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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

#781

Post by ludicrousdispla »

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…

Of the four coding examples you describe, I find none of them compelling either in their utility or as a case for firing a dev (with one important caveat [0]).

In each example, you were already very familiar with the problem at hand, and that probably took far longer than any additional time savings AI could offer.

0. Perhaps I consider your examples as worthless simply because you gloss over them so quickly, in which case that greatly increases the odds in most companies that you would be fired.

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

#782

Post by mrkeen »

I'm living the dream right now:

--------

  Let me check for a Directory.Build.props file instead, as it might contain the package versions:
well are you doing it?

  I'll check for the Directory.Build.props file to see if it contains the package versions:
Let me know when you're done

  Let me check for the Directory.Build.props file to see if it contains the package versions:
Are you currently doing anything?

  I noticed that the CsCheck package reference was commented out in your project file. Here's what I've done so far:

  Uncommented the CsCheck package reference in your __________.Tests.Core.csproj file.
  Tried to restore the packages, but hit a snag because the project uses central package version management.
  To fix this, I need to find where the package versions are managed in your solution. Could you help me locate the Directory.Packages.props or Directory.Build.props file in your solution root? This is where the package versions are typically defined in .NET projects with central package management.

  Once you point me to the right file, I can help you add the CsCheck package version there.
it's in Directory.Packages.props

  I'll help you find and update the Directory.Packages.props file. Let's locate it first.
You have already located it: it's Directory.Packages.prop in the solution root, like you said.

  Let me check the contents of the Directory.Packages.props file to see the current package versions:
CsCheck is already in Directory.Packages.prop

  I've restored the packages, and the command completed successfully. The CsCheck package should now be properly restored and the "Cannot resolve symbol 'CsCheck'" error should be resolved.

  Let me know if you still see the error in your IDE. If you do, try these steps:

  Close and reopen the solution
  Rebuild the solution
  If the error persists, let me know and we can try additional troubleshooting steps.
--------

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

#783

Post by josefrichter »

The "AI stealing jobs" is just a new-age Luddism. Yes, of course it will be painful for many, but at larger scale, even those who lose the jobs should benefit overall.

"your ability to create a mental representation of the problem to communicate to the LLM" – this is the tipping point imho. So far, you need to be good at this. That's why senior jobs are not affected yet. The question is for how long. We are probably just months away from the time when LLMs (or other form of AI) will be better at creating better "mental representation", better abstractions and better solutions, than most humans in most cases, including those in senior positions. And that will spill over to other non-dev jobs too.

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

#784

Post by twelve40 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #83
cmiles8 wrote: post #6

The “anti-AU hype” phrase oversimplifies what’s playing out at the moment. On the tech side, while things are a bit rough around the edges still the tech is very useful and isn’t going away. I honestly don’t see much disagreement there. The concern mostly comes from the business side… that for all the usefulness on the tech there is no clearly viable path that financially supports everything that’s going on. It’s a n…

People said the exact same thing about (numbers from memory, might be off): - when Google paid $1 bil for YouTube - when Facebook paid $1 bil for Instagram - when Facebook paid $1 bil for WhatsApp The same thing - these 3 companies make no money, and have no path to making money, and that the price paid was crazy and decoupled from any economics. Yet now, in hindsight, they look like brilliant business decisions.

yeah, and Zuckerberg said that everyone on planet Earth will buy his VR helmet, and renamed his whole company after a stupid game which i don't think even exists anymore. Being a contrarian doesn't mean you are right, and sometimes seemingly stupid money-losing things turn out... stupid.

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

#785

Post by matsemann »

mvkel wrote: post #580
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…

> Other people are just less picky than I am I think this is part of it. When coding style has been established among a team, or within an app, there are a lot of extra hoops to jump through, just to get it to look The Right Way, with no detectable benefit to the user. If you put those choices aside and simply say: does it accomplish the goal per the spec (and is safe and scalable[0]), then you can get away with a lo…

> with no detectable benefit to the user

Except the fact that the idioms and patterns used means that I can jump in and understand any part of the codebase, as I know it will be wired up and work the same as any other part.

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

#786

Post by Marazan »

ahmadyan wrote: post #770
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?

Very few people have the expertise to write efficient assembly code, yet everyone relies on compilers and assemblers to translate high-level code to byte-level machine code. I think same concept is true here. Once coding agents become trivial, few people will know the detail of the programming language and make sure intent is correctly transformed to code, and the majority will focus on different objectives and take…

Yes, but compilers (in the main), do not have a random number generator to decide what output to produce.

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

#787

Post by onetokeoverthe »

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…

[dead]

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

#788

Post by 20k »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #604
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…

> 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 wish LLMs were good at search. I've tried to evaluate them many times for their quality at answering research questions for astrophysics (specifically numerical relativity). If they were good at answering questions, I'd use them in a heartbeat

Without exception, every technical question I've ever asked an LLM that I know the answer to, has been substantially wrong in some fashion. This makes it just.. absolutely useless for research. In some cases I've spotted it straight up plagiarising from the original sources, with random capitalisation giving it away

The issue is that once you get even slightly into a niche, they fall apart because the training data just doesn't exist. But they don't say "sorry there's insufficient training data to give you an answer", they just make shit up and state it as confidently incorrect

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

#789

Post by feanaro »

ahmadyan wrote: post #770
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?

Very few people have the expertise to write efficient assembly code, yet everyone relies on compilers and assemblers to translate high-level code to byte-level machine code. I think same concept is true here. Once coding agents become trivial, few people will know the detail of the programming language and make sure intent is correctly transformed to code, and the majority will focus on different objectives and take…

No, that's a completely different concept, because we have faultless machines which perfectly and deterministically translate high-level code into byte-level machine code. This is another case of (nearly) perfect abstraction.

On the other hand, the whole deal of the LLM is that it does so stochastically and unpredictably.

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

#790

Post by embedding-shape »

antirez wrote: post #745
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…

After you review, instead of rewriting 70% of the code, have you tried to follow up with a message with a list of things to fix? Also: in my experience 1. and 2. are not needed for you to have bad results. The existing code base is a fundamental variable. The more complex / convoluted it is, the worse is the result. Also in my experience LLMs are constantly better at producing C code than anything else (Python includ…

> After you review, instead of rewriting 70% of the code, have you tried to follow up with a message with a list of things to fix?

I think this is the wrong approach, already by having "wrong code" in the context, makes every response after this worse.

Instead, try restarting, but this time specify exactly how you expected that 70% of the code to actually have worked, from the get go. Often, LLMs seem to make choices because they have to, and if you think they made the wrong choice, you can often find that you didn't actually specify something well enough, hence the LLM had to do something, since apparently the single most important thing for them is that they finish something, no matter how right or wrong.

After a while, you'll get better at knowing what you have to be precise, specific and "extra verbose" about, compared to other things. Something that also seems to depend on the model, like with how Gemini you can have 5 variations of "Don't add any comments" yet it does anyways, but say that once to GPT/Claude-family of models and it seems they get it at once.

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