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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#521

Post by drodgers »

> "LLMs can’t write Rust"

This really doesn't accord with my own experience. Using claude-code (esp. with opus 4) and codex (with o3) I've written lots of good Rust code. I've actually found Rust helps the AI-pair-programming experience because the agent gets such good, detailed feedback from the compiler that it can iterate very quickly and effectively.

Can it set up great architecture for a large, complex project from scratch? No, not yet. It can't do that in Ruby or Typescript either (though it might trick you by quickly getting something that kinda works in those languages). It think that will be a higher bar because of how Rust front-loads a lot of hard work, but I expect continuing improvement.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#522

Post by klabb3 »

agnishom wrote: post #508

I think the key premise here is that one can effectively and efficiently audit code that the LLM is producing. I doubt that. First, human attention and speed is very limited. Second, when I see something, I am already predisposed to assume that it is right (or at the very least, my subsequent inquiries are extremely narrow and anchored around the solution I have seen presented to me.)

Yeah. Reviewing code thoroughly is extremely time consuming. When you review code from a human, you can look for choices they made fairly quickly - say they used framework X and language feature Y. Most importantly, you assume that they’ve checked certain things to work. This way, code review can be fast but it still isn’t thorough on its own. Most of it is trust and bureaucracy (big companies do this also to prevent malicious employees from smuggling in backdoors etc).

Code from LLMs that looks right, clean and even clever poses as competence but are prone to hallucinations and business logic errors. In the short term, these changes will pass through due to their appearance but contain more issues than a human would have with the same code. In the medium term, we just lose that signal - the assumptions we can make about the authors state of mind and comprehension. It’s already incredibly hard to distinguish solid points from nonsense, when the nonsense is laundered by an LLM.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#523

Post by dyauspitr »

grafmax wrote: post #513

> Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades. We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own. If you really believe in the power of LLMs then it’s time to wake up. The writing is on the wall. Automation the workforce further into precarious jobs. The idea that tech workers can’t stop so-called “progress” is at best a dumb self-fulfilling…

If the tech is there dragging your feet is not going to buy you too much time.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#524

Post by Aeolun »

paradox242 wrote: post #392

I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere. He acknowledged that the tools need an expert to use properly, and as he illustrated, he refined his expertise over many years. He is of the first and last generation of experienced programmers who learned without LLM assistance. How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to indepe…

Feels like coding with and without autocomplete to me. At some point you are still going to need to understand what you are doing, even if your IDE gives you hints about what all the functions do.

Sure, it's a different level, but it's still more or less the same thing. I don't think you can expect to learn how to code by only ever using LLMs, just like you can't learn how to code by only ever using intellisense.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#525

Post by Aeolun »

cesarb wrote: post #312

This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…

It's not like the code is suddenly elsewhere right? If the LLM disappears I'll be annoyed, not helpless.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#526

Post by agnishom »

lolinder wrote: post #350

> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. This kind of guilt-by-association play migh…

It's not just "guilt-by-association". It is a much worse reactionary general argument. It can be applied to any kind of moral problem to preserve the status quo.

If this was a legitimate moral argument, we'd never make any social progress.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#528

Post by monkaiju »

bccdee wrote: post #467

To quote an excellent article from last week: > The AI has suggested a solution, but the added code is arguably useless or wrong. There is a huge decision space to consider, but the AI tool has picked one set of decisions, without any rationale for this decision. > [...] > Programming is about lots of decisions, large and small. Architecture decisions. Data validation decisions. Button color decisions. > Some decisio…

Adding this comment to my HN bookmarks! Well said

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#529

Post by bmink »

munificent wrote: post #244

"Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged." I would jump off a bridge before I…

I feel this so much.

I am always amazed how so many software engineers seem to dislike coding, which seems to be a major underlying theme in the AI-coding cheerleading.

Coding never feels tedious to me. Talking to a chatbot, now that’s tedious.

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