Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

81–90 of 419 posts

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#81
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.

AI companies don't think so, is clearly the implication.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#82
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as someone who’s interviewing, I know you can use AI — anyone can. It likely obscures me from judging the pitfalls, and design and architecture decisions that are required in proper engineering roles. Especially for senior and above applications, I want to make an assessment of how you think about problems, where it gives a chance for the candidate to show their experience, their technical understanding, and…

Then they shouldn't use libraries, open source code or even existing compilers. They shouldn't search online (man pages is OK). They should use git plumbing commands and sh (not bash of zsh). They should not have potable water in there house but distill river water.

There is a balance to be struck. You obviously don't expect a SWE to begin by identifying rare earth metal mining spots on his first day.

Where the line is drawn is context dependent, drawing the same single line for all possible situations is not possible and it's stupid to do so.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#83
post #64
post #12

It makes sense. Having the right people with the right merits and motivations will become even more important in the age of AI. Why you might ask? Execution is nothing when AI matures. Grasping the big picture, communicating effectively and possessing domain knowledge will be key. More roles in cognitive work will become senior positions. Of course you must know how to make the most out of AI, but it is more interest…

> Grasping the big picture, communicating effectively and possessing domain knowledge will be key But isn't this all the things AI promises to solve for you?

It's almost like what people have been saying for years: there's the promise of AI and the reality of AI - and they're 2 very different things. They only look similar to a layman without experience in the field.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#84
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.

I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I think it can be used as a tool for people who already have knowledge and skills, but I do worry how it will affect people growing up with it.

Personally I see it more like going to someone who (claims) to know what they're doing and asking them to do it for me. I might be able to watch them at work and maybe get a very general idea of what they're doing but will I actually learn something? I don't think so.

Now, we may point to the fact that previous generations railed at the degeneration of youth through things like pocket calculators or mobile phones but I think there is a massive difference between these things and so-called AI. Where those things were tools obligatorily (if you give a calculator to someone who doesn't know any formulae it will be useless to them), I think so-called AI can just jump straight to giving you the answer.

I personally believe that there are necessary steps that must be passed through to really obtain knowledge and I don't think so-called AI takes you through those steps. I think it will result in a generation of people with markedly fewer and shallower skills than the generations that came before.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#85
post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time!

I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program.

In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who was enjoying many of the obvious benefits - availability, tailoring information to his inquiry, etc. So we cut a deal: We'd use the same ChatGPT account and I could keep an eye on his interactions with the system, so I could help him when the AI went off the rails and was steering him into the wrong direction.

He initially made fast progress on the project I was helping him with, and was able to put more working code in place than others in the same phase. But then he hit a plateau really hard soon after, because he was running into bugs and issues he couldn't get solutions from the AI for and he just wasn't able to connect the dots himself.

He'd almost get there, but would sometimes forget to remove random single lines doing the wrong thing, etc. His mental map of the code was poor, because he hadn't written it himself in that oldschool "every line a hard-fought battle" style that really makes you understand why and how something works and how it connects to problems you're solving.

As a result he'd get frustrated and had bouts of absenteeism next, because there wasn't any string of rewards and little victories there but just listless poking in the mud.

To his credit, he eventually realized leaning on ChatGPT was holding him back mentally and he tried to take things slower and go back to API docs and slowly building up his codebase by himself.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#86
This has a poetic tone to it.

However, not sure what to think of it. So AI should help people on their job and their interview process, but also not? When it matters? What if you're super good ML/AI, but very bad at doing applications? Would you still have a chance?

Or do you get filtered out?

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#87
post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

Use LLM. But do not let it be the sole source of your information for any particular field. I think it's one of the most important disciplines the younger generation - to be honest, all generations - will have to learn.

I have a rule for myself as a non-native English speaker: Any day I ask LLMs to fix my English, I must read 10 pages from traditionally published books (preferably pre-2023). Just to prevent LLM from dominating my language comprehension.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#88
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who wa…

> listless poking in the mud

https://xkcd.com/1838/

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#89
post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

Feeling "Lazy" is just an emotion, which to me has nothing to do with how productive you are as a human. In fact the people not feeling lazy but hyped are probably more effective and productive. You're just doing this to yourself because you have assumptions on how a productive/effective human should function. You could call it "stuck in the past".

I have the idea that there are 2 kinds of people, those avidly against AI because it makes mistakes (it sure does) and makes one lazy and all other kinds of negative things, and those that experiment and find a place for it but aren't that vocal about it.

Sure you can go too far, I've heard someone in Quality Control Proclaim "ChatGPT just knows everything, its saves me so much time!" To which I asked if they heart about hallucinations and they hadn't, they'd just been copying whatever it said into their reports. Which is certainly problematic.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#90
post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

> LLMs just make you lazy.

Yeah, and I'd like to emphasize that this is qualitatively different from older gripes such as "calculators make kids lazy in math."

This is because LLMs' have an amazing ability to dream up responses stuffed with traditional signals of truthfulness, care, engagement, honesty etc... but that ability is not matched by their chances of dreaming up answers and ideas that are logically true.

This gap is inevitable from their current design, and it means users are given signals that it's safe for their brains to think-less-hard (skepticism, critical analysis) about what's being returned at the same moments when they need to use their minds the most.

That's new. A calculator doesn't flatter you or pretend to be a wise professor with a big vocabulary listening very closely to your problems.

Post reply on HN