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Building better AI tools

hazelweakly.me

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Re: Building better AI tools

#71

Post by cmiles74 »

tptacek wrote: post #54

This is a confusing piece. A lot of it would make sense if Weakly was talking about a coding agent (a particular flavor of agent that worked more like how antirez just said he prefers coding with AI in 2025 --- more manual, more advisory, less do-ing). But she's not: she's talking about agents that assist in investigating and resolving operations incidents. The fulcrum of Weakly's argument is that agents should stay…

There's no AI tool today that will resolve incidents to anyone's satisfaction. People need to be in the loop not only to take responsibility but to make sure the right actions are performed.

Re: Building better AI tools

#72

Post by cmiles74 »

pplonski86 wrote: post #6
Edmond wrote: post #4

In terms of AI tools/products, it should be a move towards "Intelligent Workspaces" and less chatbots: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627910 Basically environments/platforms that gives all the knobs,levers,throttles to humans while being tightly integrated with AI capabilities. This is hard work that goes far beyond a VSCode fork.

It is much easier to implement chat bot that intelligent workspace, and AI many times doesn't need human interaction in the loop. I would love to see other interfaces other than chats for interacting with AI.

Also, much less expensive to implement. Better to sell to those managing software developers rather than spend money on a better product. This is a tried-and-true process in many fields.

Re: Building better AI tools

#73

Post by tptacek »

miltonlost wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #54

This is a confusing piece. A lot of it would make sense if Weakly was talking about a coding agent (a particular flavor of agent that worked more like how antirez just said he prefers coding with AI in 2025 --- more manual, more advisory, less do-ing). But she's not: she's talking about agents that assist in investigating and resolving operations incidents. The fulcrum of Weakly's argument is that agents should stay…

It's not a confusing piece if you don't skip/ignore the first part. You're using her one example and removing the portion about how human beings learn and how AI is actively removing that process. The incident resolution is an example of her general point.

I feel pretty comfortable with how my comment captures the context of the whole piece, which of course I did read. Again: what's weird about this is that the first part would be pretty coherent and defensible if applied to coding agents (some people will want to work the way she spells out, especially earlier in their career, some people won't), but doesn't make as much sense for the example she uses for the remaining 2/3rds of the piece.

Re: Building better AI tools

#74

Post by tptacek »

cmiles74 wrote: post #71
tptacek wrote: post #54

This is a confusing piece. A lot of it would make sense if Weakly was talking about a coding agent (a particular flavor of agent that worked more like how antirez just said he prefers coding with AI in 2025 --- more manual, more advisory, less do-ing). But she's not: she's talking about agents that assist in investigating and resolving operations incidents. The fulcrum of Weakly's argument is that agents should stay…

There's no AI tool today that will resolve incidents to anyone's satisfaction. People need to be in the loop not only to take responsibility but to make sure the right actions are performed.

Nobody disputes this. Weakly posits a bright line between agents suggesting active steps and agents actually performing active steps. The problem is that during incident investigations, some active steps make a lot of sense for agents to perform, and others don't; the line isn't where she seems to claim it is.

Re: Building better AI tools

#75

Post by tjr »

lucianbr wrote: post #68
tjr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm concerned about this also. Even just reading about AI coding, I can almost feel my programming skills start to atrophy. If AI tools continue to improve, there will be less and less need for humans to write code. But -- perhaps depending on the application -- I think there will still be need to review code, and thus still need to understand how to write code, even if you aren't doing the writing yourself. I imagin…

How could advances in programming languages still happen when nobody is writing code anymore? You think we will just ask the AI to propose improvements, then evaluate them, and if they are good ask the AI to make training samples for the next AI? Maybe, but I don't think it's that easy.

If we were to reach a stage where humans don't write code any more, would there even be a need to have advances in programming languages? Maybe what we currently have would be good enough.

I don't know what future we're looking at. I work in aerospace, and being around more safety-critical software, I find it hard to fathom just giving up software development to non-deterministic AI tools. But who knows? I still foresee humans being involved, but in what capacity? Planning and testing, but not coding? Why? I've never really seen coding being the bottleneck in aerospace anyway; code is written more slowly here than in many other industries due to protocols, checks and balances. I can see AI-assisted programming being a potentially splendid idea, but I'm not sold on AI replacing humans. Some seem to be determined to get there, though.

Re: Building better AI tools

#76

Post by cwnyth »

taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

My LLM-generated code has so many bugs in it, that I end up knowing it better since I have to spend more time debugging/figuring out small errors. This might even be better: you learn something more thoroughly when you not only practice the right answers, but know how to fix the wrong answers.

Re: Building better AI tools

#77

Post by kevindamm »

lucianbr wrote: post #65
okr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soldering transistors by hand was a thing too, once. But these days, i am not sure, if people wanna keep up anymore. Many trillions of transistors later. :) I like this zooming in and zooming out, mentally. At some point i can zoom out another level. I miss coding. While i still code a lot.

There are definitely people who solder transistors by hand still. Though most not for a living. I wonder how the venn diagram looks together with the set of people designing circuits that eventually get built by machines. Maybe not as disjoint as you first imagine.

Depending on the scale of the run and innovation of the tech, it's not unusual to see a founder digging into test-run QA issues with a multimeter and soldering iron, or perhaps a serial port and software debugger. But more often in China than the US these days, or China-US partnerships. And the hobbyist Makers and home innovators still solder together one-offs a lot, that's worldwide. Speakerbox builders do a lot of projects with a little soldering.

I dare say there are more individuals who have soldered something today than there were 100 years ago.

Re: Building better AI tools

#78

Post by beefnugs »

taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

They want you to become an expert at the new thing: knowing how to set up the context with perfect information. Which is arguably as much if not more work than just programming the damn thing.

Which theoretically could actually be a benefit someday: if your company does many similar customer deployments, you will eventually be more efficient. But if you are doing custom code meant just for your company... there may never be efficiency increase

Re: Building better AI tools

#79

Post by arscan »

biophysboy wrote: post #48
taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

A retort you often hear is that prior technologies, like writing or the printing press, may have stunted our calligraphy or rhetorical skills, but they did not stunt our capacity to think. If anything, they magnified it! Basically, the whole Steve Jobs' bicycle-for-the-mind idea. My issue with applying this reasoning to AI is that prior technologies addressed bottlenecks in distribution, whereas this more directly at…

I’ve been thinking of LLMs a bit like a credit-card-for-the-mind, it reduces friction to accessing and enabling your own expertise. But if you don’t have that expertise already, be careful, eventually it’ll catch up to you and a big bill will be due.

Re: Building better AI tools

#80

Post by 0x457 »

donsupreme wrote: post #17
taylorallred wrote: post #14

One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.

Many analog to this IRL: 1) I can't remember the last time I write something meaningfully long with an actual pen/pencil. My handwriting is beyond horrible. 2) I can't no longer find my way driving without a GPS. Reading a map? lol

> I can't remember the last time I write something meaningfully long with an actual pen/pencil. My handwriting is beyond horrible.

That's a skill that depends on motor functions of your hands, so it makes sense that it degrades with lack of practice.

> I can't no longer find my way driving without a GPS. Reading a map? lol

Pretty sure what that actually means in most cases is "I can go from A to B without GPS, but the route will be suboptimal, and I will have to keep more attention to street names"

If you ever had a joy of printing map quest or using a paper map, I'm sure you still these people skill can do, maybe it will take them longer. I'm good at reading mall maps tho.

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