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The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#41

Post by alok-g »

A side-track and a possibly controversial opinion:

It seems to me that Agile methodology did a similar thing. The idea of Agile is not to skip understanding requirements, design, upfront reasoning and due diligence, as seen in seen in waterfall methods. It however sometimes turned into laziness looking like faster incremental progress.

I think quality of software has become worse over the time, with "unknown error occurred try again later" becoming more common, and I wonder if the root causes of it includes jumping to building things without properly thinking through about the customer problem, requirements and/or design.

I may easily be wrong, would like to hear corrective thoughts.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#42

Post by nativeit »

SoftTalker wrote: post #38
Arainach wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be. Comments such as yours add nothing to the conversation. It's an ad hominem attack. In the absence of explaining why you believe it "looks like AI", it's a baseless accusation

It has the typical patterns: em dashes, "it's not A, it's B" constructions. Also relatively new, low karma account, and its other comments are similarly LLM-ish.

Em dashes are—hear me out—easy for anyone who knows how to type a hyphen twice.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#44

Post by QuantumNoodle »

Valid points, with which I agree and share the concern. I can't compete with colleagues, whom do things fast, if I want to learn. On the other hand, I no longer have to toil to work through things that I never truly learned, like tasks that require to be done a few times a year. Mastery is never acievable bc I forget, side quests become much less derailing. However, I am deprived of going through the motions and researching.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#46

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Anecdote: I haven’t done any web development since 2002 and I always farmed that off to someone else.

But since I started using coding agents, I have done two feature full internal web apps authenticated by Amazon Cognito. While the UI looks like something from 2002, I am good at putting myself in the shoes of the end user, I iterated often (and quickly) over the UX.

I didn’t look at a line of code and have no plans to learn web development. I might have taken the time to learn a little before AI just to help me with internal websites. Yes I know it’s secure - I validated the endpoints can’t be accessed unauthenticated and the IAM role.

Second anecdote: I know AWS (trust me on this) like the back of my hand. I also know CloudFormation. For years I’ve been putting off learning Terraform and the CDK. After AI, why bother? I can one shot either for IAC and I’m very specific about what I want.

My company is happy and my customer is happy (consulting) what else matters? Substitute “customer” for “the business” or “stakeholders”

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#47

Post by WhatIsDukkha »

sagarm wrote: post #39
peteforde wrote: post #21

Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono). I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was ra…

LLMs absolutely let you explore ideas and areas you wouldn't have otherwise...but does your new design actually _work_? I'm curious whether the "knowledge" you gained was real or hallucinatory. I've been using LLMs this way myself, but I worry I'm contaminating my memory with false information.

At some point this existential doubt about your own work and others seems pretty weird.

Go ahead and figure out ways to interrogate on your work with technical means, that's a critical part of the process with an LLM or not.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#48

Post by Flavius »

dminik wrote: post #30
elgertam wrote: post #7

I have a nearly total opposite take. I can't tell you how many times I've read a book, a paper or something else and been confused by some ambiguity in the author's prose. Being able to drop the paper (or even the book!) into an LLM to dig into the precise meaning has been an unbelievable boost for me. Now I can actually get beyond conceptual misunderstanding or even ignorance and get to practice, which is how skills…

If you're not sure what something is saying, how can you be sure that the AI had picked the correct interpretation?

By asking it to cite its sources. Whenever I use AI, I have it pull direct quotes from the text to justify its interpretation. Sometimes it's spot on, sometimes it's wrong. But skimming a paper to fact-check a few specific quotes is still vastly faster than reading a dense paper completely blind.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#49

Post by bluefirebrand »

peteforde wrote: post #21

Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono). I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was ra…

Okay, it's been several weeks.

How much of what you did have you retained? Could you do all of, some of, a small fraction of, or none of the work again today if you had to?

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#50

Post by OptionOfT »

peteforde wrote: post #21

Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono). I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was ra…

No, you touch on the aspects where you're able to use AI as an extension of your skills.

This is completely different than my colleague who isn't a software engineer, and now all of the sudden is creating PRs which I need to review and correct.

I'm a sceptic. I use it to explore the unknowns and go from there.

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