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AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

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Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#71

Post by recursive »

aogaili wrote: post #69
recursive wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably one of the people you're talking about. I'm feeling basically mostly fulfilled in life, and don't feel my life is being wasted. I didn't understand the thing about "AI made sure they knew as well", or maybe I'm not actually who you're describing. But I definitely get into language, syntax, frameworks, parsing, and blah blah blah. Plenty of people still play chess. Plenty of people still run. Machine perf…

Yes, for me, it is a form of narrow intelligence. Being unable to grasp the big picture. I don't mean this offensively; it is what it is. If you are aware of who you are, then good, but if the issue is that a lot of those are not even aware of their strength or their limitations. Just like humans got humbled with chess, AI is humbling those coders.

It will be coming for me some day soon I'm sure, but I'm no more humble than I was before so far. (extremely humble!!!) I don't talk about it too much on here, as it would be useless, but I haven't gotten too many positive results out of the AI-assisted coding tools. And yes, I know I'm holding it wrong.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#72

Post by aogaili »

recursive wrote: post #71
aogaili wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for me, it is a form of narrow intelligence. Being unable to grasp the big picture. I don't mean this offensively; it is what it is. If you are aware of who you are, then good, but if the issue is that a lot of those are not even aware of their strength or their limitations. Just like humans got humbled with chess, AI is humbling those coders.

It will be coming for me some day soon I'm sure, but I'm no more humble than I was before so far. (extremely humble!!!) I don't talk about it too much on here, as it would be useless, but I haven't gotten too many positive results out of the AI-assisted coding tools. And yes, I know I'm holding it wrong.

I think you are not the type I'm referring to.

But again for me, the appeal for software was creativity. Our ability to shape ideas and experiences.

I never cared about proving my intelligence or arguing about syntax. If the code is maintainable, readable, and works, all good. But I corporate, I was debating over PRs, mostly subjective opinions, a form of intellectual game..

And the issue, discussion is all about convention and trivialities..

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#73

Post by jononor »

acoustics wrote: post #66
aogaili wrote: post #5

AI will hopefully humble so of the people I work with. The people who understand nothing about business, yet you can't talk to because they think gifted for being able to write instructions to a computer. The people spin out new frameworks every day and make a clusterf*ck of hyped and over-engineered frameworks. The people who took a few courses and went into programming for money.. I went into software because I enj…

Interestingly, a lot of the engineers I know are hoping for the exact opposite. They're hoping that AI will humble the business, management, product types. The way they see it, AI can easily shit out a hundred product concepts, market research, slide decks, sales emails, reports, etc. No need to bring on MBAs or self-proclaimed visionaries or LinkedIn gurus. I think both camps will be disappointed. The engineers will…

Yeah many have their favorite gripes with $TheOthers, and hoping that the AI will solve them. It won't - not because AI isn't good, but because the people involved will quickly adapt. Likely making new annoying behaviors, and probably many will adapt to find new things to be annoyed at also.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#74

Post by logicprog »

aeonik wrote: post #64
logicprog wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that since these models aren't actually doing reasoning and don't possess internal world models, you're always going to end up having to rely on your own understanding at some point, they can fill in more of the map with things they can do, but they can't ever make it complete. There will always be cul-de-sacs they end up stuck in, or messes they make, or mistakes they consistently keep making, or make s…

I understand they don't have a logic engine built into them, ie no deduction, but I do think their inference is a weak form of reasoning, and I'm not sure about world model. I suppose it depends on the definition of model. I currently do consider the transformer weights to be a world model, but having a rigid one based on statistical distributions tend to create pretty wonky behavior at times. That's why I do agree,…

Good comment. I'm pretty much on the same page, my only disagreement is that transformers, if they are a world model, are a world model of some sort of semiotic shadow world, not an experiential physical consistent world like ours, so they're not equipped to handle modelling our world.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#75

Post by prmph »

smogcutter wrote: post #25
rafterydj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: a cabinet has always been a cabinet and nobody expects it to be anything but a cabinet. Rarely are software projects as repeatable and alike to each other as cabinets are. Software is codified rules and complexity, which is entirely aribtrary, and builds off of itself in an infinite number of ways. That makes it much more difficult to turn into factory output cabinetry. I think more people should read "…

But we’re way beyond templates here. There will be niches in research, high performance computing & graphics, security, etc. But we’re in the last generation or two that’s going to hand write their own CRUD apps. That’s the livelihood of a lot of software developers around the world.

I hear this denigration of CRUD apps all the time, but people forget that CRUD apps can be as complex or simple as they need to be. A CRUD app is identified as such by its purpose, not the sophistication of it.

Right now I'm wring a web app that basically manages data in a db, but guess the kinds of things I have to deal with. Here a a few (there are many much more), in no particular order:

- Caching and load balancing infrastructure.

- Crafting an ORM that handles caching, transactions, and, well, CRUD, but in a consistent, well-typed, and IO-provider-agnostic manner (IO providers could be: DBs like Postgres, S3-compatible object stores, Redis, Sqlite, Localstorage, Filesystems, etc. Yes, I need all those).

- Concurrent user access in manner that is performant and avoids conflicts.

- Db performance for huge datasets (so consideration of indexes, execution plans, performant queries, performant app architecture, etc, etc)

- Defining fluent types for defining the abstract API methods that form the core of the system

- Defining types to provide strong typing for routes that fulfill each abstract API method.

- Defining types to provide strongly-typed client wrappers for each abstract API method

- How to choose the best option for application- and API security (Cookies?, JWT?, API keys? Oauth?)

- Choosing the best UI framework for the requirements of the app. I actually had to write a custom react-like library for this.

- Media storage strategy (what variants of each media to generate on the server, how to generate good storage keys, etc.

- Writing tooling scripts that are sophisticated enough to help me type-check, build, text, and deploy the app just in the way I want

- Figuring out effective UI designs for CRUD pages, with sorting, filtering, paging, etc built in . This is far from simple. For just one example, naive paging is not performant, I need to use keyset pagination.

- Doing all the above with robust, maintainable, and performant code

- Writing effective specs and docs for all my decisions and design for the the above

- And many many more! I've been working on this "CRUD" app for years as a greenfield project that will be the flagship product of my startup.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#76

Post by aeonik »

logicprog wrote: post #74
aeonik wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand they don't have a logic engine built into them, ie no deduction, but I do think their inference is a weak form of reasoning, and I'm not sure about world model. I suppose it depends on the definition of model. I currently do consider the transformer weights to be a world model, but having a rigid one based on statistical distributions tend to create pretty wonky behavior at times. That's why I do agree,…

Good comment. I'm pretty much on the same page, my only disagreement is that transformers, if they are a world model, are a world model of some sort of semiotic shadow world, not an experiential physical consistent world like ours, so they're not equipped to handle modelling our world.

Semiotic shadow world works for me. I think that's a great description.

Re: AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery

#77

Post by ubermon »

lordnacho wrote: post #50

In recent weeks, I have made huge changes to my main codebase. Pretty sweeping stuff, things that would have taken me months to get right. Both big, architecturally important things, as well as minor housekeeping tasks. None of it could have been done without AI, yet I am somehow inclined to agree with the sentiment in this article. Most of what I've done lately is, in some strange sense, just typing quickly. I alrea…

very good articulation on the problem. My bet is that it is probably fine in the sense that the mastery itself is not going to be relevant.

I want to view AI coding as invention of new coding tools, at least in the way you described. I (hope) it will be more like punch-card->assembly-> BASIC/C -> scripting language -> some sort of well-structured natural language.

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