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Please Use AI

shawnsmucker.substack.com

371–380 of 414 posts

Re: Please Use AI

#371

This was great. I think about this a lot and have for years now. When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?” Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question. I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them…

Did you use AI to write this ? Feels like you did.

Haha, no, not at all. Maybe I've been spending too much time with the robots.

Re: Please Use AI

#372

This was great. I think about this a lot and have for years now. When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?” Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question. I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them…

I don't know if I would put recipes in the same 'real' stuff category as writing. I am sure celebrity cookbooks have been regurgitating the same recipes with slight modifications for decades now. What is the difference between buying and following Reese Witherspoon's cookbook and just asking an LLM? It is not like either is putting your apron on and mixing the ingredients.

I suspect you're right, but the alternative is finding better cookbooks I suppose. I've found incredible books in the last 5 years or so that have transformed my kitchen. I don't think an LLM could do that. To be fair, I haven't tried to get great results from one, either.

Re: Please Use AI

#373
post #55

I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results. I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel emp…

All this happening with Mobile phones, and now AI reminds me of "Solarians" in Isaac Asimov universe:

https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria

They were a race of humans that hated contact with other people. Each of of them lived in estates separated by acres of space.

We keep pushing our culture/society towards that sort of thing. We keep writing into to this "social" media (including what I am just writing) which is not social at all (but more akin to shouting opinions the middle of a mall).

Re: Please Use AI

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an undercurrent in a lot of writings like this that don't seem to grasp that LLMs enable access to a ton of knowledge that was otherwise out of reach for a ton of people. I'll give an example. I just traveled to Serbia, and I went on a run through a park in New Belgrade, where I saw a monument written in Cyrillic. I snapped a pic of it and uploaded it to Claude; it translated and gave me some context. I thoug…

>There's an undercurrent in a lot of writings like this that don't seem to grasp that LLMs enable access to a ton of knowledge that was otherwise out of reach for a ton of people. There isn't. This blog post is a great example. There isn't a hint of what you are asserting. You are assuming it out of thin air. LLMs enable a lot and harm a lot. We should be able to talk about the harm without people assuming we are una…

There’s absolutely a hint.

The poem didn’t talk about asking around for info about fly fishing, not finding anyone, but then deciding that was okay and/or finding new interests based on the interests of the people he talked to.

This would have been very in-bounds thematically.

Re: Please Use AI

#375
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, when working on personal projects with AI I feel like I've replaced some of the joy of tinkering with code with the joy of tinkering with models. They require different work, writing prompts, setting up guardrails, harnesses etc, and that is also pretty fun for me!

I find very little joy in trying to wrangle the blackboxes that are LLMs. The undeterministic nature of them frustrates me, and feels nothing like the software engineering I know and love. However, I know I’m in the minority here, as almost everyone else in the industry I’ve talked to seems to love using them.

I absolutely love deterministic, reliable, robust software so I find the challenge of non-deterministic agents completely fascinating and exciting. Programming for the user has always been a challenge (especially in the browser where the environment itself isn't consistent), and now we have the same kinds of challenges across the stack.

I'm enjoying that aspect of it so much. How can we make it safer, more reliable, predictable? I don't think we'll have totally satisfactory answers for a long time, and it'll be a lot of fun to explore the space until we get there.

I think what really kills me is allowing non-deterministic agents to write non-deterministic code and not really being critical of the process or the results. That's poison for our industry, newcomers to the field, and frankly the profession itself. I'd like to see us take this more seriously.

Re: Please Use AI

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is completely dependent on the person building it and why they love building software. Some people got into software development because they love to code. Others got into it because they love bringing ideas to life and coding was the only means to do so. I am of the latter. I love software development because it allows me to bring my idea to life. Yes, I love to code but it's a means to get to my ultima…

It's also not an either/or, You can love both. I still love coding for the challenge, but I also love the productivity benefits AI brings me when producing things that benefit people. At the end of the day I do not put my skills on a pedestal either, I can learn from AI the same way I learn from reading open source code.

You are absolutely right! Sorry, I couldn't resist that one (thanks Claude).

I agree with you completely.

