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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#51

Post by n_e »

snarf21 wrote: post #16
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

I feel the same but the question I struggle most with is this: "Does it matter when the people who are going to come along and maintain this are just going to use AI to fix or adjust this maintenance nightmare?"

The problem with crappy frontend code is not only the maintenance. It's that stuff such as responsive design, accessibility or cross-browser compatibility that work nearly for free with elegant code won't work at all.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#52

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

sarreph wrote: post #18

I agree with the author that -- right now -- we're still in the part of the AI adoption / product development curve that it's an extreme force multiplier. I like to think of it as a normal distribution, the further away a programmer is to the right of the mean, the more their benefit. It's almost like it's their standard deviation squared (σ²). So someone like Matt Perry (as OP mentioned), who is a >99.99% programmer…

> How much longer is knowing what you're doing going to be a moat?

For a looooonnnnngggg time, unless there's massive progress in AI research.

Fundamentally, next token prediction is limited. Granted, I'm pretty amazed at how well it's done, but if you can't activate the right parts of the models (with your prompts), then you're not going to get good results.

And to be fair, for lots of things this doesn't matter. Steve in Finance or Mindy in Marketing can create dashboards that actually help them, and the code quality mostly doesn't matter.

For stuff that needs to be shipped, monitored and maintained you still need to know what you're doing.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#53

Post by giancarlostoro »

akersten wrote: post #23
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…

> The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly a maintenance dead end. In the Tailwind thread the other day I was explicitly told that the intended experience of many frameworks is "write-only code" so maybe this is just the way of the future that we have to learn to embrace. Don't worry how it's all hooked u…

Easy, have Claude review the code, tell it to be critical and that it needs to be easier to understand, follow Clean Code, SOLID principles and best practices. Lie to it, say you got this from a Junior developer, or "review it as if you were a Staff Level Engineer reviewing Junior code" the models can write better code, just nobody tells them to.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#54

Post by anilgulecha »

It is of course a multiplier. The worries are:

- Lesser overall engineers needed -> lesser demand of human engineers -> lower compensations

- insufficient training at junior levels.

- longer time to productive human engineering skill.

These are playing out right now, and a concern for all engineers in the industry. IronMan amplification don't address the above

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#55

Post by idopmstuff »

sarreph wrote: post #18

I agree with the author that -- right now -- we're still in the part of the AI adoption / product development curve that it's an extreme force multiplier. I like to think of it as a normal distribution, the further away a programmer is to the right of the mean, the more their benefit. It's almost like it's their standard deviation squared (σ²). So someone like Matt Perry (as OP mentioned), who is a >99.99% programmer…

100% agree with this. I think takes like OP's would be much more interesting if they staked out a position in the future. I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that someone with a great deal of technical expertise is going to be a hugely more effective LLM user today.

The question that really matters is whether that will continue to be the case. My guess is that technical expertise matters less over time, and the ability to specify the desired outcome is eventually the only thing that becomes important. But I could be wrong! The direction this all goes is pretty fuzzy in my mind.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#57

Post by michaelcampbell »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #43
simmerup wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it’s impossibly hard to test all the edge cases Which is probably why so many random buttons in microsoft/apple/spotify just stop working once you get off the beaten path or load the app in some state which is slightly off base

Yeah, the biggest thing I've noticed from LLMs is that large tech products now have even more bugs. Turns out the humans weren't so bad after all...

> Turns out the humans weren't so bad after all...

The people pushing AI _over_ humans never thought they were. They just don't care about 'good' or 'bad', only 'time-to-market'. A bad app making money is better than a good one that isn't deployed yet. And who cares about anything past the end of the quarter? That's the next guy's problem.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#58

Post by runarberg »

snide wrote: post #7

I mostly share Josh's opinion, but I think a lot of these posts that talk about Senior vs. Junior experience when working with AIs is kind of rubbish. Sure, you get better results as a Senior working with AI tooling and struggle more as a Junior. Nothing has changed in that equation except the amplification. What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI…

> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant

This is a testable hypotheses with severe lack of citations. Intuition would argue the opposite. We learn by using our brains, if we offload the thinking to a machine and copy their output we don‘t learn. A child does not learn multiplication by using a calculator, and a language learner will not learn a new language by machine translating every sentence. In both cases all they’ve learnt is using a tool to do what they skipped learning.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#59

Post by DarkTree »

sarreph wrote: post #18

I agree with the author that -- right now -- we're still in the part of the AI adoption / product development curve that it's an extreme force multiplier. I like to think of it as a normal distribution, the further away a programmer is to the right of the mean, the more their benefit. It's almost like it's their standard deviation squared (σ²). So someone like Matt Perry (as OP mentioned), who is a >99.99% programmer…

> How much longer is knowing what you're doing going to be a moat?

To me, I don't see how this will ever not be an advantage. All software requires constraints. Some of those constraints might be objective (scale, performance, etc.) but a lot of them are subjective and require active decision making (architecture, UI, readability).

So if there was only one way to do something or only one desired output, then yes I think models would surpass humans. But like art, I don't think there is a objective truth to software and because of that, humans get the opportunity to play an important role.

Now whether that is valued from a business/industry perspective is a question that I think we all know the answer to unfortunately.

Re: AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills

#60

Post by Ecys »

>AI is a powerful multiplier for people who already have deep technical expertise. The people seeing the biggest wins with AI are already highly skilled.

This sentiment will stray further from the truth as time goes on.

Sure, it's a multiplier for those who are already skilled, but for those who are unskilled, it is capable of taking you from 0 -> 1+.

The ones currently benefiting from AI are the ones who (i) have a general understanding of how an AI works and experience with using it and (ii) have a very generic understanding of what it is they're trying to do (programming, most likely) and know the limits of their tools, but don't know how to actually do anything meaningful.

The whole point of AI is to open the door of complexity to normies; they are the ones benefiting most from it. For a skilled developer, it may make a 1hr task -> 5 mins; for a normie, it makes something which was utterly impossible into -> now within his reality to achieve. the difference for normies is just more life-changing.

If you think of skilled developers as the ceiling and normies as the floor, AI raises the floor higher by giving normies more capability, which makes the ceiling seem less impressive. But eventually the floor will surpass the ceiling, and then it'll be a matter of who can operate AI better/how good AI is.

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