand-holding built in - and they took off. It's been 4 weeks and we already have 3 internal tools deployed, one of which eliminated the busy work of another team so much that they now have twice the capacity. These are all things 'real' engineers and…

This is the positive side of AI and that's inspiring. I have a friend who is into digital marketing but now he has automated most of the processes and moving towards learning to code at the side. Within a year I can say he is on par with a junior dev and now understands if I explain something technical.
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