41–49 of 49 posts
It is everywhere. Even on birthday invites for my kids there's nonsense from an LLM. At work I review PRs with code that doesn't even run. Doing research is harder than ever as more and more references are completely made up. We're too lazy and too obsessed with getting ahead to use this technology responsibly in my opinion.
Why is that being allowed?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course they are providing that feedback! No one gives a shit though. Our industry and society at large has basically given approval for people to submit AI slop. Managers and executives consider it working smart and efficiently. So telling someone "this code doesn't run" results in more slop in an attempt to fix it. Eventually it will run and get merged and the code base gets even shitter. There's only so much gat…
Do managers genuinely not care if the code they are paying to have written works or not?
Particularly when they know that people like the commenter above are making sure it ultimately “works” by covering the incompetence of their colleagues.
The comment you are replying to is in my view a superb observation of the challenge of maintaining quality against systemic pressures to appear to be performing.
Most senior leaders in organisations cannot (or care not to) measure quality. Few (outside big tech I assume but wouldn’t be surprised to also see overlook this?) are even usefully measuring benefits realisation tied back to activity (such as software releases).
What they can measure and are systemically incentivised for is “what does it take to get the approval of the next leader above me”, and most of the time a plausible report that the software has been delivered to/ahead of schedule is the real objective to achieve this goal.
That doesn’t mean morally motivated managers aren’t out there driving quality. But it is at odds with these org systems, at the detriment (or risk of detriment) of their own careers compared to peers who optimise more for what the system rewards, and at the expense of greater energy as they effectively have to hide their pursuit of better outcomes for the organisation under a veneer of performing as the organisation expects (that is, serve two goals simultaneously, one covert and one performative).
Something like this is a good exploration of the subject: https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted
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I thought a big part of hacker culture involved taking interest in new technology, exploring the edges of it (and beyond those edges) and figuring out what works and what breaks - and how to break it. I don't understand why many software engineers are so resistant to exploring AI. It's fascinating!
I've explored AI, and will continue to do so. I deliberately overcame my resistance to it because I'm an old-school hacker and I do enjoy tinkering with technology. But regardless of how cool it is and whether it works or not (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't), it doesn't make me feel good. Like the brain stupor I get from watching a vapid movie, or eating too much sugar and bouncing off the walls. Relatedly,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought a big part of hacker culture involved taking interest in new technology, exploring the edges of it (and beyond those edges) and figuring out what works and what breaks - and how to break it. I don't understand why many software engineers are so resistant to exploring AI. It's fascinating!
I've explored AI, and will continue to do so. I deliberately overcame my resistance to it because I'm an old-school hacker and I do enjoy tinkering with technology. But regardless of how cool it is and whether it works or not (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't), it doesn't make me feel good. Like the brain stupor I get from watching a vapid movie, or eating too much sugar and bouncing off the walls. Relatedly,…
What frustrates me is when people 1. claim it's entirely useless and that anyone who thinks it's useful is deceiving themselves (still very common, albeit maybe less so now than it was six months ago) or 2. claim that spending time writing about and understanding it "has turned a lot of them into drooling fanboys."
Hence my snappy response to the above comment. I took it a bit personally.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've explored AI, and will continue to do so. I deliberately overcame my resistance to it because I'm an old-school hacker and I do enjoy tinkering with technology. But regardless of how cool it is and whether it works or not (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't), it doesn't make me feel good. Like the brain stupor I get from watching a vapid movie, or eating too much sugar and bouncing off the walls. Relatedly,…
I'm fine with people deciding that AI programming isn't for them, especially if they've given it a fair shake first and didn't drop it the second it made an obvious mistake. What frustrates me is when people 1. claim it's entirely useless and that anyone who thinks it's useful is deceiving themselves (still very common, albeit maybe less so now than it was six months ago) or 2. claim that spending time writing about…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm fine with people deciding that AI programming isn't for them, especially if they've given it a fair shake first and didn't drop it the second it made an obvious mistake. What frustrates me is when people 1. claim it's entirely useless and that anyone who thinks it's useful is deceiving themselves (still very common, albeit maybe less so now than it was six months ago) or 2. claim that spending time writing about…
That's fair. I also made a snappy response because I get frustrated on the other side, when proponents say 1) "you're using it wrong" or 2) "it'll get better" or 3) "I don't understand why people are resistant". In that last case, there's two interpretations of resistance, the one in which someone doesn't overcome their initial knee-jerk response, and another one when someone develops a more warranted resistance afte…
Honestly at this point you could build a full periodic table of AI hesitancy/resistance/criticism and have it be a useful document!
I'm staunchly opposed to the whole "model welfare" thing, deeply skeptical of most of the AGI conversation and continue to think that outsourcing any critical decisions to an AI system is a catastrophically bad idea in a world where we haven't solved prompt injection (or indeed made much progress towards solving it) - so carve me out a bunch of squares for those.
Maybe there's room here for one of those political compass style quizzes.
I'm far too lazy to be able to responsibly use a machine that can give me semi-sensible answers. I saw the danger of it as a form of learned helplessness down the line and swore off using LLM's for that reason, that and I feel no need to delegate my thinking to a machine that can't think and I like thinking. Same reason snacks are upstairs in the kitchen and not in my office on the ground floor - I'm too lazy and if…
I'm far too lazy to be able to responsibly use a machine that can give me semi-sensible answers. I saw the danger of it as a form of learned helplessness down the line and swore off using LLM's for that reason, that and I feel no need to delegate my thinking to a machine that can't think and I like thinking. Same reason snacks are upstairs in the kitchen and not in my office on the ground floor - I'm too lazy and if…
This resonated for me. It’s really easy to hit that tiny cognitive speedbump of needing to put a bit of effort into recalling some API detail or other and instead of reaching into the old trusty manages, tabbing into the spammy chatbot for a quick fix.