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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

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Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#731

Post by Balinares »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

That's been pretty much exactly my experience too.

For what it's worth, multiple times in my career, I've worked at shops that once thought they could do it quick and cheap and it would be good enough, and then had to hire someone 'picky' like me to sort out the inevitable money-losing mess.

From what I've seen even Opus 4.5 spit, the 'picky' are going to remain in demand for a little while longer still. Will that last? No clue. We'll see.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#732

Post by [deleted] »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

[deleted]

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#733

Post by AlexCoventry »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

> I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks.

I'm happy enough for it to automate away the trivial coding tasks. That's an immense force multiplier in its own right.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#734

Post by matwood »

smt88 wrote: post #603
daxfohl wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but: There's been a notable jump over the course of the last few months, to where I'd say it's inevitable. For a while I was holding out for them to hit a ceiling where we'd look back and laugh at the idea they'd ever replace human coders. Now, it seems much more like a matter of time. Ultimately I think over the next two years or so, Anthropic and OpenAI will evolve their product from "coding assistant" to "…

There's no chance LLMs will be an engineering team replacement. The hallucination problem is unsolvable and catastrophic in some edge cases. Any company using such a team would be uninsurable and sued into oblivion.

These types of comments are interesting to me. Pre-chatGPT there were tons of posts how so many software people were terrible at their jobs. Bugs were/are rampant. Software bugs caused high profile issues, but likely so many more we never heard about.

Today we have chatGPT and only now will teams be uninsurable and sued into oblivion? LOL

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#735

Post by alkonaut »

I don't think _software_ is very interesting in the whole AI debate. It's perhaps interesting from a jobs perspective or an economical perspective. But the whole "anti AI" thing is much deeper than that. My main objections to AI is the evaporation of truth, and of art.

We now have top chart hits which are soulless AI songs. It's perhaps a testament to the fact that some of these genres where this happens a lot, were already trending towards industrially produced songs with little soul in them (you know what genres these are, and it's hilarious that one of them). But most concerning to me is the idea that we'll never trust our eyes with what's true starting now.

We can't trust that someone who calls us is human, or that a photo or recording is of a real event. This was always true in some sense, but it required a ton of effort to pull off at least. Now it's going to be trivial. And for every photo depicting an actual event, there will be a thousand depicting non-events. What does that do to the most important thing we have as a society: the "shared truth"? The decay of traditional media already put a big dent in this - with catastrophic results. Ai will make it 10x worse.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#736

Post by lxgr »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #721
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> non-trivial coding tasks I’ve come back to the idea LLMs are super search engines. If you ask it a narrow, specific question, with one answer, you may well get the answer. For the “non-trivial” questions, there always will be multiple answers, and you’ll get from the LLM all of these depending on the precise words you use to prompt it. You won’t get the best answer, and in a complex scenario requiring highly recurs…

I'm not going to argue about how capable the models are, I personally think they are pretty capable. What I will argue is that the LLMs are not just search engines. They have "compressed" knowledge. When they do this, they learn relations between all kinds of different levels of abstractions and meta patterns. It is really important to understand that the model can follow logical rules and has some map of meta relati…

A sufficiently advanced search engine might actually be indistinguishable from intelligence.

After all, until quite recently, chess engines really were quite mechanically search engines too.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#737

Post by lxgr »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #617
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> non-trivial coding tasks I’ve come back to the idea LLMs are super search engines. If you ask it a narrow, specific question, with one answer, you may well get the answer. For the “non-trivial” questions, there always will be multiple answers, and you’ll get from the LLM all of these depending on the precise words you use to prompt it. You won’t get the best answer, and in a complex scenario requiring highly recurs…

>I’ve come back to the idea LLMs are super search engines. Yes! This is exactly what it is. A search engine with a lossy-compressed dataset of most public human knowledge, which can return the results in natural language. This is the realization that will pop the AI bubble if the public could ever bring themselves to ponder it en masse. Is such a thing useful? Hell yes! Is such a thing intellegent? Certainly NO!

I personally had the completely opposite takeaway: Intelligence, at its core, really might just be a bunch of extremely good and self-adapting search heuristics.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#738

Post by gspr »

embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part.

I know you didn't mean to, but I think that description is a mischaracterization. I'd wager most of us "I control the computer" people who enjoy crafting software don't really care for the actual imputation of symbols. That is just the mechanism by which we move code from our heads to the computer. What LLMs destroy – at least for me – is the creation of code in my head and its (more-or-less) faithful replication inside the computer. I don't particularly enjoy the physical act of moving my fingers across a piece of plastic, but I do enjoy the result executing my program on my computer.

If an LLM is placed in the middle, two things happen: first, I'm expressing the _idea_ of my program not to a computer, but to an LLM; and second, the LLM expresses its "interpretation" of that idea to the computer. Both parts destroy joy for me. That's of course not important to anyone but myself and likeminded people, and I don't expect the world to care. But I do also believe that both parts come with a whole host of dangers that make the end result less trustworthy and less maintainable over time.

I'm definitely warming to the role of LLMs as critics though. I also see value in having them write tests – the worst a bad or unmaintainable test will provide is a false error.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#739

Post by Madmallard »

redox99 wrote: post #679
totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

It sounds harsh but you're most likely using it wrong. 1) Have an AGENTS.md that describes not just the project structure, but also the product and business (what does it do, who is it for, etc). People expect LLMs to read a snippet of code and be as good as an employee who has implicit understanding of the whole business. You must give it all that information. Tell it to use good practices (DRY, KISS, etc). Add patt…

"The LLM should be able to determine if a task was completed successfully or not."

Writing logic that verifies something complex requires basically solving the problem entirely already.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#740

Post by elvis10ten »

simonw wrote: post #160
systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…

While intuition takes a while, I think it can be learned in less than a month or two.

This has been my experience. When something gets good enough, someone will create some really good resource on it. Allowing the dust to settle, to me is a more efficient strategy than constantly trying to “keep up”. Maybe also not waiting too long to do so.

This wouldn’t work of course if a person was trying to be some AI thought leader.

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