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I am leaving the AI party after one drink

lara-aigmueller.at

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Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#71

Post by legitster »

B56b wrote: post #49
legitster wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of themselves as very practical - I drive a manual, I fix my own cars, I do my own house projects, I cook my own meals. Which is part of the reason these anti-AI screeds fall on deaf ears for me. My generation has willingly abandoned all of these legitimately useful hard-skills But there's also nothing preventing you from picking and choosing what you care about.

What's wrong with choosing to care about coding manually then?

I'm not actually against manual coding. I just think people need to be honest about about why it's valuable.

I don't work on my own car because I believe that everyone should fix their own cars. But I think enough people should be knowledgeable and have these skills in society - if for no other reason than to keep mechanics and automakers and dealerships honest. I am not personally upset if you work on your own used car or take it to your dealership.

I am against the idea that everyone should somehow be against AI coding.

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#72

Post by _doctor_love »

legitster wrote: post #7

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…

I don't want any machine doing my thinking for me. This is why I am in favor of banning traffic lights. Why should I trust a machine to tell me when it's safe to stop and when it's safe to go? Plus, we could employ police officers to stand in the middle of the intersection and direct traffic, thus contributing further to employment.

;)

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#73

Post by jr3592 »

mstank wrote: post #4

While I applaud her and wish her well — writing like this reminds me of a couple of things. First my aging father insisting on navigating using his unfortunately fading memory instead of Google maps. Some people just won’t pick up technology out of habit or spite, even if it hinders them. Second, a quote I read here that I’ll paraphrase “you can be the best marathon runner in the world and still lose a race to a guy…

> Know the race you’re racing

This is the KEY difference between people who are willing to adopt this technology and those who aren't.

If you are able to view your job as simply a pursuit of a craft, more power to you.

The reality is likely that over time your employer will realize you are slower than every other engineer, and that your enjoyment of the craft is actually just you being an old slow developer.

The "race" here is the race with every other developer out there. They're getting on bikes, and starting to pull away ... what are YOU going to do?

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#74

Post by happytoexplain »

legitster wrote: post #7

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…

[dead]

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#75

Post by lowlander »

Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." Doctor: "Then don't do that!"

I'm finding that how you choose to use it makes all the difference in whether it's useful or not. I understand the reticence to jump on the hype train and it's taken some reps to find the parts of building with AI that I don't like and how to navigate it and keep it from making choices I wouldn't make or are low quality.

> asking for a recommended tech stack

this is up to you. you can just tell it what tech stack to use. better yet, bootstrap the project yourself and give it to AI as the starting point. nobody is saying AI has to make these choices for you and you're not allowed anymore.

> I wasn’t happy with some of them because of my own experiences in the past... Even when deciding against something for a reason, Claude Code tried to push me back on the suggested track.

this kind of sounds like many human teammates at work... you don't always like their suggestions or they aren't convinced by your arguments? the difference being with AI you can just tell it what to do, no persuasion required.

nothing about AI prevents you from thinking about design choices, architecture, data modeling, or even the minutiae if you want to. the only thing telling AI to do those things for you is you!

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#76

Post by hirvi74 »

TheGRS wrote: post #45

I know I read several posts like these every day, but I've been thinking more and more that I should stick to the chat window and having AI guide me instead of doing the work for me. Great tool for showing me what to do when I don't know and offering me guidance, and rubber ducking of course, but I definitely lose the context and understanding when I just let it rip and write everything for me.

> I've been thinking more and more that I should stick to the chat window and having AI guide me instead of doing the work for me.

That's how I have been using AI for years. I feel like my productivity has skyrocketed over the past year or two, and all my code is still written by hand. It's like having StackOverflow on demand. I also never really have to worry about tokens or usage limits. I don't think I have ever hit the limit on the $20 Claude plan, and I use Claude every day.

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#77

Post by rustystump »

haolez wrote: post #3

I don't have a stake on AI, but more and more I see the following patterns: - people that give in to AI do so because the technical merits suddenly became too big to ignore (even for seasoned developers that were previously against it) - people who avoid AI center their arguments on principles and personal discomfort Just from that, you can kind of see where this is going.

Most arguments against it are built on some moral principle and not on objective reality of usefulness.

Crypto used to be the thing to hate but that made sense as the objective usefulness of crypto was meek. AI models were always crazy useful but prohibitively expensive. Youd need an entire team to build your models. Now you dont.

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#78

Post by legitster »

cush wrote: post #70
legitster wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is purely a matter of perception. Cooking a meal is a deeply intellectual process. If I buy a meal from a restaurant, yes I am losing a skill. But if making a hollandaise is not a skill I ever need in my life, it's not really a practical loss. AI is taking problems and putting them in a drawer so we never have to think about it again. Matches de-intellectualized making a fire. A washing machine de-intellectualiz…

> making a hollandaise is not a skill I ever need in my life I know you just wanted to poke at the analogy, but if you like hollandaise, it's one of the easiest and most rewarding sauces to make at home! Restaurant hollaindaise is usually terrible

Agreed.

(Though it's not as easy as a béchamel, and yet I still see people buy jarred alfredo sauces. You can literally make an amazing alfredo sauce with pantry ingredients in less time than it takes to boil the noodles! Why would anyone buy an alfredo sauce!?)

Although this more or less is my point. If people are willing to give up these incredibly high reward, low effort skills - how much more uphill is the battle to make people code and process data?

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#79

Post by PeterStuer »

I am the opposite. I do not understand how people do not get at least 5x more productive with GenAI.

Maybe it is because I do not do much front-end design. Maybe it is because I'm a bit more diligent than your average "viber", or maybe because for me it is easier to spot a suboptimal solution, or challange with edge cases from experience etc.

But these people turning their backs, not in principle, because that I fully understand, but because of underperformance?

Maybe their expectations are way out there? Maybe (most likely) it is the application domain? Maybe plainly a skill issue?

But seeing how GenAI is plowing through through fields, I would not turn my back on it even if it wasn't there (yet) in my domain.

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#80

Post by tines »

haolez wrote: post #3

I don't have a stake on AI, but more and more I see the following patterns: - people that give in to AI do so because the technical merits suddenly became too big to ignore (even for seasoned developers that were previously against it) - people who avoid AI center their arguments on principles and personal discomfort Just from that, you can kind of see where this is going.

Yeah, things get more and more terrible over time. Your point?
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