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Believe the Checkbook

robertgreiner.com

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Re: Believe the Checkbook

#71

Post by duskdozer »

mk12 wrote: post #62
zmj wrote: post #55

Do people reading this post not understand that this is the output of a prompt like 'analyze with arriving at '? Tighten up your epistemology if you're arguing with an author who isn't there.

This has been happening a lot recently, where an article immediately sets off all my AI alarm bells but most people seem to be happily engaging with it. I’m worried we’re headed for a dystopian future where all communication is outsourced to the slop machine. I hope instead there is a societal shift to better recognize it and stigmatize it.

I've noticed some of this in recent months. I've also noticed people editing out some of the popular tells, like replacing em-dashes with commas, or at least I think so, because of odd formatting/errors in places where it sounds like the LLM would have used a dash.

But at this point I'm not confident that I'm not failing to identify a lot of LLM-generated text and not making false positives.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#72

Post by maccard »

bonesss wrote: post #70
geitir wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have that hair raising “am I crazy why are people touting ai” feeling, it’s good to look at their profile. Oftentimes they’re caught up in some ai play. Also it’s good to remember yc has heavy investment in gen ai so this site is heavily biased

Context is king, too: in greenfield startups where you care little about maintenance and can accept redundant front end frameworks and backend languages? I believe agent swarms can poop out a lot lot lot of code relatively quick… Copy and paste is faster though. Downloading a repo is very quick. In startups I’ve competed against companies with 10x and 100x the resources and manpower on the same systems we were buildi…

Here’s the thing - an awful lot of it doesn’t even compile/run, never mind do the right thing. My most recent example was asking it to use terraform to run an azure container app with an environment variable in an existing app environment. It repeatedly made up where the environment block goes, and and cursor kept putting the actual resource in random places in the file.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#73

Post by 9rx »

marcosdumay wrote: post #12
conductr wrote: post #3

People speak in relative terms and hear in absolutes. Engineers will never completely vanish, but it will certainly feel like it if labor demand is reduced enough. Technically, there’s still a horse buggy whip market, an abacus market, and probably anything else you think technology consumed. It’s just a minuscule fraction of what it once was.

> but it will certainly feel like it if labor demand is reduced enough All the last productivity multipliers in programming led to increased demand. Do you really think the market is saturated now? And what saturated it is one of the least impactful "revolutionary" tools we got in our profession? Keep in mind that looking at statistics won't lead to any real answer, everything is manipulated beyond recognition right…

Each of the last productivity multipliers coincided with greatly expanded markets (e.g. PC revolution, internet, mobile). Those are at the saturation point. And we've effectively built all the software those things need now. Of course there is still room for innovation in software, but it is not like in the past where we also had to build all the low-hanging fruit at the same time. That doesn't require nearly as many people — and that was already starting to become apparent before anyone knew what an LLM is.

This AI craze swooped in at the right time to help hold up the industry and is the only thing keeping it together right now. We're quickly trying to build all the low-hanging fruit for it, keeping many developers busy (although not like it used to be), but there isn't much low-hanging fruit to build. LLMs don't have the breadth of need like previous computing revolutions had. Once we've added chat interfaces to everything, which is far from being a Herculean task, all the low-hanging fruit will be gone. That's quite unlike previous revolutions where we had to build all the software from scratch, effectively, not just slap some lipstick on existing software.

If we want to begin to relive the past, we need a new hardware paradigm that needs all the software rewritten for it again. Not an impossible thought, but all the low-hanging hardware directions have also been picked at this point so the likelihood of that isn’t what it used to be either.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#74

Post by saghm »

RandallBrown wrote: post #7

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

Sometimes people who don't work in software seem surprised that I don't type faster than I do given my line of work, and I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. I don't pretend to know for sure if this holds true for every possible software job but it's not a concept I've seen surprise many software engineers. This almost seems like the next level of that; they certainly do more than just write code I want faster, but except for problems where I have trouble figuring out how to express what I want in code, they're not necessarily the solution to any problem I have.

If they could write exactly what I wanted but faster, I'd probably stop writing code any other way at all because that would just be a free win with no downside even though the win might be small! They don't write exactly what I want though, so the tradeoff is whether the amount of time they save me writing it is lost from the extra time debugging the code they wrote rather than my own. It's not clear to me that the code produced by an LLM right now is going to be close enough to correct enough of the time that this will be a net increase in efficiency for me. Most of the arguments I've seen for why I might want to consider investing more of my own time into learning these tools seem to be based on extrapolation of trends to up to this point, but it's still not clear to me that it's likely that they'll become good enough to reach a positive ROI for me any time soon. Maybe if the effort to actually start using them more heavily was lower I'd be willing to try it, but from what I can tell, it would take a decent amount of work for me to get the point where I'm even producing anything close to what I'm currently producing, and I don't really see the point of doing that if it's still an open question if it will ever close the remaining gap.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#75

Post by zamadatix »

fwip wrote: post #26
zamadatix wrote: post #9

Something about the way the article sets up the conversation nags at me a bit - even though it concludes with statements and reasoning I generally agree quite well with. It sets out what it wants to argue clearly at the start: > Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished... The Bun acquisition blows a hole in that story.” But what the article actually discusses and…

I mean, it smells an AI slop article, so it's hard to expect much coherence.

