Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's not empowering to hand off the details

davidnicholaswilliams.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 154 posts

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#51

Post by flogistonical »

sedawkgrep wrote: post #26
flogistonical wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pro argument is always quantity based, yet we never get to see the actual gain in quality. It's always "I'm doing SO MUCH more". Never "I'm doing better, with less effort." It's also what we see in the wild. There are so many things going on, so many news about "AI". Are things getting better in any meaningful way? Why are we getting so much from "AI" yet things keep getting worse? The only real, objective and ve…

> The pro argument is always quantity based, yet we never get to see the actual gain in quality. It's always "I'm doing SO MUCH more". Never "I'm doing better, with less effort." For me, it's "I can do this now; yesterday I could not." I am not a developer - I am a hack with some experience in a smattering of languages who hits very real obstacles very quickly. AI has allowed me to overcome those obstacles and build…

> For me, it's "I can do this now; yesterday I could not."

Yeah. More.

Better? How would you be able to tell? Can you show us better? Or only more?

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#52

Post by risaacs99 »

inigyou wrote: post #41
canthonytucci wrote: post #2

All details are not created equal. Some details are boring. My AI dream (that I’m living happily) is getting to focus on the details that I find interesting and ignoring all the boilerplate details that modern software requires.

Boilerplate details mean we've failed as an industry. Why haven't we already got the computer to automate all the boring bits without AI?

why can't AI be that solution?

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#53

Post by Xcelerate »

RGS1811 wrote: post #19

I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They'…

I’ve found AI works much better for constraint based problems than open ended “tasks”. I.e., if you specify all of the constraints of the problem, it works really well at achieving the objective. But the caveat is that you really do have to enumerate all of the constraints, because if you miss even one, it will use that as a loophole to shortcut the problem.

I think the solution is toward more formalization of the behavior we expect of various systems. E.g., produce a Lean proof that a program never behaves in a certain way, and if you can’t, iterate on the program until it satisfies such a proof. I’ve only tinkered around with this a little bit, but it seems promising on toy problems. Scaling up to tech-company level infra is going to take quite some time however I think.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#54

Post by nemomarx »

existencebox wrote: post #50
raincole wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat This... quite describes what the current AI feels like to me. So I really don't see a problem. If AI does too much for you, you should, uh, just prompt it to do less. Everyone talks about how their AI escapes sandbox and virtualization or delete their entire repos or something. Perhaps they're using a skynet I'm not aware of. Fr…

I expect there's a probabilistic factor to it, among other things. I use the almost the same addendum as you ("do not make, commit, or push any changes without my approval") and it broadly seems to work in my day-to-day dev. However, I also set up some agents that trigger on incoming requests from my dev teams to automate things that used to be rote/manual tasks. _That_ is where I see the issues, I suspect simply bec…

I do wonder if "without my approval" is looser than "discuss only, do not make edits"? I'm not sure how much that finegrain thing matters in prompts nowadays tho

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#55

Post by IsTom »

inigyou wrote: post #41
canthonytucci wrote: post #2

All details are not created equal. Some details are boring. My AI dream (that I’m living happily) is getting to focus on the details that I find interesting and ignoring all the boilerplate details that modern software requires.

Boilerplate details mean we've failed as an industry. Why haven't we already got the computer to automate all the boring bits without AI?

I feel that this is because people have been reinventing the wheel a lot in IT.

A lot of innovation that finally lands in programming languages has been done decades earlier, but now it's mostly awkwardly bolted on existing languages and frameworks.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#56

Post by kenforthewin »

lelanthran wrote: post #24
RGS1811 wrote: post #19

I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They'…

> Here's what I want: I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat. You aren't going to get that. Why would they even offer you that? You're going to be the meatbag peripheral to an AI.

Is this not literally just Claude Code? I don't understand the hysteria.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#57

Post by hangrybear666 »

To make a meathead analogy: you all know the people in the gym who apply the strategy of least resistance by taking shortcuts, skipping the hard parts or following some hype new training regimen while forgetting about the fundamentals. None of those people look like they lift and a lot of them remain in the same shape their entire life.

Same with AI. if you use it to skip all the hard parts you will not grow and mature and waste your potential.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#58

Post by lifeisstillgood »

It reminds me of “magic”. I say “expelliamus” and the wand flies out the other guys hand, not his hat, or wallet or the person behind’s sandwiches.

The details always matter. There is a (fairly) good book series where it turns out we are living in the matrix and someone finds a config file and effectively becomes a Wizard, and of course problems ensue with details (like flying by adjusting one’s position one feet up every second is just vibrating a lot)

I think ultimately AI is “do what I mean” and the only reason it looks like it’s working is because AI has read all the same books as us

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#59

Post by breezybottom »

exe34 wrote: post #27
breezybottom wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? Jobs aren't supposed to be fun. Lots of people depend on those boring details.

Some of us just wouldn't work if it wasn't fun. I'd let myself starve in the streets. (I have some experience with starvation from an eating disorder phase in my twenties, it's only unbearable if you have to work).

Easy to say when you're not at risk of starving.

Re: It's not empowering to hand off the details

#60

Post by anditherobot »

AI can generate what a company makes. Can it generate what a company is?

Producing artifacts: media, code, documents, the visible output has clearly gotten easier. But the other things, like knowing what's worth building in the first place and making the right judgment call, still seem to be left to the humans.

Post reply on HN