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AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

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Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#61

Post by logicprog »

aeonik wrote: post #52
logicprog wrote: post #9

This is a really good post. I'm a naturally controlling person, and I care about my craft a lot, so even in my recent dabbling (on a ~3000 LOC project) with agentic coding, one of the things I naturally did from the start was not just skim the diffs that the AI generated, but decide for myself what technologies should be used, describe the logic and architecture of the code I wanted in detail — to keep my mental mode…

Something I've noticed recently, is the new Opus 4.1 model seems to be incredibly good at getting out of these cul-de-sacs. I've always had a subscription to both ChatGPT and Claude, but Claude has recently almost one-shotted major toxic waste dumps from the previous models. I'll still use ChatGPT, it seems to be pretty good at algorithms, and bouncing ideas back and forth. but when things go off the rails Opus 4.1 b…

The thing is that since these models aren't actually doing reasoning and don't possess internal world models, you're always going to end up having to rely on your own understanding at some point, they can fill in more of the map with things they can do, but they can't ever make it complete. There will always be cul-de-sacs they end up stuck in, or messes they make, or mistakes they consistently keep making, or make stochastically. So, although that's rather neat, it doesn't really change my point, I don't think.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#62

Post by talideon »

TrackerFF wrote: post #59
talideon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those CNC-made cabinets are driven by software written by a human being. And I'm not talking about the CNC software itself: CNC machine operators _code_, even if it's not obvious to those who don't know somebody who works with CNC machines. They provide descriptions to the machine in the form of M-Code and G-Code. Your analogy doesn't work at all. (I know this because my previous landlady's husband was a CNC machine…

C'mon, this is not hard. What takes more time to master: Learning how to be a competent woodworker, so that you can build a piece of complex furniture from scratch, by hand. Or learning how to punch in instructions, following templates. The first can take years to master, the latter is done in mere months. You don't need to be a master woodworker to operate a CNC machine. With LLMs, we're now at the point where non-p…

Oh, I know exactly what you were trying to say, but it's in no way analogous. Your analogy is bogus.

And sure, you don't need a master woodworker to operate a CNC machine, but the that person is still highly skilled, it's just that the set of skills is different: they need to be able to program on some level, and they also need to have an understanding of the materials they're working with. Go away for a bit and so some research on what somebody who operates a CNC machine actually does.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#63

Post by gp90 »

Not even mastery. The other day I was trying to figure out how to pass an external label to Prometheus alert rules when unit testing the rules with "promtool test rules". Man, all the models gave all kinds of hallucinated answers, and I had to resort to reading the promtool code. In the end, mastery means we get apply our skills to solve new problems, yet in the current state AI can only interpolate already solved problems.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#64

Post by aeonik »

logicprog wrote: post #61
aeonik wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I've noticed recently, is the new Opus 4.1 model seems to be incredibly good at getting out of these cul-de-sacs. I've always had a subscription to both ChatGPT and Claude, but Claude has recently almost one-shotted major toxic waste dumps from the previous models. I'll still use ChatGPT, it seems to be pretty good at algorithms, and bouncing ideas back and forth. but when things go off the rails Opus 4.1 b…

The thing is that since these models aren't actually doing reasoning and don't possess internal world models, you're always going to end up having to rely on your own understanding at some point, they can fill in more of the map with things they can do, but they can't ever make it complete. There will always be cul-de-sacs they end up stuck in, or messes they make, or mistakes they consistently keep making, or make s…

I understand they don't have a logic engine built into them, ie no deduction, but I do think their inference is a weak form of reasoning, and I'm not sure about world model.

I suppose it depends on the definition of model.

I currently do consider the transformer weights to be a world model, but having a rigid one based on statistical distributions tend to create pretty wonky behavior at times.

That's why I do agree, relying on your own understanding the code is the best way.

It's amazing seeing these things produce some beautiful functions and designs, and then promptly forget that it exists, and then begin writing incompatible, half re-implemented non-idiomatic code.

If you're blind to what they are doing, it's just going to be layers upon layers of absolute dreck.

I don't think they will get out of cul-de-sacs without a true deductive engine, and a core of hard, testable facts to build on. (I'm honestly a bit surprised that this behavior didn't emerge early in training to be honest).

Though I think humans minds are the same way, in this respect, and fall for the same sort of traps. Though at least our neurons can rewire themselves on the fly.

