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Cannibalism

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Re: Cannibalism

#41

Post by selfhoster1312 »

exitb wrote: post #36
po1nt wrote: post #31

Fantastic article. However author never considered that I'm looking forward to my job being automated. That's like a whole point of programming.

To what end? Can't you just quit and get the same result?

Quitting is an individual action with potential adverse consequences (misery).

The political question is why despite productivity in economic terms (which i know is flawed) growing many times over, do we still have to work as much, get paid so little, and have so many unemployed people looking for a job?

Looks like without a parasitic capitalist class, we could share resources and work and have people live better lives and work less.

Re: Cannibalism

#42

Post by js8 »

9dev wrote: post #27
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #3

Are people seriously getting use out of LLMs? Everything they produce is extermely sloppy in my experience, like actually mostly useless. I really dont understand the hype. Its very confusing.

Every time I have actually engaged in conversations with people making the same claim you do, it turned out they did not really invest time into learning how to work with coding agents: They assumed, given that they’re developers, the know how to code, and thus would knew how to steer a coding agent. That is a wrong assumption, however. An agent is an entirely new tool in your toolbox, with no similarity to any of th…

No, the more appropriate analogy would be that LLMs (reasoning agents would be better term, as they are no longer just an LLMs) are new beings rather than new tools.

A new tool can be ultimately understood, and has a well-defined behaviour you can rely on. Then you can indeed become an expert in using a new tool.

But AI agent is more a new being (or person). It's not possible to understand them, as they are not meant to. Each of them has individuality, and can change tomorrow. There is no guarantee of a common behaviour.

So you could replace "tool" in your comment with "person" and you will see the flaw of your argument. No matter how many people you saw before, it's difficult to generalize the skillset (at least for humans there are some biological and cultural arguments why they can be generalized over). You can always meet someone different, who's, for whatever reason, not being helpful to you.

Re: Cannibalism

#43

Post by 9dev »

js8 wrote: post #42
9dev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I have actually engaged in conversations with people making the same claim you do, it turned out they did not really invest time into learning how to work with coding agents: They assumed, given that they’re developers, the know how to code, and thus would knew how to steer a coding agent. That is a wrong assumption, however. An agent is an entirely new tool in your toolbox, with no similarity to any of th…

No, the more appropriate analogy would be that LLMs (reasoning agents would be better term, as they are no longer just an LLMs) are new beings rather than new tools. A new tool can be ultimately understood, and has a well-defined behaviour you can rely on. Then you can indeed become an expert in using a new tool. But AI agent is more a new being (or person). It's not possible to understand them, as they are not meant…

Most of the interaction surface with a coding agent is the harness anyway, so I'd definitely classify them as tools. Moreover, I don't like the anthropomorphism of calling them beings—and even if I were to follow that narrative, you can absolutely become better at interacting with people by practicing it.

Regardless, it sure seems like developers experienced with using coding agents achieve better results than those without, which pretty much refuses your entire point.

Re: Cannibalism

#44

Post by lukan »

9dev wrote: post #27
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #3

Are people seriously getting use out of LLMs? Everything they produce is extermely sloppy in my experience, like actually mostly useless. I really dont understand the hype. Its very confusing.

Every time I have actually engaged in conversations with people making the same claim you do, it turned out they did not really invest time into learning how to work with coding agents: They assumed, given that they’re developers, the know how to code, and thus would knew how to steer a coding agent. That is a wrong assumption, however. An agent is an entirely new tool in your toolbox, with no similarity to any of th…

I don't know, it is pretty simple to type /init in claude and see if its understanding of a project matches reality. And if it can make changes to it.

The difference working with agents, is that a solo dev suddenly becomes a dev manager, who has to deal with a unreliable team of developers far out on the spectrum.

Re: Cannibalism

#45

Post by entropi »

dmje wrote: post #29

Great piece, well written and succinctly sums up my thoughts. The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated sh…

> We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.

I think one more thing this whole LLM charade in the last few years has revealed is that no-one really cares. As long as it "looks" like it works, turns out, its all fine.

Re: Cannibalism

#46

Post by graemep »

watwut wrote: post #30
wiseowise wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it? Who, with a half brain, thought that you’d ever work less ?

Literally no one, no one even claimed we would work less due to AI. It is one of many absurd claims about AI here. There was no period in which we would get think pieces predicting more leisure time. We had plenty of think pieces about making people obsolete, about destruction, generally in celebratory tone. I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch…

> Literally no one, no one even claimed we would work less due to AI. It is one of many absurd claims about AI here. There was no period in which we would get think pieces predicting more leisure time.

https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/business/ari-emanuels-3b-v...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/11/ignore-the-d...

https://time.com/6268804/artificial-intelligence-pissarides-...

> I cant even think of period where AI think pieces would promises much positive - it was sold to CEOs, so pitch was always "higher unemployment".

Higher unemployment means people work less.

Re: Cannibalism

#47

Post by po1nt »

exitb wrote: post #36
po1nt wrote: post #31

Fantastic article. However author never considered that I'm looking forward to my job being automated. That's like a whole point of programming.

To what end? Can't you just quit and get the same result?

Of course, on the other hand does it make sense to keep an obsolete field artificially alive because "jobs"? There are many new oportunities opening for us. One will be increasing demand for cybersecurity auditors, someone will need to wire those servers and someone else will need to expand the AI into more fields.

We humans don't like change much, but that doesn't mean we should pump money to blockbuster.

Re: Cannibalism

#48

Post by Dansvidania »

dmje wrote: post #29

Great piece, well written and succinctly sums up my thoughts. The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated sh…

Doesn’t the article make the argument that since you can write tests this is not as much of a problem for code gen ?

Its arguable whether it is a foolproof solution (I don’t think so) but it definitely makes it look like you can build a harness around the stochastic machine that will validate the correctness of the generated randomness.

Monkeys and typewriters when you can quickly validate whether it’s Shakespeare or not is a costly but theoretically feasible scenario. No?

Re: Cannibalism

#49

Post by AdrianB1 »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #3

Are people seriously getting use out of LLMs? Everything they produce is extermely sloppy in my experience, like actually mostly useless. I really dont understand the hype. Its very confusing.

Yes. Most of the people I see are on the extremes of either hating LLMs or fanatically loving it, but I am somewhere in the middle ground, I think, where I see it as a tool that sometimes helps to some extent. I don't depend on it, it almost never gives me new ideas or ways to do things, but for trivial tasks it helps me relax supervising it - usually writing the first draft for documentation or suggesting initial updates, even filling in some semi-repetitive code patterns in web apps ("create empty functions and link the buttons to it"). It is just a tool, not too bad to ignore, not too good to get more productivity, sometimes useful. Using it is like using an IDE 30 years ago or Intellisense 15-20 years ago.

LE. I see current versions of LLM like an intern that helps me doing work. We work together, I give directions and supervision and I am responsible for the results. I cannot give complex tasks and I cannot skip checking everything, but it usually helps.

Re: Cannibalism

#50

Post by exitb »

selfhoster1312 wrote: post #41
exitb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what end? Can't you just quit and get the same result?

Quitting is an individual action with potential adverse consequences (misery). The political question is why despite productivity in economic terms (which i know is flawed) growing many times over, do we still have to work as much, get paid so little, and have so many unemployed people looking for a job? Looks like without a parasitic capitalist class, we could share resources and work and have people live better liv…

Your job being automated to the point where you no longer proform it has the same adverse consequences. Whether this could work is some economic and societal setup is irrelevant, because that's not the world we live in.
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