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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

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Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#501

Post by throwanem »

nidnogg wrote: post #443
sd9 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the models and harnesses had a step change in capability around December, as somebody who’s been using them daily since early/mid 2025. It’s gone from me doing the majority of the programming, to me doing essentially none, since December. And that change felt quite sudden. The more recent shift after December is mostly explained by people at my company catching up with the events that happened in December…

I can relate to the feeling - this timing tracks for when most, if not all of my friends, all my co-workers (even the few who were resisting to adopt any AI toloing) flocked to just "Claude Code". Similar to how the masses gobbled VS Code a while back. Company started doling out Claude Code configs, everything is now cli/agentic AI harnessed and news about "90% of this company's code is now AI Generated" pop up every…

[dead]

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#502

Post by senordevnyc »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #411
senordevnyc wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article is paywalled, so perhaps you could just summarize his proposal?

> At the type of place where I taught until recently—a small, selective, private liberal-arts college—administrators can go quite far in limiting AI use, if they have the guts to do so. They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologi…

This isn't aimed at you, but this strikes me as exactly the kind of divorced-from-the-real-world thinking that academia is pilloried for all the time. This kind of proposal will never happen, I'd basically stake my life on it. Students (and their parents) have zero interest in this kind of anti-technology nonsense, so it's DOA. College isn't compulsory, and those students aren't some captive audience you can do whatever you want with, they're customers. And I frankly doubt that most professors or administrators want this either.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#503

Post by carlosjobim »

mattmanser wrote: post #492
carlosjobim wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can verify by running the code and see if it works.

Seriously? The article is about scientists learning to do science, not programming. I know we're not supposed to say RTFA, but your comment really takes the cake.

My mistake then. There's so much AI discussion here on HN from the developer perspective, that it's easy to get lost.

But why wouldn't my comment apply to all science? You have to make experiments and gather evidence, otherwise it's not science, it's just academia.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#504

Post by antonvs »

cmiles74 wrote: post #345
leereeves wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And so the paradox is, the LLMs are only useful† if you're Schwartz Was the LLM even useful for Schwartz, if it produced false output?

Maybe it saved them some time? So far the studies seem to lean toward probably the LLM didn't save them any time.

So far the studies point to study authors having a profound misunderstanding of what’s happening. Which isn’t surprising, since any study right now requires speculating about what’s important and impactful in a new and fast-moving field. Very few people are good at that, and most of the ones who are are not running studies.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#506

Post by bootsmann »

NiloCK wrote: post #162
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. The first 10 rungs of the ladder will be removed, but we still expect you to be able to get to the roof. The AI won't get you there and you won't have the knowledge you'd normally gain on those first 10 rungs to help you move past #10.

People would have said the same about graphing calculators or calculators before that. Socrates said the same thing about the written word. The determining factor is always "did I come up with this tool". Somehow, subsequent generations always manage to find their own competencies (which, to be fair, may be different). This isn't guaranteed to play out, but it should be the default expectation until we actually see g…

We notably teach people how to do arithmetics by hand before we hand them calculators.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#507

Post by bandofthehawk »

foobarchu wrote: post #469
vinceguidry wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there for that war. Kids weren't listening and didn't care back then either. If anything, Gen Z is the most politically-aware generation we've had since we started keeping track. Trump doesn't have to justify a single thing because the billionaires behind him know that every last bet is off and their very livelihoods are at risk, and his entire base of support up and down the chain are either complicit or foole…

I was there as well, the bush presidency lasted my entire middle and high school career, and I got the chance to vote for Obama in my senior year. I remember things very differently. Everyone cared about the Iraq war, gay-straight alliance was one of the most up and coming clubs, and political music was everywhere. Green Day had their big second wave with American Idiot, System Of A Down was on top of the world, Rock…

In 2002, there war in Iraq had large popular support, something like 70-80 percent. It took a few years for people to realize it was based on a lie and was a massive mistake. It was also morally reprehensible, but that part is not often discussed in mainstream US politics.

If you compare that to the current Iran war, a majority of the population is already against it, however the current administration doesn't seem to care much about public opinion, and there doesn't seem to be much that the public can do about it.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#508

Post by shimman »

throwanem wrote: post #477
shimman wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be weary of false prophets in these comments, none of these tools are anywhere close to production quality and now that major companies are suffering enough outages to negatively impact them (Amazon, MSFT, Cloudflare). Much better take is to start establishing yourself as a slop wrangler. Lot of stupid money to be made from fools wanting to purify their slop.

If you don't consider it "production quality" and I don't consider it "production quality" and the paying client does consider it "production quality," which two of these people are wrong?

Why does that matter and not you know... the actual outcomes and damages that are effecting real lives here?

Are you seriously arguing that the only thing that determines right from wrong is someone buying the thing? I mean that would explain most of the sickness that is neoliberalism currently infecting the US.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#509

Post by CPLX »

foobarchu wrote: post #469
vinceguidry wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there for that war. Kids weren't listening and didn't care back then either. If anything, Gen Z is the most politically-aware generation we've had since we started keeping track. Trump doesn't have to justify a single thing because the billionaires behind him know that every last bet is off and their very livelihoods are at risk, and his entire base of support up and down the chain are either complicit or foole…

I was there as well, the bush presidency lasted my entire middle and high school career, and I got the chance to vote for Obama in my senior year. I remember things very differently. Everyone cared about the Iraq war, gay-straight alliance was one of the most up and coming clubs, and political music was everywhere. Green Day had their big second wave with American Idiot, System Of A Down was on top of the world, Rock…

Yeah I was there too and I don’t know what this guy is talking about. Gen X was highly politically active. This was the era of violent in the street anti-globalization clashes like the WTO protests.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#510

Post by TacticalCoder »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #227

> Schwartz's experiment is the most revealing, and not for the reason he thinks. What he demonstrated is that Claude can, with detailed supervision, produce a technically rigorous physics paper. What he actually demonstrated, if you read carefully, is that the supervision is the physics. Claude produced a complete first draft in three days. It looked professional. The equations seemed right. The plots matched expecta…

> And so the paradox is, the LLMs are only useful† if you're Schwartz, and you can't become Schwartz by using LLMs.

It's exactly the same for coding.

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