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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

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

#381

Post by Tade0 »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #348
Tade0 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can tell from this statement that you don't have experience with claude-code. I happen to use it on a daily basis. 4.6-opus-high to be specific. The other day it surmised from (I assume) the contents of my clipboard that I want to do A, while I really wanted to B, it's just that A was a more typical use case. Or actually: hardly anyone ever does B, as it's a weird thing to do, but I needed to do it anyway. > but…

What do you mean the content of your clipboard?

I either accidentally pasted it somewhere and removed, forgetting about doing that or it's reading the clipboard.

The suggestion it gave me started with the contents of the clipboard and expanded to scenario A.

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

#382

Post by dsego »

zombot wrote: post #314
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> I would rather a single human (for now) architect with good taste and an army of agents than a team of humans. A human might have taste, but AI certainly doesn't.

It has average taste based on the code it was trained on. For example, every time I attempted to polish the UX it wanted to add a toast system, I abhor toasts as a UX pattern. But it also provided elegant backend designs I hadn't even considered.

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

#383

Post by bsenftner »

No, AI is plastic, and we can make it anything we want.

It is a coworker when we create the appropriate surrounding architecture supporting peer-level coworking with AI. We're not doing that.

AI is an exoskeleton when adapted to that application structure.

AI is ANYTHING WE WANT because it is that plastic, that moldable.

The dynamic unconstrained structure of trained algorithms is breaking people's brains. Layer in that we communicate in the same languages that these constructions use for I/O has broken the general public's brain. This technology is too subtle for far too many to begin to grasp. Most developers I discuss AI with, even those that create AI at frontier labs have delusional ideas about AI, and generally do not understand them as literature embodiments, which are key to their effective use.

And why oh why are go many focused on creating pornography?

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

#384

Post by anyonecancode »

oxag3n wrote: post #32

> We're thinking about AI wrong. And this write up is not an exception. Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there’s 90% less demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a spectrum." So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in near future (6-12 months accor…

If the goal is to reduce the need for SWE, you don’t need AI for that. I suspect I’m not alone in observing how companies are often very inefficient, so that devs end up spending a lot of time on projects of questionable value—something that seems to happen more often the larger the organization. I recall at one job my manager insisted I delegate building a react app for an internal tool to a team of contractors rather than letting me focus for two weeks and knock it out myself.

It’s always the people management stuff that’s the hard part, but AI isn’t going to solve that. I don’t know what my previous manager’s deal was, but AI wouldn’t fix it.

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

#386

Post by laichzeit0 »

Tade0 wrote: post #250
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's just really good at saying things which sound plausible.

Absolutely nuts, I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. I could list several anecdotes here where Claude has solved issues for me in an autonomous way that (for someone with 17 years of software development, from embedded devices to enterprise software) would have taken me hours if not days.

To the nay sayers... good luck. No group of people's opinions matter at all. The market will decide.

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

#387

Post by windexh8er »

pousada wrote: post #340
lpapez wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Some people are still stuck in the “stochastic parrot” phase and see everything regarding LLMs through that lense.

Current LLMs do not think. Just because all models anthropomorphize the repetitive actions a model is looping through does not mean they are truly thinking or reasoning.

On the flip side the idea of this being true has been a very successful indirect marketing campaign.

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

#389

Post by nazgul17 »

Tade0 wrote: post #250
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's just really good at saying things which sound plausible.

While I agree, if you think that AI is just a text predictor, you are missing an important point.

Intelligence, can be borne of simple targets, like next token predictor. Predicting the next token with the accuracy it takes to answer some of the questions these models can answer, requires complex "mental" models.

Dismissing it just because its algorithm is next token prediction instead of "strengthen whatever circuit lights up", is missing the forest for the trees.

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

#390

Post by ACCount37 »

mrbungie wrote: post #370
jychang wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Modern ML is old school mad science.

The lifeblood of the field is proof-of-concept pre-prints built on top of other proof-of-concept pre-prints.

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