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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

#611

Post by abustamam »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #593
abustamam wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if manual coding becomes "outdated" then there will just be no demand for junior engineers to manually code.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…

>> What that means 20-30 years from now when the seniors of today retire. I fear that many won't retire and instead completely leave the industry which is already happening. Its anecdotal, but when I first started as a junior dev, I was working with many intermediate devs who had a few years on me. I kept ties with a group of about two dozen devs. We all went through a lot of the same stuff. Last year I attended two…

Thanks for sharing. Maybe I'm just hanging out with a lot of young devs (we're in our 30s and senior leaning) but we're all cautiously optimistic about AI. That being said we also don't have FU money so we're kinda forced to deal with it.

Maybe CS is one of those industries that just ends up cannibalizing itself with its success.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#612

Post by eleumik »

spiresofagartha wrote: post #560
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of argument flies in the face of the fact that plenty of inherited rich people seem to lead very happy lives. Of course, they do find things to struggle with, but it's much more pleasant to struggle to score 72 at the golf course or to outbid a rival for a piece of contemporary art than to struggle for basic needs.

i agree, but i doubt anyone on hn is struggling for basic needs. so the struggle is almost always fun, and i think that goes for most white collar jobs. it's a fun struggle. getting to the office, doing some chores, and that's something AI is slowly killing off

But there is 150/200k year people using gpt for psychological help...

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#613

Post by eleumik »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #356
ookblah wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you learn by struggling and slogging through, even as a senior if your shit breaks it's on you to understand why. no LLM will shortcut that process for you (even asking LLMs why something is wrong requires you to actually understand it eventually, aka LEARNING). how that happens is up to the person. i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier…

I'd argue that the engineers of 20 years ago were better than the engineers of today because they were significantly more resource constrained and for example, would never use a 300mb javascript library for a profile page.

Also because once there were no people choosing sector for being a rich sector

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#615

Post by Izkata »

infecto wrote: post #440
Rebuff5007 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the engineers of 20 years ago were better than the engineers of today because they were significantly more resource constrained and for example, would never use a 300mb javascript library for a profile page.

I never buy these examples. Being a good engineer is more than purely resource optimization. I can think of many times over my career where resource optimization mattered but it’s not always a valuable undertaking.

You're missing a step in the middle: It's not resource optimization itself, it's working under the constraint that forces you to learn, get creative, and figure things out. The investigation, attempts, failures, detours - all of it teaches you more about the language and system you're working on. That's where the experience and improved skills comes from.

Referring to it just by the end result of "resource optimization" is overly simplistic, along the lines of "painting is no big deal, it's just a bunch of colors".

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#616

Post by Izkata »

fainpul wrote: post #331
chii wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how that's possible, but maybe I'm thinking too myopically. you are thinking too myopically. We have people who can still do maths well after the introduction of the calculator. We have people who can still spell after the introduction of spell check. The junior only need to train without using AI to gain the skills needed - that's called education. If they choose to rely on AI solely, and gimp their ow…

> We have people who can still do maths well after the introduction of the calculator. I assume by "do maths" you mean doing simple calculations, like adding a bunch of small numbers, in one's head. That's because in many situations it's more convenient to do so, than using a calculator. So the skill is preserved / practiced, because a calculator is too cumbersome to use. The skills of most people settle at the equil…

> > We have people who can still spell after the introduction of spell check.

> When using spell check to fix your document, you automatically learn to spell. Your skills improve by using the tool. A better analogy to AI would be an email client with a "Fix all and send"-button, where you never look at the output of the spell checker.

I was in highschool right as spellcheckers were becoming common, and the general consensus among us as students was that they made us worse for exactly that reason: We could just click the spellcheck button and "accept all", so most of us stopped learning the right way to spell words we had trouble with.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#617

Post by deadbabe »

iewj wrote: post #500
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.

Capitalism doesn’t care about that. Capitalism does eventually care about efficient allocation of money to produce capital though. Competition takes care of that; see china vs USA.

I don’t care about Capitalism.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#618

Post by infecto »

Izkata wrote: post #615
infecto wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never buy these examples. Being a good engineer is more than purely resource optimization. I can think of many times over my career where resource optimization mattered but it’s not always a valuable undertaking.

You're missing a step in the middle: It's not resource optimization itself, it's working under the constraint that forces you to learn, get creative, and figure things out. The investigation, attempts, failures, detours - all of it teaches you more about the language and system you're working on. That's where the experience and improved skills comes from. Referring to it just by the end result of "resource optimizati…

Why do folks like yourself jump to such dull and cheap comments.

> “Painting is no big deal, it’s just a bunch of colors”

I don’t think anyone was saying such a thing. The original post stated that engineers of yesterday were so much better because of resource use, nobody would install a large JavaScript library.

My counter is that I don’t believe these arguments ever truly hold up. The times change and engineers are just as good as they once were but in other attributes. Sure constraints are great in work and in the market but that was not the original thesis.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#619

Post by traderj0e »

spacechild1 wrote: post #379
nunez wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most CS programs have software dev in their curricula; I don't think it's wild to expect a CS student to code FizzBuzz.

Yes, but overall it's still a science degree and not an engineering degree.

Some of them aren't even BS, they're BA

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#620

Post by traderj0e »

whstl wrote: post #386
LtWorf wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers graduates I've met are usually much worse at programming than computer science graduates.

I'm gonna strongly +1 on this. Most of the "Software Engineering" curricula I've seen is catered towards "getting a job as a programmer", and is mostly focused on languages, frameworks and outdated processes. As an engineer in another discipline, there's no engineering there. I would rank like this: Computer Science > Self Taught > Software Engineering.

I remember people in college bragging that they're learning Angular. I was like, is this an engineering or physics thing, angular dynamics? No, it's a web framework with a ton of boilerplate that my LLM deals with now.
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