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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#411

Post by coldtea »

da_chicken wrote: post #346
coldtea wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering! "Structured, mature, legally enforced, physically grounded standards based approach to the construction of repeatable, reliable, verifiable, artifacts under stable (to the degree that matters) external constraints". Some niche software development (e.g. NASA/JPL coding projects with special rules, practices, MISRA etc) can…

The only word doing any work at all in that definition is "artifacts", and the problem is that the methodology that is actually foundational to engineering need not be applied to physical objects. Further, it's not clear that this methodology shouldn't be rigorously applied to non-"artifacts" which that can cause equal or greater harms when created negligently. The definition I always saw used was this one, I think:…

>The only word doing any work at all in that definition is "artifacts"

That's the subject, the only word that is NOT doing any work there (since both regular and software engineering produce artifacts).

Words that do the heavy work in that phrase are:

structured, mature, legally enforced, standards-based approach - for repeatable, reliable, verifiable, - artifacts - under stable external constraints

Software can sometime appear to touch those.

E.g. there are "standards", like HTML or like ARIA, so it's "standards-based" too! But those standards are loosely enforced, usually not mandated, loosely defined, and ad-hoc implemented with all kinds of diverting.

Or e.g. software can some times be repeatable. E.g. reproducible builds (to touch upon one aspect). But that's again left to the implementor, seldom followed (almost never for most software work, only in niche industries).

In general, software is not engineering (in the strict sense) because it's anything goes, all the above conditions can or cannot be handled (in any random set), the final work is a moving target, and verification is fuzzy, if it even happens.

>The reality is that engineering is the methodical application of constraints to solve a problem.

In that case, following specific constraits to solve a math problem, or to draw an artwork (e.g. using perspective) is also "engineering". That's too loose a term to be of any use.

Even accepting that, the degree of "methological" in software "engineering" versus e.g. civic or aviation engineering is orders of magnitude less.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#412

Post by falcor84 »

sesm wrote: post #403
freetime2 wrote: post #400

The scary thing is I have seen high level directors and executives say “I asked ChatGPT and it agreed with me” as a way to try to settle a debate. People seem all too willing to delegate even matters of judgement to AI. On the other hand I have been in debates where someone asks ChatGPT to draft a list of possible approaches and pros and cons - and after reading through the list we were all in alignment on the best a…

To make an exhaustive list of possible options you need to find key questions that divide solution space. This requires logic, which LLMs lack.

> This requires logic, which LLMs lack.

What? I've heard many takes on what AI lacks, but never this one. We had ChatGPT being able to solve an Erdős problem on its own yesterday [0]; how could you explain that if it cannot do logic?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903126

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#413

Post by thrownthatway »

netcan wrote: post #318
nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

Myopic is inevitable, to some extent. It's very hard to project this stuff. Socrates wrote about what was being lost as philosophy was becoming written rather than oral...and he was right. We can't even understand what was lost. Many methods of learning and thinking became entirely lost. You could say they were redundant, and they were. But... writing largely replaced oral traditions. It didn't just augment them. He…

> Socrates wrote about what was being lost…

Dr. Steven Skultety & Dr. Gad Saad discussed this in a recent video / podcast.

This link is time stamped to the topic https://youtu.be/7mcQf9E3YRo?t=1058

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#414

Post by hectdev »

luckystarr wrote: post #133

The way I use AI now feels more exhausting than the programming I did for the last 20 years. I pose a problem, then evaluate proposals, then pick the one I think is the "right one"(tm), then see the AI propose a bunch of weird shit, then call it out, refine the proposal until it feels just about right (this is the exhausting part), then let it code the proposal. The coding will then run for 1-5 hours and produce some…

Sounds like you’re using Waterfall Which, if it works for you, go for it. But maybe Agile would feel more dynamic.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#415

Post by coldtea »

keeda wrote: post #285
coldtea wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will challenge you to come up with a strict definition that excludes software engineering! "Structured, mature, legally enforced, physically grounded standards based approach to the construction of repeatable, reliable, verifiable, artifacts under stable (to the degree that matters) external constraints". Some niche software development (e.g. NASA/JPL coding projects with special rules, practices, MISRA etc) can…

>* ... legally enforced ...* Other than that part (most countries in the world do not have regulations or licensing requirements for most engineering disciplines) I would agree. But I would also point out the set of software projects that meet that definition is much larger than those you listed. As mentioned, it's a matter of economics, so the rigor scales with the pain it can cause if something that goes wrong. Hen…

>most countries in the world do not have regulations or licensing requirements for most engineering disciplines

Well, then in those countries those disciplines aren't treated as enginering.