I started at a new company in February and was able to use AI to get fully on boarded 3 months faster than their typical onboarding cycle.

I use it to learn new things all the time and to enhance my existing decades of experience. Very humbling when it shows you how much you don't know.

Re: Please Use AI

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your project contained original thought does it matter if the IFs and the ELSEs were generated? I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it. I am on the other extreme end: I don’t give a rat’s ass about the code itself. The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. All the “file ha…

I have landed here myself. I have always enjoyed writing code, but I find lately that I am getting so much more satisfaction from the process of exploring and designing systems more, and code is simply the substrate. I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.

> I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.

I don't believe this, every architect ive ever worked with that was not regularly in the weeds on various things in the codebase were universally terrible and out of touch.

Re: Please Use AI

#378
It would be nice if I could talk to my parents in person everyday, feeling their touches and temperature. But we live in different countries, so instead I talk to them over FaceTime everyday. TBH, even if they live next door, I may not always find time to visit them everyday. So having a way to use a device in my pocket to talk to them is nice. It's a compromise I accept.

On the other hand, if I live in 150 years ago where telephone had not been invented, I may never make such decision to live so far away from my parents at all.

"Technology giveth and technology taketh away"

Re: Please Use AI

#379
post #354
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And why did you decide the AI makes you a better speaker than talking and getting feedback from your fellow humans? You've just demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension. The choice that I made wasn't humans, OR AI. It was humans, OR humans+AI. All else being equal, more feedback is better. > It seems to me a sort of "productivity death cult". Productivity for what? Are you having a discussion with me, or a stra…

> You've just demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension Why are you escalating this? I didn't personally attack you or question your comprehension, I'm challenging some of what you said. Not even all. > Are you having a discussion with me, or a strawman that you're projecting onto me? Right now it looks like you're debating a strawman. Who doesn't look anything like me. Not a strawman. I'm addressing a broader con…

> Why are you escalating this? I didn't personally attack you or question your comprehension, I'm challenging some of what you said.

On personal attacks, you literally said that it looked to you like I am part of a productivity death cult. How was that not you attacking first?

Moving on, What you challenged was not what I said. It was a misunderstanding of what I said. A misunderstanding that is directly contradicted by what I DID say.

To verify, re-read the thread. Note where I first said that we should not reduce human interactions. And then realize that if we're not reducing human interactions, we're certainly not replacing human interactions with AI interactions.

> Not a strawman. I'm addressing a broader context than just you, while relating it to what you said about the AI being "available" when humans weren't.

In other words what you had to say should have been addressed to some other group, for some other reason.

Meanwhile, what I said is true. I have a number of people I get feedback from. I value it. They're there for me, I'm there for them. But if I want an extra 5 rounds of feedback, I'll feel guilty for disrupting my friend that much. I won't feel guilty after asking that from an AI. And unless a friend is in crisis, I wouldn't be happy with a friend who regularly demanded that much from me.

AI connections are not as meaningful. But they are definitely more available.

> None of this was in your initial comment, how could I guess? This is additional context that does, indeed, change some of our conversation.

Bullshit.

I said up front that I have personal reasons for wanting to be a better speaker. The default assumption when someone says that they have personal reasons for something, should be that they have personal reasons for it. And that their reasons are at the very least meaningful to them.

You didn't. You assumed the worst of me. You then misread me to be worse still. And then were confrontational about it. And now are standing on, "Who me? How could I have guessed at all that?"

> Yes, but let's be honest about what "helpful" means here, and to what end. Perfecting a speech (or helping you perfect it) doesn't seem to me a particularly necessary use of AI.

Since you've been honest, I'll be honest back. If you gave a shit, you'd know what my goal is. It isn't perfecting any given speech. You'd also know why it is important to me. And if that isn't enough in your books to justify what I'm using AI for, then I'll ignore your opinions on the matter.

Re: Please Use AI

#380
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elitism excludes humans from one another, which is exactly what the poem is encouraging you not to do

The poem itself is elitist. If you leverage a broad social network, you are better than if you use AI.

You completely misunderstood it then. It was not about utilizing broad social networks nor was it about not-using AI.
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