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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#71

Post by AnotherGoodName »

This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’.

It was obviously huge. You could see it taking off. Yet a lot of people proudly displayed ignorance and backed each other up on it to the point that discussion around the topic was often drowned out by the opposition to change. Now today it takes minutes of playing with ai coding agents to realise that it’s extremely useful and going to be similarly huge.

Resistance to change is not a virtue!

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#72

Post by sublinear »

pie_flavor wrote: post #46

I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the l…

I have to completely agree with this and nobody says this enough.

This tradeoff of unfamiliarity with the codebase is a very well understood problem for decades. Maintaining a project is 99% of the time spent on a successful project.

In my opinion though, having AI write the initial code is just putting most people in a worse situation with almost no upside long term.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#74

Post by derefr »

pie_flavor wrote: post #46

I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the l…

So do the thing that a student copying their notes from the board does: look at the PR on one monitor, and write your own equivalent PR by typing the changes line-for-line into your IDE on the other. Pretend copy/paste doesn’t exist. Pretend it’s code you saw in a YouTube video of a PowerPoint presentation, or a BASIC listing from one of those 1980s computing magazines.

(And, if you like, do as TFA says and rephrase the code into your own house style as you’re transcribing it. It’ll be better for it, and you’ll be mentally parsing the code you’re copying at a deeper level.)

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#75

Post by FridgeSeal »

TrackerFF wrote: post #44

My take is: It is OK to don't buy into the hype. There's a lot of hype, no denying that. But if you're actively avoiding everything related to it, you might find yourself in a position where you're suddenly being left in the dust. Maybe not now, not next month, not next year, but who some time in the future. The models really are improving fast! I've talked with devs that (claim they) haven't touched a model since Ch…

The counter-argument as I see it is that going from “not using LLM tooling” to “just as competent with LLM tooling” is…maybe a day? And lessening and the tools evolve.

It’s not like “becoming skilled and knowledgeable in a language” which took time. Even if you’re theoretically being left behind, you can be back at the front of the pack again in a day or so. So why bother investing more than a little bit every few months?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#76

Post by tptacek »

fooqux wrote: post #65

> "For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields." You've already lost me, because I view programming as an art form. I would no more use AI to generate code than I would use it to paint my canvas. I think the rest of the article is informative. It made me want to try some things. But it's written from the perspective of a CEO thinking all his developers are just sal…

Woodworking is also an art form. But most people just need furniture, fixtures, and structures. Nobody would take seriously the idea that new construction all be done with sashimono joinery in order to preserve the art form, but somehow we're meant to take seriously the idea of hand-dovetailed CRUD apps.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#77

Post by mjburgess »

Can we get a video of a workday conducted by these people?

Unless there's a significant sense of what people are working on, and how LLMs are helping -- there's no point engaging -- there's no detail here.

Sure, if your job is to turn out tweaks to a wordpress theme, presumably that's now 10x faster. If its to work on a new in-house electric motor in C for some machine, presumably that's almost entirely unaffected.

No doubt junior web programmers working on a task backlog, specifically designed for being easy for juniors, are loving LLMs.

I use LLMs all the time, but each non-trivial programming project that has to move out of draft-stage needs rewriting. In several cases, to such a degree that the LLM was a net impediment.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#78

Post by tabletcorry »

pie_flavor wrote: post #46

I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the l…

This level of knowledge is nearly impossible to maintain as the codebase grows though, beyond one or two people at a typical company. And tools need to exist for the new hire as well as the long-standing employee.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#79

Post by IshKebab »

kakadu wrote: post #56

A hammer hammers. It hammers 100% of the time, with no failure. It requires the same amount of labour from my part but it delivers the same outcome every time. That is what tools do, they act as an extension and allow you to do things not easily done otherwise. If the hammer sometimes hammers, sometimes squeaks and sometimes screws then it requires extra labour from my part just to make it do what purpose specific to…

This is the kind of non-serious argument he's talking about. There are plenty of tools that require supervision to get good results. That doesn't make them useless.

My 3D printer sometimes prints and sometimes makes spaghetti. Still useful.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#80

Post by skissane »

pie_flavor wrote: post #46

I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the l…

> When stuff slips through code review, even if it is a mistake you might have made, you would remember that you made it.

I don’t know. Ever had the experience of looking at 5+ year old code and thinking “what idiot wrote this crap” and then checking “git blame” and realising “oh, I’m the idiot… why the hell did I do this? struggling to remember” - given enough time, humans start to forget why they did things a certain way… and sometimes the answer is simply “I didn’t know any better at the time, I do now”

> You don't get that with AI. The codebase is always new.

It depends on how you use AI… e.g. I will often ask an AI to write me code to do X because it gets me over the “hump” of getting started… but now this code is in front of me on the screen, I think “I don’t like how this code is written, I’m going to refactor it…” and by the time I’m done it is more my code than the AI’s

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