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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#581

Post by mediaman »

gjuggler wrote: post #406

I was surprised not to see any discussion on whether the author used AI to help write this post. As many people say, writing is thinking. I started getting that "I'm reading another AI-written blog post" feeling around 1/3 of the way through, but I don't consider myself super calibrated on this. Pangram seems pretty confident it's AI ( https://www.pangram.com/history/e9f6eb77-86f9-46d0-a6c1-e57c... ). But I know thes…

This article looks entirely written by AI to me. It's difficult to buy that it served as a mere light editing tool.

It hit me in the very second sentence:

"The danger is not that A.I. will make people lazy in some vague moral sense. It is that it makes it easy to simulate competence without building competence."

Ironically to the article, using AI so heavily in writing makes us worse writers. There's something in polishing words by hand, over many essays over years, that makes us good writers.

I see it in AI-generated UI, as well. There's some lack of theory of mind the AI has about its users. It seems fine for functional stuff -- I wish a lot of crummy local state government websites were done in AI, because AI seems to still have better theory of mind than lowest-cost bidders -- but it still leaves an "I didn't care enough to polish this myself" feel to it.

In that way AI UI feels very similar to AI writing.

I think the author still has good ideas here, but the problem with having AI write out your good ideas is that it generates the smell of thoughtless AI slop so strongly that even if your thoughts are good, the odor completely masks it.

I suspect people will start learning to not have AI assist too much with their writing, because it will actively hurt the interpretation of their ideas, no matter how good their ideas are. Better to be a bit rough around the edges but with good ideas than slop, because readers will make their judgment early.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#582

Post by abustamam »

netcan wrote: post #318
nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

Myopic is inevitable, to some extent. It's very hard to project this stuff. Socrates wrote about what was being lost as philosophy was becoming written rather than oral...and he was right. We can't even understand what was lost. Many methods of learning and thinking became entirely lost. You could say they were redundant, and they were. But... writing largely replaced oral traditions. It didn't just augment them. He…

I think if manual coding becomes "outdated" then there will just be no demand for junior engineers to manually code. People will probably still learn to code manually, just as there are folks who will still build their own furniture. There may just not be a business demand for it.

What that means 20-30 years from now when the seniors of today retire if there are no juniors right now is yet to be seen. People say that AI will probably have advanced far enough that it won't be a problem. But let's say somehow AI stagnantes, then I would guess that AI-generated code that is too difficult to debug will be treated as legacy and there'll be demand for manual coding again.

Companies that aren't able to afford the rewrite or maintenance will probably go out of business.

It's an interesting time we live in for sure.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#583

Post by bitwize »

This is one of those happy little lies we tell ourselves, you know, like Agile is to help us collaborate better. No, your company adopted Agile so that upper management has near-real-time feedback in how teams are doing, who are the top performers and who are the stragglers.

When it comes to AI, the entire value proposition is that it is a substitute for human thought. Your thought is now no longer as valuable, and it is also no longer the bottleneck. That's the reality.

"Oh it's just here to remove the drudgery and let us focus on what's really important." When it comes to many forms of knowledge work, including programming, the "drudgery" is the important bit. Doing the long, slow work of integrating systems is how you gain intimate knowledge of the shapes of those systems. "Oh, you just have to think at a higher level of abstraction now." Since "higher levels of abstraction" are all about removing details, in the end this means less information to be manipulated, hence less thinking that you are responsible for.

Make no mistake, we programmers are coal miners, and the world is going solar punk. Have a nice day.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#584

Post by ekeke »

pydry wrote: post #577
deadbabe wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster faster faster, everything faster except for fixing the climate, sheltering the poor, healing the sick, reducing inequality. Until we are planning to do these things with the same speed and enthusiasm as pushing out more crap for people to buy, the only thing we are moving faster toward is our own doom.

It's not the "faster" which makes investors and PMCs wet their pants with anticipation...it's the ability to swap reliance upon labor which requires a level of labor cooperation (which can be withdrawn) with reliance on raw materials. For raw materials all you need is a bigger gun, missile and/or aircraft carrier. Labor can go straight to hell and the economy wont freeze up. It's the same calculus which precipitated…

Well the irony of that is if labour disappears these vultures don’t live in peace. They end up fighting each other until the victor is left standing lol.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#586

Post by lukan »

lelanthran wrote: post #551
lukan wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it saves me overhead by not having to read all the necessary docs etc myself and just check the resulting code and not having to type all myself.

