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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

#641

Post by at-fates-hands »

el_benhameen wrote: post #605
at-fates-hands wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Out of curiosity, where did those who couldn’t or didn’t want to retire go?

A few went into the trades. Welding, carpentry and one started their own painting company. Another started a landscaping company. One moved out into BFE Montana, got a 125 acre hobby ranch and trains horses for equestrian riders.

The one theme is not only just get out of tech, but trying to be completely removed from it.

I know one of the guys moved out to Western ND to start a farm growing wheat and sunflower - only to find out most of the work is either automated or relies heavy on technology like the majority of John Deere tractors and other tools they need. He said he's still happier than he was working in Silicon Valley. lol

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#642

Post by nkrisc »

darkwater wrote: post #530
nkrisc wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Intuition mostly “muscle-memory” earned from previous experience. 2. Don’t assume you’re the next Mozart. Someone is, statistically it’s not you.

Maybe it's just muscle-memory, but clearly there are brains which develop it 100x faster than others, depending on the topic. See the aforementioned Mozart and the music topic. I think there are a lot of young and not so young adults whose peak performance in instrument playing is equal to Mozart's at age 8.

There are always exceptional cases that won’t apply to just about everyone else. Mozart did more than just play instruments.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#643

Post by harambae »

zozbot234 wrote: post #449
erdaniels wrote: post #443

This feels AI written as the post goes on. Either way, I'd like for us to stop fetishizing how we can use AI to make us stronger, better, and more valuable engineers. It's exhausting and doesn't consider other ways to use it. I've only been using it lately for tasks that are a step or two above google. Having it write code for me has just been a slippery, unfulfilling slope.

Apparently the write code part works a bit better in languages like Rust and perhaps Swift where the compiler is unforgiving in rejecting outright nonsense and the AI can iterate on any errors it gets. Of course logically flawed code is always possible so this does not replace human review. But code in these languages is also a bit more compact and hopefully easier to understand for a human.

On the flip side, how much training data exists for coding in Swift? Especially when a new version seems to come out every 6 months.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#644

Post by spunker540 »

Leonard_of_Q wrote: post #104
saadn92 wrote: post #10

Hard disagree. I feel like I'm thinking a lot more now because I have so many parallel projects going on at the same time. AI has allowed me to really, truly create in a way that I've never done before. Yes, my coding skills probably aren't as sharp as they used to be, but my system design skills are at an all time high. Don't blame the tool.

The real question is whether you'd be able to continue doing your work if someone took your toys away and said "here's a nickel, kid, go buy yourself a real computer". I'm not referring to whether you'd be able to keep up your productivity since it is clear you couldn't just like a carpenter with a nail gun works faster than one with a hammer and a bucket'o'nails. Could you do the work, starting with the design follo…

I've hit my claude quota and felt a scary helplessness - but honestly, what if someone took away the toy that is the internet? or the toy that is npm or the toy that is AWS, or the toy that is C# to name a few other toys? plenty of developers can spend their entire careers focused on a single toy and be helpless without said toy.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#646

Post by famouswaffles »

sesm wrote: post #422
falcor84 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This requires logic, which LLMs lack. What? I've heard many takes on what AI lacks, but never this one. We had ChatGPT being able to solve an Erdős problem on its own yesterday [0]; how could you explain that if it cannot do logic? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903126

LLM didn't solve an Erdos problem, it generated a text that a human looked at, cleaned up, corrected and used as base for a solution. WRT logic, there a multiple occasions of LLMs answering incorrectly to trivial logic puzzles. Of course, with each occasion becoming public they are added to training data and overfitted on, but if you embed them in a more subtle way LLMs will fail again.

>LLM didn't solve an Erdos problem, it generated a text that a human looked at, cleaned up, corrected and used as base for a solution.

That's not at all what happened. You clearly are unable to actually understand the work it did so it would have been nice if you'd read the article and accounts of experts.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#647

Post by eleumik »

cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #522
eleumik wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the "our jobs are lost" attitude that is part of problem. Is not about that. Is more quality thinking, is daring, not fearing or hoping

Haven't seen to many people feeding their children with "daring".

But there are much more humble jobs that have not that luxury , for me is a bit like rich people complaining or scared to become poor

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#648

Post by Leonard_of_Q »

spunker540 wrote: post #644
Leonard_of_Q wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is whether you'd be able to continue doing your work if someone took your toys away and said "here's a nickel, kid, go buy yourself a real computer". I'm not referring to whether you'd be able to keep up your productivity since it is clear you couldn't just like a carpenter with a nail gun works faster than one with a hammer and a bucket'o'nails. Could you do the work, starting with the design follo…

I've hit my claude quota and felt a scary helplessness - but honestly, what if someone took away the toy that is the internet? or the toy that is npm or the toy that is AWS, or the toy that is C# to name a few other toys? plenty of developers can spend their entire careers focused on a single toy and be helpless without said toy.

Internet is handy but not essential, there are other ways to communicate. Back to the BBS, flash drives tied to pigeon legs, packet radio, mesh radio networking, etc. Taking away npm and its ilk would after a relatively short adaptation period probably lead to increased code quality, reliability and safety. Those who wanted to keep on importing silly dependencies could still do so, they'd just have to do it manually using whatever alternative communication method replaced the aforementioned once-upon-an-internet. Taking away AWS (etc.) would not be much of a problem, you'd have to go back to self-hosting in co-lo facilities or just 'in the basement of a few branch offices'. Take away C# and there's a whole alphabet of languages to replace it.

A better comparison would be to suggest taking away contractors and consultants. Suddenly that supermarket owner would have to write his own software or hire someone to do it while before he could just tell some external agent (...) what he wanted to do - and change the requirements weekly, and forget to mention that one important task without which the system is useless, complain to the developers about it being missing upon delivery, eventually grudgingly agree that he did not mention it, pay more, wait another month or 2 for an updated revised version, etc.

Design and coding skills are like perishable goods, use 'm or loose 'm. Once they've been lost they need to be reacquired at substantial cost in time and effort. They also need to be kept up to date or they'll loose relevancy in today's fast-paced world .

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#649

Post by cyclopeanutopia »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #638
cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you.

Not a compliment. I’m saying you’re speaking from an incredibly obscure perspective because you took what the other person said way to literally and pedantically.

Your intent here is irrelevant. ;) I know why my perspective is the correct one here and the fact that is "incredibly obscure" only supports my findings.

Majority of software sucks and majority of "software engineers" suck too. It's not a herd that one should ever want to be associated with.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#650

Post by cyclopeanutopia »

eleumik wrote: post #647
cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't seen to many people feeding their children with "daring".

But there are much more humble jobs that have not that luxury , for me is a bit like rich people complaining or scared to become poor

And they are also going to be affected, that's the biggest issue here.
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