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The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

techtrenches.dev

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Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#451

Post by Forgeties79 »

liendolucas wrote: post #152

I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things. My main point against using AI is that I do not want to depend basically on anything when I'm in front of the screen (obviously not including, documentation, books, SO and alike). I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most tri…

To add to this issue, a lot of people then offload their mental load and work to the people downstream of their LLM results.

Someone on HN put it well the other day: everyone wants to deliver AI results, no one wants to receive them.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#453

Post by Kerrick »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #116
allending wrote: post #32

There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on? The text has few of the obvious AI tells. The only thing that, to me, looks characteristic of LLM-generated text is the short and terse sentence structure, but this has been a "prestigious" way to write in English since Hemingway.

https://awnist.com/slop-cop (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806845) points out Staccato Burst, Dramatic Fragment, Colon Elaboration, and Short-Hook Paragraph. To me, those define the tone of this article.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#454

Post by Forgeties79 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #378
liendolucas wrote: post #152

I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things. My main point against using AI is that I do not want to depend basically on anything when I'm in front of the screen (obviously not including, documentation, books, SO and alike). I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most tri…

I'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. I'd say it's far more tiring working that way though, you're breaking the satisfaction loop so you never really get the dopamine you used to get coding by hand, when you had a problem figuring it out was like solving a puzzle and you feel satisfaction at the end of it. With AI it feels most of my day is spent being a QA than…

>I'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months.

This feels unfair to the people dealing with your (LLM’s) code. You don’t vet it at all? Or am I reading this wrong?

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#455

Post by api »

jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

Most of what you describe here is overfitting:

https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#456

Post by torginus »

MattJ100 wrote: post #199
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people. The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker. It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing? The thing that gets me is,…

We see this in our open-source community. We've had a community channel for over two decades, where community members help newcomers and each other solve problems and answer questions. Increasingly we have people join who tell us they've been struggling with a problem "for days". Per routine, we ask for their configuration, and it turns out they've been asking ChatGPT, Claude or some other LLM for assistance and thei…

I have switched to OpenWRT during the LLM era. I wanted to set up some special network configs, and ChatGPT happily spit out the necessary configs.

From what little I understood from OpenWRT everything looked fine, but nothing worked. I still to this day have no idea what I (or ChatGPT) did wrong.

I just reset the router, actually took the time to do everything by the docs, and then it worked.

Debugging someone's broken code that never worked is a nightmare I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#458

Post by osigurdson »

The author calls it out at the end but still spends a long time creating a false equivalency. Offshoring to humans in another country is not the same as having machines do work domestically. Really, the only thing that matters is:

"Maybe AI gets good enough, and the bet pays off. Maybe it doesn’t."

Of course, we are all wondering if AI will be good enough in 5 to 10 years such that you don't have to look at the code (at all). If so, then very few programmers will be needed it seems. If not, its possible that roughly the same number will be needed.

It seems oddly binary to me since as soon as you need to understand anything about the code, you have to effectively onboard yourself to a foreign codebase and develop the needed context.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#459

Post by torginus »

stingraycharles wrote: post #57
jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

Seems to me that - optimistically - this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role, and that the actual implementation is done by AI. In the same way in other areas, engineering and implementation differ and implementation can be (and is) automated. No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “ol…

Personally my experience has been that once I manage to describe a problem in good enough detail that a junior engineer would be able to solve it, it's good enough for an LLM as well.

Which creates incentives I'm not wholly comfortable with, but the fact is that I'm more productive now alone, than I used to be in a team.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#460

Post by drzaiusx11 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #454
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. I'd say it's far more tiring working that way though, you're breaking the satisfaction loop so you never really get the dopamine you used to get coding by hand, when you had a problem figuring it out was like solving a puzzle and you feel satisfaction at the end of it. With AI it feels most of my day is spent being a QA than…

>I'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. This feels unfair to the people dealing with your (LLM’s) code. You don’t vet it at all? Or am I reading this wrong?

Another tragedy of the commons tbh
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