> Of course it saves me overhead by not having to read all the necessary docs etc myself and just check the resulting code and not having to type all myself. That link I posted upthread, the "developer" did not read the docs "because the LLM wrote the code" and hence did not realise that the token they had was a full access token, not a limited access token. You're now boasting that you also don't have to read the do…

It depends on the project. Anything high stake, I verify myself. But also with simple things it is still way faster having a agent dig through it, quote me relevant sections and me evaluating if it is sound, or not.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#587

Post by throw4847285 »

sayYayToLife wrote: post #562
throw4847285 wrote: post #507

This is what happens when the people building your society's advanced technology have no theory of mind. Too much science fiction, not enough human interaction. The Social Network is looking more and more prophetic. When your only ambition is success for its own sake, driven by insecurities you can never name, you're going to make things that don't actually serve other people, or only do as an unfortunate side effect…

Do you live in the US? Because there is a military reason for chasing success for success sake. The US doesnt really have a choice here. We live in a unipolar(or bipolar world) and the US must be number 1, or the international system breaks down and we can expect incredible amounts of war. (Its generally agreed that historically multipolar worlds are the worst to live in). If you don't live in the US and you are taki…

I guess I appreciate the explicit realpolitik of it all, but I'm not sure I buy your argument. The US is the world's current dominant global empire, and unlike other leftists, I don't believe this is inherently a bad thing. But I don't think it's necessarily a good thing either. It's just the reality.

I also think your whole unipolar vs. multipolar framework is ahistorical. It's always been more secure living within the cosmopolitan center of an empire, but there's never just been one empire.

I just think your view of history is too simplistic to be accurate or interesting. If/when the US declined as a global power, the results would be entirely unpredictable. They wouldn't adhere to the kind of formula you're describing.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#588

Post by bartread »

nunez wrote: post #303

> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…

Does AI remove all struggle?

I would credit my relative success (compared with many complaints I’ve read) at building software using AI as a helper to the fact that I’ve already solved the problem in my mind before I prompt the AI, and I tell it how I want the problem to be solved. Generally it’s possible to do that in English much more tersely than it is in code.

So what I’ve done is the hard (in the sense of problem difficulty) work and simply got the AI to do all the typing for me because I just can’t be arsed any more. The typing isn’t the hard part of software development: just the part that, historically, has taken up a massive chunk of my time in the domains I’ve worked it.

I’m not saying this works for everyone in every situation but, as far as I’m concerned, bring it on.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#589

Post by SkyBelow »

IceDane wrote: post #148
lsy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining knowledge of “what you are doing”. With AI coding either you need to carefully review outputs and you aren’t saving any cognitive capacity, or you aren’t looking at the outputs and don’t know what you’re…

It's staggering to me how many times I've heard this argument that LLMs are just the next level of abstraction. Some people are even comparing them to compilers.

As much as I use AI, even for coding, I really do not like the argument. They are too chaotic to be compilers. The descent from prompt to code has far too many branches, and even small requests begin to build up bad patterns.

There is some fun to consider when sufficiently advanced AI allows this in areas where we are okay with things going wrong, but that seems a very limited domain for fun and games and not for serious software that needs to be correct as possible.

I can see vibe coding building very simple systems, and it likely will get better with systems that are one off throw aways where edge cases don't matter because we have a one off need of turning input X into output Y, but when it comes to people using AI in systems where correctness matters, long term support must be provided, and ease of adding new functionality is a serious consideration, it seems we are as far from having prompt as code as we are from AGI.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#590

Post by keeda »

coldtea wrote: post #415
keeda wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* ... legally enforced ...* Other than that part (most countries in the world do not have regulations or licensing requirements for most engineering disciplines) I would agree. But I would also point out the set of software projects that meet that definition is much larger than those you listed. As mentioned, it's a matter of economics, so the rigor scales with the pain it can cause if something that goes wrong. Hen…

> most countries in the world do not have regulations or licensing requirements for most engineering disciplines Well, then in those countries those disciplines aren't treated as enginering. Any country worth its name and with a rule of law, would have regulations and licensing requirements for electricians, civic engineers, structural engineers, aviation engineers, chemical engineers, etc. I mean, they had building…

If you look at the number of countries that require licensing to practice, there are literally a handful. It doesn't make sense to dismiss the vast, vast majority of engineers in the world as "not really engineers."
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