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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

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

#771

Post by noodletheworld »

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…

> I don't think you can just catch up in a few weeks, and I do think that the risk of falling behind isn't being taken seriously enough by much of the developer population.

This is nonsense.

This field moves so fast the things you did more than a year ago aren't relevant anymore.

Claude code came out last year.

Anyone using random shit from before that is not using it any more. It is completely obsolete in all but a handful of cases.

To make matters worse “intuition” about models is wasted learning, because they change, significantly, often.

Stop spreading FUD.

You can be significantly less harmful to people who are trying to learn by sharing what you actually do instead of nebulously hand waving about magical BS.

Dear readers: ignore this irritating post.

Go and watch Armin Ronacher on youtube if you want to see what a real developer doing this looks like, and why its hard.

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

#772

Post by Narkov »

gspr wrote: post #767
antirez wrote: post #759

Thanks for reading / commenting this post. Initially it seemed like I received a bunch of very negative comments, now I read most of the thread, and there are very good points, articulated with sensibility. Thank you. I wanted to provide some more context that is not part of the blog post. Since somebody may believe I don't enjoy / love the act of writing code. 1. I care a lot about programming, I love creating somet…

I still really, really, really struggle to see how humans are going to maintain and validate the programs written by LLMs if we no longer know (intimately) how to program. Any thoughts?

Fair question but haven't we been doing this for decades? Very few people know how to write assembly and yet software has proliferated. This is just another abstraction.

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

#773

Post by gspr »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #768
gspr wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still really, really, really struggle to see how humans are going to maintain and validate the programs written by LLMs if we no longer know (intimately) how to program. Any thoughts?

> how humans are going to maintain and validate the programs written by LLMs if we no longer know (intimately) how to program Short answer: we wouldn’t be able to. Slightly-less short answer: unlikely to happen. Most programmers today can’t explain the physics of computation. That’s fine. Someone else can. And if nobody can, someone else can work backwards to it.

> > how humans are going to maintain and validate the programs written by LLMs if we no longer know (intimately) how to program

> Short answer: we wouldn’t be able to.

That's a huge problem! A showstopper for many kinds of programs!

> Slightly-less short answer: unlikely to happen.

Could you elaborate?

> Most programmers today can’t explain the physics of computation. That’s fine. Someone else can. And if nobody can, someone else can work backwards to it.

That's not the same at all. We have properly abstracted away the physics of computation. A modern computer operates in a way where, if you use it the way you've been instructed to, the physics underlying the computations cannot affect the computation in any undocumented way. Only a very few (and crucically, known and understood!!) physical circumstances can make the physics influence the computations. A layperson does not need to know how those circumstances work, only roughly what their boundaries are.

This is wildly different from the "abstraction" to programming that LLMs provide.

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

#774

Post by erelong »

gspr wrote: post #767
antirez wrote: post #759

Thanks for reading / commenting this post. Initially it seemed like I received a bunch of very negative comments, now I read most of the thread, and there are very good points, articulated with sensibility. Thank you. I wanted to provide some more context that is not part of the blog post. Since somebody may believe I don't enjoy / love the act of writing code. 1. I care a lot about programming, I love creating somet…

I still really, really, really struggle to see how humans are going to maintain and validate the programs written by LLMs if we no longer know (intimately) how to program. Any thoughts?

You could use AI to tutor you on how to code in a specific instance you need?

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

#775

Post by gspr »

Narkov wrote: post #772
gspr wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still really, really, really struggle to see how humans are going to maintain and validate the programs written by LLMs if we no longer know (intimately) how to program. Any thoughts?

Fair question but haven't we been doing this for decades? Very few people know how to write assembly and yet software has proliferated. This is just another abstraction.

> Fair question but haven't we been doing this for decades? Very few people know how to write assembly and yet software has proliferated. This is just another abstraction.

Not at all. Given any "layperson input", the expert who wrote the compiler that is supposed to turn it into assembly can describe in excruciating detail what the compiler will do and why. Not so with LLMs.

Said differently: If I perturb a source code file with a few bytes here and there, anyone with a modicum of understanding of the compiler used can understand why the assembly changed the way it did as a result. Not so with LLMs.

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

#776

Post by gspr »

erelong wrote: post #774
gspr wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still really, really, really struggle to see how humans are going to maintain and validate the programs written by LLMs if we no longer know (intimately) how to program. Any thoughts?

You could use AI to tutor you on how to code in a specific instance you need?

Tutoring – whether AI or human – does not provide the in-depth understanding necessary for validation and long-term maintenance. It can be a very useful step on the way there, but only a step.

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

#777

Post by febusravenga »

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…

> Using this stuff well is a deep topic. These things can be applied in so many different ways, and to so many different projects. The best asset you can develop is an intuition

You're basically saying that using LLMs is like using magic. Telling people to use intuition is basically telling that i don't know how it works and why, but works for me sometimes.

That's why we programmers hate it - we have safe space where there's no intuition - namely programming languages & runtimes with deterministic behavior. And we're shoehorned back into mess of magic/intuition and wishfullthinking.

(yes, i try llm, i have some results, i'm frustrated mostly by people AI-slopping _everything_ around me)

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

#778

Post by concats »

daxfohl wrote: post #599
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…

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 "…

> Ultimately I think over the next two years or so, Anthropic and OpenAI will evolve their product from "coding assistant" to "engineering team replacement"

The way I see it, there will always be a layer in the corporate organization where someone has to interact with the machine. The transitioning layer from humans to AIs. This is true no matter how high up the hierarchy you replace the humans, be it the engineers layer, the engineering managers, or even their managers.

Given the above, it feels reasonable to believe that whatever title that person has—who is responsible for converting human management's ideas into prompts (or whatever the future has the text prompts replaced by)—that person will do a better job if they have a high degree of technical competence. That is to say, I believe most companies will still want and benefit if that/those employees are engineers. Converting non-technical CEO fever dreams and ambitions into strict technical specifications and prompts.

What this means for us, our careers, or Anthropic's marketing department, I cannot say.

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

#779

Post by twelvedogs »

daxfohl wrote: post #599
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…

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 "…

honestly i think they got the low hanging fruit already. they're bumping up against the limits of what it can do and while it's impressive it's not spectacular

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

#780

Post by Xunjin »

gherkinnn wrote: post #290
falloutx wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this only works for people with like 10+ years of domain experience, doesnt that make this an Anti-AI article? Whole vibe coding sells on the promise that it works and it works for every tom and their mom.

This conflates two things. One is LLMs writing code. Not everything and not for everyone. But they are useful for most of the code being written. It is useful. What it does not do (yet, if ever) is bridging the gap from "idea" to a working solution. This is precisely where all the low-code ideas of the past decades fell apart. Translating an idea in to formal rules is very, very hard. Think of all of the "just add a…

"How hard can it be to add just a button?"
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