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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

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Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#601

Post by totallykvothe »

aperrien wrote: post #573
totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

Have you tried asking one of your peers who claims to get good results to run a test with you? Where you both try to create the same project, and share your results?

I and one or two others are _the_ AI use experts at my org, and I was by far the earliest adopter here. So I don't really have anyone else with significantly different experiences than me that I could ask.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#603

Post by smt88 »

daxfohl wrote: post #599
totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

Agreed, but: There's been a notable jump over the course of the last few months, to where I'd say it's inevitable. For a while I was holding out for them to hit a ceiling where we'd look back and laugh at the idea they'd ever replace human coders. Now, it seems much more like a matter of time. Ultimately I think over the next two years or so, Anthropic and OpenAI will evolve their product from "coding assistant" to "…

There's no chance LLMs will be an engineering team replacement. The hallucination problem is unsolvable and catastrophic in some edge cases. Any company using such a team would be uninsurable and sued into oblivion.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#604

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

> non-trivial coding tasks

I’ve come back to the idea LLMs are super search engines. If you ask it a narrow, specific question, with one answer, you may well get the answer. For the “non-trivial” questions, there always will be multiple answers, and you’ll get from the LLM all of these depending on the precise words you use to prompt it. You won’t get the best answer, and in a complex scenario requiring highly recursive cross-checks— some answers you get won’t be functional.

It’s not readily apparent at first blush the LLM is doing this, giving all the answers. And, for a novice who doesn’t know the options, or an expert who can scan a list of options quickly and steer the LLM, it’s incredibly useful. But giving all the answers without strong guidance on non-trivial architectural points— entropy. LLMs churning independently quickly devolve into entropy.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#605

Post by nuky »

jacquesm wrote: post #450
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

> For me, I initially got into programming because I wanted to ruin other people's websites, then I figured out I needed to know how to build websites first, then I found it more fun to create and share what I've done with others, and they tell me what they think of it. Talk about a good thing coming from bad intentions! Congratulations on shaking that demon.

[dead]

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#606

Post by throw234234234 »

simianwords wrote: post #398
threethirtytwo wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is not about whether programming is fun, elegant, creative, or personally fulfilling. It is about business value. Programming exists, at scale, because it produces economic value. That value translates into revenue, leverage, competitive advantage, and ultimately money. For decades, a large portion of that value could only be produced by human labor. Now, increasingly, it cannot be assumed that this will…

I wrote something similar earlier: This is because they have entrenched themselves in a comfortable position that they don’t want to give up. Most won’t admit this to be the actual reason. Think about it: you are a normal hands on self thought software developer. You grew up tinkering with Linux and a bit of hardware. You realise there’s good money to be made in a software career. You do it for 20-30 years; mostly th…

> disrupting others careers is why you have a career in the first place.

Not every software project has or did this. In fact I would argue many new businesses exist that didn't exist before software and computing and people are doing things they didn't beforehand. Especially around discovery of information - solving the "I don't know what I don't know" problem also expanded markets and demand to people who now know.

Whereas the current AI wave seems to be more about efficiency/industrialization/democratizing of existing use cases rather than novel things to date. I would be more excited if I saw more "product orientated" AI use cases other than destroying jobs. While I'm hoping that the "vibing" of software will mean that SWE's are needed to productionise it I'm not confident that AI won't be able to do that soon too nor any other knowledge profession.

I wouldn't be surprised with AI if there's mass unemployment but we still don't cure cancer for example in 20 years.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#607

Post by username223 »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #421
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.

This. To me, using an LLMs is more like having a team of ghostwriters writing your novel. Sure, you "built" your novel but it feels entirely different to writing it yourself.

And if you write novels mostly because you enjoy watching them sell, as opposed to sharing ideas with people, you don't care.

To scientists, the purpose of science is to learn more about the world; to certain others, it's about making a number of dollars go up. Mathematicians famously enjoy creating math, and would have no use for a "create more math" button. Musicians enjoy creating music, which is very different from listening to it.

We're all drawn to different vocations, and it's perverse to accept that "maximize shareholder value" is the highest.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#608

Post by jonas21 »

anileated wrote: post #561
tokioyoyo wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From purely business and career perspective, being anti-AI will be a self-own unless you work for niche companies that have the anti-AI stance. Yes, they exist. But if a company is building, supporting, or consulting any product, where timing matters and there’s competition (which is super majority), it’ll be in their best interest to nudge their employees to speed up via AI. I do think at least being proficient righ…

> From purely business and career perspective, being anti-AI will be a self-own From purely business and career perspective being anti-blockchain/NFT/online gambling/adtech/fascism (at least for now in US)/etc. is a self-own, too. I'm sure everybody making a choice against that knows it. Thankfully purely business and career perspectives don't dictate everything.

There are plenty of non-blockchain, non-NFT, non-online gambling, non-adtech, non-facist software jobs. In fact, the vast majority of software jobs are. You can refuse to work with all of these things and not even notice a meaningful difference in career opportunities.

If you refuse to work with AI, however, you're already significantly limiting your opportunities. And at the pace things are going, you're probably going to find yourself constrained to a small niche sooner rather than later.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#609

Post by AlexandrB »

mvkel wrote: post #580
totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

> Other people are just less picky than I am I think this is part of it. When coding style has been established among a team, or within an app, there are a lot of extra hoops to jump through, just to get it to look The Right Way, with no detectable benefit to the user. If you put those choices aside and simply say: does it accomplish the goal per the spec (and is safe and scalable[0]), then you can get away with a lo…

What's that old adage? "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."[1]

[1] https://cs61a.org/articles/composition/

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#610

Post by willtemperley »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

I get the best results when using code to demonstrate my intention to an LLM, rather than try and explain it. It doesn't have to be working code.

I think that mentally estimating the problem space helps. These things are probabilistic models, and if there are a million solutions the chance of getting the right one is clearly unlikely.

Feeding back results from tests really helps too.

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