71–80 of 384 posts
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So long as their productivity was on par with the rest of the team there was no issue.
Suddenly, everyone needs to use this new tool (which we haven't proven to actually be effective) and if you don't you don't belong in the industry.
Very much on the same page as the author, I think AI is a phenomenal accelerant. If you're going in the right direction, acceleration is very useful. It rewards those who know what they're doing, certainly. What's maybe being left out is that, over a large enough distribution, it's going to accelerate people who are accidentally going in the right direction, too. There's a baseline value in going fast.
Maybe to the people writing the invoices for the infra you're renting, sure. Or to the people who get paid to dig you out of the consequences you inevitably bring about. Remember, the faster the timescale, the worse we are wired to effectively handle it as human beings. We're playing with a fire that catches and spreads so fast, by the time anyone realizes the forest is catching and starting to react, the entire forest is already well on the way to joining in the blaze.
Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
LLMs are great for rapid prototyping, boilerplate, that kind of thing. I myself use them daily. But the amount of mistakes Claude makes is not negligible in my experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And those mediocre engineers put their work online, as do top-tier developers. In fact, I would say that the scale is likely tilted towards mediocre engineers putting more stuff online than really good ones. So statistically speaking, when the "AI" consumes all of that as its training data and returns the most likely answer when prompted, what percentage of developers will it be better than?
In other words, there's probably a market for a model trained on a curated collection of high-quality code.
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> Building systems that supervise AI agents, training models, wiring up pipelines where the AI does the heavy lifting and I do the thinking. Honestly? I’m having more fun than ever. I'm sure some people are having fun that way. But I'm also sure some people don't like to play with systems that produce fuzzy outputs and break in unexpected moments, even though overall they are a net win. It's almost as if you're deali…
I'm just an old school programmer who loves writing code, and the recent AI developments have just taken the most fun part away from me.
I agree wholeheartedly with all that is said in this article. When guided , AI amplifies the productivity of experts immensely. There are two problems left, though. One is, laypersons don't understand the difference between "guided" and "vibe coded". This shouldn't matter, but it does, because in most organizations managers are laypersons who don't know anything about coding whatsoever, aren't interested by the topic…
I think the problem is overstated. People always learn the things they need to learn. Were people clutching their pearls about how programmers were going to lack the fundamentals of assembly language after compilers came along? Probably, but it turned out fine. People who need to program in assembly language still do. People who need to touch low-level things probably understand some of it but not as deeply. Most of…
No, they don't. Which why a huge % of people are functionaly illiterate at the moment, know nothing about finance and statistics and such and are making horrendous decisions for their future and their bottom line, and so on.
There is also such a thing as technical knowledge loss between generations.
what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.
The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita. And then add on top the environmental impact of all of the money that programmer gets from programming - travels around the world, buying large houses, ... If you care about the environment, you should want AI's re…
The programmer will continue to exist as a consumer of those things even if they get replaced by AI in their job.
Very much on the same page as the author, I think AI is a phenomenal accelerant. If you're going in the right direction, acceleration is very useful. It rewards those who know what they're doing, certainly. What's maybe being left out is that, over a large enough distribution, it's going to accelerate people who are accidentally going in the right direction, too. There's a baseline value in going fast.
>There's a baseline value in going fast. Maybe to the people writing the invoices for the infra you're renting, sure. Or to the people who get paid to dig you out of the consequences you inevitably bring about. Remember, the faster the timescale, the worse we are wired to effectively handle it as human beings. We're playing with a fire that catches and spreads so fast, by the time anyone realizes the forest is catchi…
I suspect this has been said in one form or another since the discovery of fire itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita. And then add on top the environmental impact of all of the money that programmer gets from programming - travels around the world, buying large houses, ... If you care about the environment, you should want AI's re…
> The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita. The programmer will continue to exist as a consumer of those things even if they get replaced by AI in their job.