Any country worth its name and with a rule of law, would have regulations and licensing requirements for electricians, civic engineers, structural engineers, aviation engineers, chemical engineers, etc.

I mean, they had building rules at the time of Babylon:

https://talk.build/construct-iq/ancient-babylon-and-the-firs...

And even in medieval times, working in certain fields that we'd call engineering today, was legally restricted to specific guilds.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#416

Post by base698 »

thrownthatway wrote: post #413
netcan wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myopic is inevitable, to some extent. It's very hard to project this stuff. Socrates wrote about what was being lost as philosophy was becoming written rather than oral...and he was right. We can't even understand what was lost. Many methods of learning and thinking became entirely lost. You could say they were redundant, and they were. But... writing largely replaced oral traditions. It didn't just augment them. He…

> Socrates wrote about what was being lost… Dr. Steven Skultety & Dr. Gad Saad discussed this in a recent video / podcast. This link is time stamped to the topic https://youtu.be/7mcQf9E3YRo?t=1058

It's the opening page of the book Technopoly.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#417

Post by afro88 »

nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

This has happened in other industries before. Drafting for example when CAD arrived. Entry level wasn't "can draw, willing to learn" anymore, but demanded high domain understanding. So the pathway became compressed learning through study, and field exposure.

Study of senior drafter "red lines": what and why they changed the initial drawing, RFI response etc. Reverse engineering good work. Failed design studies etc.

SWE equivalents: PRs, code review, studying high quality codebases (guess what: LLMs are amazing at helping here), pair programming (learning why what the LLM did was wrong, how to improve it, etc), customer support, debugging prod incidents, studying post mortems etc

We don't hire juniors and throw them boilerplate and tiny bugs while expecting them to learn along the way ad hoc through some pair programming and the occasional deep end. We give them specific tasks and studies that develop their domain understanding and taste, actively support and mentor them, and expect them to drive some LLMs on the side to solve simple issues that still need human eyes on it.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#418

Post by falcor84 »

breve wrote: post #332

People are lazy. AI will replace thinking for many people. Augmentation always leads to atrophy.

> Augmentation always leads to atrophy.

That's a very bold claim. As a small example let's look at calculators - I remember a lot of claims that having access to calculators would make people's brains atrophy and they'll never be able to do actual math, but what I'm seeing in myself and most people around me is that we're using calculators (and more mathematical software) to tackle significantly more complex problems than people would be able to do if they rejected calculators.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that kids should be using a calculator from the first day of pre-school, but I do absolutely think that using them as later on as augmentation is clearly beneficial.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#419

Post by ookblah »

techpression wrote: post #387
ookblah wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you learn by struggling and slogging through, even as a senior if your shit breaks it's on you to understand why. no LLM will shortcut that process for you (even asking LLMs why something is wrong requires you to actually understand it eventually, aka LEARNING). how that happens is up to the person. i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier…

Understanding something and learning something are not the same things.

nobody said they were, they are related. if you don't understand why something is behaving a certain way you need to learn

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#420

Post by gombosg »

gjuggler wrote: post #406

I was surprised not to see any discussion on whether the author used AI to help write this post. As many people say, writing is thinking. I started getting that "I'm reading another AI-written blog post" feeling around 1/3 of the way through, but I don't consider myself super calibrated on this. Pangram seems pretty confident it's AI ( https://www.pangram.com/history/e9f6eb77-86f9-46d0-a6c1-e57c... ). But I know thes…

Right at the top: "That distinction matters more than people think." That's basically telltale AI :)

Also the entire framing around "judgment" and "taste" is what LLMs love to parrot about the topic.

There are fair arguments in the post but I totally agree that "writing is thinking" and also holding myself to "if you didn't bother to write it, why would I bother to read it"?

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