I know a LOT of people who sparingly use their more advanced reasoning faculties, and instead primarily rely on vibes, or pre-trained biases. Even though I KNOW they are capable of better.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#65

Post by 4rt »

TrackerFF wrote: post #4

There used to be a time when you needed to be very skilled woodworker in order to make nice cabinets. There still are, but the number of machine / CNC made cabinets outnumber artisanal 100% hand-made cabinets by some incredible number. For every masterpiece made by a Japanese cabinet maker, imagine how many Ikea cabinets there are out there... And that's how I believe software engineering will end up. Hand crafted co…

i used to make 'leaflet websites' in the 90s, then shopping carts. it was an era where everybody wanted an online presence to make themselves seem legitimiate. i expect this is the normal progression of anybody born in the 80s who could do software dev.

it got to a point where people would say they needed a website and i'd say to them that a facebook page would meet their needs better or eventually that a shopify site met their needs better. my business obviously folded.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#66

Post by acoustics »

aogaili wrote: post #5

AI will hopefully humble so of the people I work with. The people who understand nothing about business, yet you can't talk to because they think gifted for being able to write instructions to a computer. The people spin out new frameworks every day and make a clusterf*ck of hyped and over-engineered frameworks. The people who took a few courses and went into programming for money.. I went into software because I enj…

Interestingly, a lot of the engineers I know are hoping for the exact opposite. They're hoping that AI will humble the business, management, product types.

The way they see it, AI can easily shit out a hundred product concepts, market research, slide decks, sales emails, reports, etc. No need to bring on MBAs or self-proclaimed visionaries or LinkedIn gurus.

I think both camps will be disappointed. The engineers will be disappointed that they'll still need vapid business/product people to keep them pointed at projects that will actually put food on the table. The business/product people will be disappointed that they'll still need sanctimonious engineers to make anything actually work.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#67

Post by MoreQARespect »

dimal wrote: post #33
gwynforthewyn wrote: post #2

I've been seeing teammates go from promising juniors to people who won't think, and I've tried hard here to say what I think they're going wrong. Like the great engineers who came before us and told us what they had learned, Rob Pike, Jez Humble, Martin Fowler or Bob Martin, it's up to those of us with a bit more experience to help the junior generation to get through this modern problem space and grow healthily. Fir…

There’s always been this draw in software engineering to find the silver bullet that will allow you to turn off your brain and just vibe your way to a solution. It might be OOP or TDD or pair programming or BDD or any number of other “best practices”. This is just an unusual situation where someone really can turn off their brain and get a solution that compiles and solves the problem, and so for the type of person t…

Most juniors I watch program very quickly get overwhelmed by complexity because they dont know how to follow strategies like BDD or TDD which isolate parcels of complexity (e.g. how the program is supposed to behave) from other parcels (e.g. how the code actually works).

Even worse though, they all seem to think that the solution to becoming overwhelmed with complexity isnt to parcel it up with strategies like BDD and TDD but to just get better at stuffing more complexity into their brains.

To be honest, I see a similar attitude with LLMs where loads of people think you just need to stuff more into the context window and tweak the prompt and then it'll be reliable.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#68

Post by cauliflower99 »

I wrote a blog post looking at a similar vein: https://www.dcaulfield.com/mastery-4-ai

If everyone uses AI, then the standard of mastery hasn't lowered - it's increased!

We're now caught in a dilemma: Do we play the short term game and use AI at the expense of our skills, or do we play the long term game and avoid AI where possible to build up expertise while risking being out-competed by everyone else who is using AI?

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#69

Post by aogaili »

recursive wrote: post #29
aogaili wrote: post #5

AI will hopefully humble so of the people I work with. The people who understand nothing about business, yet you can't talk to because they think gifted for being able to write instructions to a computer. The people spin out new frameworks every day and make a clusterf*ck of hyped and over-engineered frameworks. The people who took a few courses and went into programming for money.. I went into software because I enj…

I'm probably one of the people you're talking about. I'm feeling basically mostly fulfilled in life, and don't feel my life is being wasted. I didn't understand the thing about "AI made sure they knew as well", or maybe I'm not actually who you're describing. But I definitely get into language, syntax, frameworks, parsing, and blah blah blah. Plenty of people still play chess. Plenty of people still run. Machine perf…

Yes, for me, it is a form of narrow intelligence. Being unable to grasp the big picture.

I don't mean this offensively; it is what it is. If you are aware of who you are, then good, but if the issue is that a lot of those are not even aware of their strength or their limitations. Just like humans got humbled with chess, AI is humbling those coders.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#70

Post by aogaili »

acoustics wrote: post #66
aogaili wrote: post #5

AI will hopefully humble so of the people I work with. The people who understand nothing about business, yet you can't talk to because they think gifted for being able to write instructions to a computer. The people spin out new frameworks every day and make a clusterf*ck of hyped and over-engineered frameworks. The people who took a few courses and went into programming for money.. I went into software because I enj…

Interestingly, a lot of the engineers I know are hoping for the exact opposite. They're hoping that AI will humble the business, management, product types. The way they see it, AI can easily shit out a hundred product concepts, market research, slide decks, sales emails, reports, etc. No need to bring on MBAs or self-proclaimed visionaries or LinkedIn gurus. I think both camps will be disappointed. The engineers will…

Well, real business is more than slides and content, just like real product development is more than coding.

Yeah, those who were creating sophisticated business models on Excel, fancy slides, etc, yeah, they will also get humbled.

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