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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#51

Post by input_sh »

rel_ic wrote: post #42
input_sh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even speaking from a pure statistical perspective, it is quite literally impossible for "AI" that outputs world's-most-average-answer to be better than "most engineers". In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what percentage of engineers it's better than: all it does is it consumes as much data as possible and returns the statistically most probable answer, therefore it's gonna be better than roughly 50% of engineers.…

This is kind of like saying a kid can never become a better programmer than the average of his teachers. IMHO, the reasons not to use AI are social, not logical.

The kid can learn and become better over time, while "AI" can only be retrained using better training data.

I'm not against using AI by any means, but I know what to use it for: for stuff where I can only do a worse than half the population because I can't be bothered to learn it properly. I don't want to toot my own horn, but I'd say I'm definitely better at my niche than 50% of the people. There are plenty of other niches where I'm not.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#52

Post by wartywhoa23 »

input_sh wrote: post #39
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. The reality of software engineering is that there's a lot of mediocre developers on the market and a lot of mediocre code being written; that's part of the industry, and the jobs of engineers working with other engineers and/or LLMs is that of quality control, through e.g. static analysis, code reviews, teaching, studying, etc.

And those mediocre engineers put their work online, as do top-tier developers. In fact, I would say that the scale is likely tilted towards mediocre engineers putting more stuff online than really good ones. So statistically speaking, when the "AI" consumes all of that as its training data and returns the most likely answer when prompted, what percentage of developers will it be better than?

These people also prefer plastic averaged-out images of AI girls to real ones.

The Average is their top-tier.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#53

Post by bob1029 »

holyra wrote: post #38

what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.

I believe the orange site's consensus was that it's approximately one additional mini fridge or dish washer worth of consumption on average. You've got users who use these tools barely 1k tokens per week. Assuming it's all batched ideally that's like running an LED floodlight for a minute or so. The other end of the spectrum can be pretty extreme in consumption but it's also rare. Most people just use the adhoc stuff.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#54

Post by sd9 »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #43
tern wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…

[flagged]

Calling somebody a wannabe systems engineer is unneccessarily antagonistic.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#56

Post by tern »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #43
tern wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…

[flagged]

I know it's not anyone's fault exactly, but the current state of systems in general is an absolute shit show. If you care about what you do, I'd expect you to be cheering that we just might have an opportunity for a renaissance.

Moreover, this kind of thinking is incredibly backward. If you were better than me then, you can easily become much better than I'll ever be in the future.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#57

Post by sd9 »

thefounder wrote: post #49

The issue is that you become lazy after a while and stop “leading the design”. And I think that’s ok because most of the code is just throwaway code. You would rewrite your project/app several times by the time it’s worth it to pay attention to “proper” architecture. I wish I had these AIs 10 years ago so that I could focus on everything I wanted to build instead to become a framework developer/engineer.

I agree. I've got more lazy over time too. But the cost of creating code is so cheap... it's now less important to be perfect the first time the code hits prod (application dependant). It can be rewritten from scratch in no time. The bar for 'maintainability' is a lot lower now, because the AI has more capacity and persistence to maintain terrible code.

I'm sure plenty of people disagree with me. But I'm a good hand programmer, and I just don't feel the need to do that any more. I got into this to build things for other people, and AI is letting me do that more efficiently. Yes, I've had to give up a puritan approach to code quality.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#58

Post by dist-epoch »

holyra wrote: post #38

what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.

The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita.

And then add on top the environmental impact of all of the money that programmer gets from programming - travels around the world, buying large houses, ...

If you care about the environment, you should want AI's replacing humans at most jobs so that they can no longer afford traveling around the world and buying extravagant stuff.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#59

Post by wartywhoa23 »

holyra wrote: post #38

what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.

All environmental impacts are equal, but some of them are more equal than the others!

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#60

Post by wartywhoa23 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #58
holyra wrote: post #38

what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.

The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita. And then add on top the environmental impact of all of the money that programmer gets from programming - travels around the world, buying large houses, ... If you care about the environment, you should want AI's re…

So you mean that human programmers who were replaced by AI are dead by now?

"You'll be fine digging trenches, programmer", they said.

Seriously, though:

...so that they can no longer afford traveling around the world...

This is either a sarcasm I failed to parse, or pure technofascism.

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