661–670 of 1001 posts
I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
So genuine question for AI Boosters, what should I be using?
I would like the 10x productivity gains we were promised :)
This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…
Maven central is gone and you have no proxy setup or your local cache is busted? Poof, you’re fucking gone, all your Springs, Daggers, Quarkuses and every third party crap that makes up your program is gone. Same applies to bazillion JS, Rust libraries.
"Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged." I would jump off a bridge before I…
For me switching the career, after spending more than 20 years in this as well... is very hard. I spent all my career outside of high-pay places like SV telling myself "I have all the time in the world, I don't need to grab most amount of money as soon as possible", so retiring is not an option.
So, switch to what? Any well-paid profession is going to be under pressure to be LLMized as much as possible.
I think the key premise here is that one can effectively and efficiently audit code that the LLM is producing. I doubt that. First, human attention and speed is very limited. Second, when I see something, I am already predisposed to assume that it is right (or at the very least, my subsequent inquiries are extremely narrow and anchored around the solution I have seen presented to me.)
You do a few iterations until code runs, review carefully but notice a bug. So you do another iteration and 40% of code changes. Now you need to review again but you need to understand how the changes fit in.
Repeat this a few times and it becomes very tiring.
Ultimately you can't trust them not to do stupid shit. Your tests fail and you tell it to stop that? Sure, we can just catch those exceptions and the tests pass, etc. You get pissed off an tell it to FIX the CODE so the tests pass and the cycle continues.
It's like working with a potentially gifted moron.
Tells you what you need to know about the AI culture.
The reaction to this article is interesting. I have found AI to be useful in software contexts that most people never exercise or expect based on their intuitions of what an LLM can do. For me, a highly productive but boring use of LLMs for code is that they excel at providing midwit “best practice” solutions to common problems. They are better documentation than the documentation and can do a lot of leg work e.g. Li…
Neither helps with the hardest and most time consuming problems faced by software engineers: solving problems that have never been (publicly) solved before, making hard decisions based on intuition about what will be necessary in the future, understanding the interactions between broad webs of dependency in large codebases, and working with proprietary domain knowledge.
I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
I really want to like AI assisted coding, but I guess i am just stuck as to what to do.
I have tried co-pilot, both 2 years ago, and recently. I have tried some other AI plugin on VScode (i thought that was cursor, but I don't see it in the extensions when i now search, so it was probably something else). If anything, I have found with these solutions that they are great for the first few tasks - generate these models, scaffold this, add oauth, etc - but after that they lack all consistency with the code they themselves generated (like if i add a new model, the output is wildly different to what it already created) and it takes more time to rewrite that output than to copy-paste and change whats already there.
@op - could you explain exactly what tooling you are using, maybe give an example of these async agents, etc? Would be most appreciated for us luddites who would love to be more productive.