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My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

matthewrocklin.com

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Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#71

Post by falloutx »

llmslave2 wrote: post #53
eikenberry wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one is not writing code your ability to read code will degrade quickly and be reduced to a basic sanity check as to whether you need to add more constraints (prompts, tests, etc.). Anyone who thinks they can read code without writing code at a level needed to understand what is going on (for anything non-trivial) is fooling themselves.

Yep. I'd say it's an order of magnitude more effort to read code you haven't written too, compared to reading code you wrote. So there is approximately zero chance the people using AI to generate code are reading it at a level where they actually understand it, or else they would lose all of their supposed productivity gains.

Yeah if people were good at reading code we wouldn't have the whole LGTM meme where the reviewer gives up as soon the PRs is bigger than 500 lines.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#72

Post by 9dev »

falloutx wrote: post #67
linkregister wrote: post #64

Rather than spending iterations crafting precise permissions, why not just run with --dangerously-skip-permissions If run in a devcontainer[1][2], the worst thing that can happen is it deletes everything in the filesystem below the mounted repo. Recovery would entail checking out the repo again. 1. (conventional usage) https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers 2. (actual spec) https://containers.dev…

Still leaves you open for data exfil. Your AI goes to a site to check documentation, but oh no that site wants it to make an API call with a very specific token.

Claude will only ever ask if it is allowed to connect to the domain name, so if it got a malicious link from a web search, you’re SOL anyway.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#73

Post by falloutx »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #6

For a senior engineer, some very odd takes here: "Our ability to zoom in and implement code is now obsolete Even with SOTA LLMs like Opus 4.5 this is downright untrue. Many, many logical, strategic, architectural, and low level code mistakes are still happening. And given context window limitations of LLMs (even with hacks like subagents to work around this) big picture long-term thinking about code design, structure…

Its sad we have gone from making the software as good and efficient as possible to "good enough, ship it". This is the main reason AI agents are successful.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#74

Post by llmslave2 »

falloutx wrote: post #69
llmslave2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news: the evidence points to it being slower than non-ai workflows. So we're destroying our economy, society, and planet to make worse software, more slowly! :)

we are also making all software much worse at the same time. I dont think every app needs AI but apparently they do. Notion used to be a Zen writing app back in the day, canva used to an app where you can do simple graphics without a complicated tools panel.

[flagged]

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#75

Post by falloutx »

9dev wrote: post #72
falloutx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still leaves you open for data exfil. Your AI goes to a site to check documentation, but oh no that site wants it to make an API call with a very specific token.

Claude will only ever ask if it is allowed to connect to the domain name, so if it got a malicious link from a web search, you’re SOL anyway.

atleast you get one prompt, with --dangerously-skip-permissions you get no prompts

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#76

Post by spankibalt »

> "I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun."

What I always find amusing are the false equivalences, where one or several (creative) processes involving the hard work that is a fundamental part of the craft get substituted by push-to-"I did this!1!!" slop.

How's the saying go? "I hate doing thing x. The only thing I hate more is not doing thing x". One either owns that, or one doesn't. So that is indeed not mysterious. Especially not in a system where "Fake it till you make it" has been and is advertised as a virtue.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#77

Post by pixl97 »

NoraCodes wrote: post #23

I don't care that AI development is more fun for the author. I wouldn't care if all the evidence pointed toward AI development being easier, faster, and less perilous. The externalities, at present, are unacceptable. We are restructuring our society in a way that makes individuals even less free and a few large companies even more powerful and wealthy, just to save time writing code, and I don't understand why people…

>hat makes individuals even less free and a few large companies even more powerful and wealthy

You're what, 250 years behind at this point?

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution there is a general trend that fewer can make more with less. And really even bigger than AI were fast fuel based transportation and then global networks. Long before we started worrying about genAI, businesses have been consolidating down to a few corporations that make enough to supply the world from a singular large factories.

We fought the war against companies. Companies won.

Now you're just at the point where the fabric makers were, where the man with the pick axe was, where the telephone switch operator was, where the punch card operator was.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#78

Post by tsukikage »

9dev wrote: post #70
tsukikage wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” Indeed, of all the possible things to say! AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.

I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Wrestling the computer is stuff like figuring out how to recite the right incantation so Gradle will do a multi-platform fat bundle, and then migrate to the next major Gradle version. Unless you have a very specific set of kinks, tasks like these will make you want to quit your career in computers and pick up trash on the highway instead. You very likely have some of…

The hard part of software engineering, and indeed many other pursuits, is working out what it is you actually need to happen and articulating that clearly enough for another entity to follow your instructions.

Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#79

Post by falloutx »

xnx wrote: post #62
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

What part of making a movie is fun? Acting, costumes, sets, camerawork, story, dialogue, script, sound effects, lighting, editing, directing, producing, marketing? Creating software has a similar number of steps. AI tools now make some of them much (much) easier/optional.

All parts of making a movie are fun. If you hire people who are passionate at each task, you will get 1000x better result. It may be 10 days late but better to be late than slop.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#80

Post by noddingham »

None of these articles address how we'll go from novice to expert, as either self-taught or through the educational system, and all the bloggers got their proverbial "10k hours" before LLMs were a thing. IMO This isn't abstractions, the risk is wholesale outsourcing of learning. And no, I don't accept the argument that correct and LLMs errors is the same as correcting a junior devs errors because the junior dev would (presumably) learn and grow to become a senior. The technology doesn't exist for an LLM to do the same today and there's no viable path in that direction.

Can someone tell me what the current thinking is on how we'll get over that gap?

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