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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#601

Post by chunkmonke99 »

alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

I don't understand this line of reasoning. Like genuinely. So with AI coding (let's just limit ourselves to coding); are you saying that the Agent is going to prompt itself? Like it exists only to read your mind and create precisely the code you wanted or didn't even know you wanted? Or will you have to explain and verify that it did what you asked? At some point we run into magical thinking and absurdities.

Programming or math are not like Chess or Go. There is no endgame to win. And the human/input/judgement/whatever and where that begins or ends isn't a technical issue but a political one.

So my question: are you expecting that at some time N that models are so good that they can read your mind? Or are you saying that you will just be able to "speak" into existence any type of software? And how are you going to specify this if you can't already point to something similar?

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#602

Post by jychang »

wamiks wrote: post #581
jychang wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lame typical anti-intellectual argument. You might as well as say all of physics is worthless because nobody truly understands gravity. Notice I didn't use vague terms like "think" or "reason" and instead used specific terms like "feature/circuit internal representation". You're trying to make a false equivalence of "the hard problem of gravity/reasoning/etc is not solved ... so therefore nobody understands…

Dude, seriously, the parent is typical of a mature phd student and up. It's spot on. Enthusiasm is great, but not without humility.

That's fake epistemic humility, akin to a religious nutcase proclaiming "evolution is just a theory". In fact, he's using the exact same arguments.

I'm not impressed. I've seen this before, from "biology is actually fake" or "the covid vaccine is fake, the FDA is using an 'emergency authorization' which means it's made up", or plenty of other examples. That's not a substantive objection, that's a thought-terminating cliche which is designed to dismiss any merits in the moment.

Imagine if someone in 1945 said "nuclear bombs cannot be real, even if the USA just dropped a nuke on Hiroshima, because it's just theory and it hasn't been peer reviewed yet. The Manhattan project is burning a lot of money". That would be hilarious. And yet if someone identifies an actual neuron or feature in a ML model that activates upon recognition of a software bug- WHICH IS LITERALLY WHAT YOU WOULD EXPECT IF A MODEL HAS AN INTERNAL REPRESENTATION OF SUCH A THING- it gets dismissed. If such an obvious signal is dismissed, what is even the end goal?

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#603

Post by ehnto »

SCdF wrote: post #276
ehnto wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs. LLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing, it's not surprising there is crossover.

If it indicates, culturally in the current zeitgeist, that an AI wrote it, it becomes a bad structure.

I'd prefer we look to other trust metrics, rather than change for the sake of other's interpretation of who we are.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#604

Post by zombot »

elevatortrim wrote: post #325
zombot wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would rather a single human (for now) architect with good taste and an army of agents than a team of humans. A human might have taste, but AI certainly doesn't.

I’d say AI has better taste than an average human but definitely not the taste you would see in competent people around you.

> I’d say AI has better taste than an average human

This is wrong by definition because AI outputs the average of its training data.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#605

Post by MrOrelliOReilly »

LoganDark wrote: post #548
emp17344 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just invent a nonsense fallacy to use as a bludgeon here? “Stochastic parrot fallacy” does not exist, and there actually quite a bit of evidence supporting the stochastic parrot hypothesis.

I imagine "stochastic parrot fallacy" could be their term for using the hypothesis to dismiss LLMs even where they can be useful; i.e., dismissing them for their weaknesses alone and ignoring their strengths. (Of course, we have no way to know for sure without their input.)

Correct, I am stating that the stochastic parrot hypothesis is a fallacy.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#606

Post by zombot »

dsego wrote: post #382
zombot wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would rather a single human (for now) architect with good taste and an army of agents than a team of humans. A human might have taste, but AI certainly doesn't.

It has average taste based on the code it was trained on. For example, every time I attempted to polish the UX it wanted to add a toast system, I abhor toasts as a UX pattern. But it also provided elegant backend designs I hadn't even considered.

> It has average taste based on the code it was trained on.

Agreed. Just that I view "average taste" as no taste at best.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#607

Post by rob »

ehnto wrote: post #603
SCdF wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it indicates, culturally in the current zeitgeist, that an AI wrote it, it becomes a bad structure.

I'd prefer we look to other trust metrics, rather than change for the sake of other's interpretation of who we are.

Other metrics:

Comment 1: 2026-02-18T23:45:12 1771458312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067991

Comment 2: 2026-02-18T23:45:32 1771458332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067994

20 seconds between comments.

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or:

Comment 1: 2026-02-18T20:06:49 1771445209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065649

Comment 2: 2026-02-18T20:07:12 1771445232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065653

23 seconds between comments.

---

It's a bot.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#608

Post by nicowesterdale »

cesarvarela wrote: post #9
m_ke wrote: post #4

It's the new underpaid employee that you're training to replace you. People need to understand that we have the technology to train models to do anything that you can do on a computer, only thing that's missing is the data. If you can record a human doing anything on a computer, we'll soon have a way to automate it

LLMs have a large quantity of chess data and still can't play for shit.

I wrote a, I hope, amusing breakdown of the structural reasons why off-the-shelf Large Language Models physically cannot "see" a chess board, and continue to make illegal moves, and teleport pieces as seen in Gotham Chess' latest videos.

https://www.nicowesterdale.com/blog/why-llms-cant-play-chess

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