I was thinking the same but it's like they only used AI to handle the editing or something because even throwing it into ChatGPT "how could this article be improved: ${article}" gives:

> Tighten the causal claim: “AI writes code → therefore judgment is scarce”

As one of the first suggestions, so it's not something inherent to whether the article used AI in some way. Regardless, I care less about how the article got written and more about what conclusions really make sense.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#76

Post by marbro »

mk12 wrote: post #62
zmj wrote: post #55

Do people reading this post not understand that this is the output of a prompt like 'analyze with arriving at '? Tighten up your epistemology if you're arguing with an author who isn't there.

This has been happening a lot recently, where an article immediately sets off all my AI alarm bells but most people seem to be happily engaging with it. I’m worried we’re headed for a dystopian future where all communication is outsourced to the slop machine. I hope instead there is a societal shift to better recognize it and stigmatize it.

[dead]

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#77

Post by marcosdumay »

9rx wrote: post #73
marcosdumay wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it will certainly feel like it if labor demand is reduced enough All the last productivity multipliers in programming led to increased demand. Do you really think the market is saturated now? And what saturated it is one of the least impactful "revolutionary" tools we got in our profession? Keep in mind that looking at statistics won't lead to any real answer, everything is manipulated beyond recognition right…

Each of the last productivity multipliers coincided with greatly expanded markets (e.g. PC revolution, internet, mobile). Those are at the saturation point. And we've effectively built all the software those things need now. Of course there is still room for innovation in software, but it is not like in the past where we also had to build all the low-hanging fruit at the same time. That doesn't require nearly as many…

> Each of the last productivity multipliers coincided with greatly expanded markets

They didn't. But it may be a relevant point that all of that was slow enough to spread that we can't clearly separate them.

Anyway, the idea that any one of those large markets is at saturation point requires some data. AFAIK, anything from mainframe software to phones has (relatively) exploded in popularity every time somebody made them cheaper, so that is a claim that all of those just changed (too recently to measure), without any large thing to correlate them.

> That's quite unlike previous revolutions where we had to build all the software from scratch

We have rewritten everything from scratch exactly once since high-level languages were created in the 70s.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#78

Post by RealityVoid »

saghm wrote: post #74
RandallBrown wrote: post #7

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

Sometimes people who don't work in software seem surprised that I don't type faster than I do given my line of work, and I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. I don't pretend to know for sure if this holds true for every possible software job but it's not a concept I've seen surprise many software engineers. This almost seems like the next level of that; they certainly do…

> I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do.

Never is a very strong word. I'm not a terribly fast typist but I intentionally trained to be faster because at times I wanted to whip out some stuff and the thought of typing it all out just annoyed me since it took too long. I think typing speed matters and saying it doesn't is a lie. At the very least if you have a faster baseline then typing stuff is more relaxing instead of just a chore.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#79

Post by lolc »

RealityVoid wrote: post #78
saghm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes people who don't work in software seem surprised that I don't type faster than I do given my line of work, and I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. I don't pretend to know for sure if this holds true for every possible software job but it's not a concept I've seen surprise many software engineers. This almost seems like the next level of that; they certainly do…

> I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. Never is a very strong word. I'm not a terribly fast typist but I intentionally trained to be faster because at times I wanted to whip out some stuff and the thought of typing it all out just annoyed me since it took too long. I think typing speed matters and saying it doesn't is a lie. At the very least if you have a faster baseline…

An often repeated point on this forum: A lot of our comms are text. You don't want stall and lose attention to comms. Makes sense to train and have the flow on auto.

Re: Believe the Checkbook

#80

Post by saghm »

RealityVoid wrote: post #78
saghm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes people who don't work in software seem surprised that I don't type faster than I do given my line of work, and I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. I don't pretend to know for sure if this holds true for every possible software job but it's not a concept I've seen surprise many software engineers. This almost seems like the next level of that; they certainly do…

> I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. Never is a very strong word. I'm not a terribly fast typist but I intentionally trained to be faster because at times I wanted to whip out some stuff and the thought of typing it all out just annoyed me since it took too long. I think typing speed matters and saying it doesn't is a lie. At the very least if you have a faster baseline…

I'm sure people's experiences vary here, but for me, it absolutely never has been a bottleneck in any circumstance.
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