Using AI is part of the job now. Whether you like it or not, it behooves you as a professional to become proficient with anything that enhances your productivity, including LLMs.
Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
651–660 of 1001 posts
Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
#652I 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…
AI is a house painter, wall to wall, with missed spots and drips. Good coders are artists. That said, artists have been known to use assistants on backgrounds. Perhaps the end case is a similar coder/AI collaborative effort?
Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
#653AI doesn't do anything fundamentally new; you search for information the same way you used to through Google. The difference is that when you Googled, you understand that responsibility for the end result lies with you. Now, "users" shift responsibility to the "machine," even though they're essentially writing the program's configuration in their own language. Once you take responsibility for what your LLM writes, you'll no longer be so eager to pursue mythical "productivity."
Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…
It needs to be said that your opinion on this is well understood by the community, respected, but also far from impartial. You have a clear vested interest in the success of _these_ tools. There's a learning curve to any toolset, and it may be that using coding agents effectively is more than a few weeks of upskilling. It may be, and likely will be, that people make their whole careers about being experts on this top…
How does he have a vested interest in the success of these tools? He doesn't work for an AI company. Why must he have some shady ulterior motive rather than just honestly believing the thing they are stated? Yes, he blogs a lot about AI, but don't you have the cart profoundly before the horse if you are asserting that's a "vested interest"? He was free to blog about whatever he wants. Why would he fervently start blogging about AI if he didn't earnestly believe it was an interesting topic to blog about?
> But it's still a statistical text prediction model
This is reductive to the point of absurdity. What other statistical text prediction model can make tool calls to CLI apps and web searches? It's like saying "a computer is nothing special -- it's just a bunch of wires stuck together"
Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of rewriting yourself have you tried telling the agent what it did wrong and do the rewrite with it? Then at the end of the session ask it to extract a set of rules that would have helped to get it right the first time. Save that in AGENTS.md. If you and your team do this a few times it can lead to only having to rewrite 5% of the code instead of 70%.
> Instead of rewriting yourself have you tried telling the agent what it did wrong and do the rewrite with it? I have, it becomes a race to the bottom.
Race to the bottom? Tell me more
Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
#656Efficient markets route around bottlenecks. Technological revolutions accelerate the speed at which that re-routing happens.
In software, we, the developers, have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity.
Here's an excellent Casey Handmer quote from a recent Dwarkesh episode:
> One way to think about the industrial revolutions is [...] what you're doing is you're finding some way of bypassing a constraint or bypassing a bottleneck. The bottleneck prior to what we call the Industrial Revolution was metabolism. How much oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for their peasant overlord or whatever? Nowadays we would giggle to think that the amount of food we produce is meaningful in the context of the economic power of a particular country. Because 99% of the energy that we consume routes around our guts, through the gas tanks of our cars and through our aircraft and in our grids and stuff like that.
> Right now, the AI revolution is about routing around cognitive constraints, that in some ways writing, the printing press, computers, the Internet have already allowed us to do to some extent. A credit card is a good example of something that routes around a cognitive constraint of building a network of trust. It's a centralized trust.
It's a great episode, I recommend it: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/casey-handmer
Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest frustration with LLMs for me is people telling me I'm not promoting it in a good way. Just think about any product where they are selling a half baked product, and repeatedly telling the user you are not using it properly.
But that's not how most products work. If you buy a table saw and can't figure out how to cut a straight line in a piece of wood with it - or keep cutting your fingers off - but didn't take any time at all to learn how to use it, that's on you. Likewise a car, you have to take lessons and a test before you can use those! Why should LLMs be any different?
A table saw does not advertise to be a panacea which will make everyone obsolete.
Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the subpar code, would the code work, albeit suboptimally? I think part of the problem a lot of senior devs are having is that they see what they do as an artisanal craft. The rest of the world just sees the code as a means to an end. I don't care how elegantly my toaster was crafted as long as it toasts the bread and doesn't break.
> I don't care how elegantly my toaster was crafted as long as it toasts the bread and doesn't break. A consumer or junior engineer cares whether the toaster toasts the bread and doesn’t break. Someone who cares about their craft also cares about: - If I turn the toaster on and leave, can it burn my house down, or just set off the smoke alarm? - Can it toast more than sliced uniform-thickness bread? - What if I stick…
My contention is:
> A consumer
is all that ultimately matters.
All those things you’re talking about may or may not matter some day, after years and a class action lawsuit that may or may not materialize or have any material impact on the bottom line of the company producing the toaster, by which time millions of units of subpar toasters that don’t work sideways will have sold.
The world is filled with junk. The majority of what fills the world is junk. There are parts of our society where junk isn’t well tolerated (jet engines, mri machines) but the majority of the world tolerates quite a lot of sloppiness in design and execution and the companies producing those products are happily profitable.
Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest frustration with LLMs for me is people telling me I'm not promoting it in a good way. Just think about any product where they are selling a half baked product, and repeatedly telling the user you are not using it properly.
If my mum buys a copy of Visual Studio, is it their fault if she cannot code?
its more like I buy Visual studio, it will crash at random time, and I get a response like you don't know how to use the ide.
Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
#660What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.
You don't want a bit of influence over the design?