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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#81

Post by yunyu »

Windchaser wrote: post #25
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm.. but do they need it.. at this point, we do have custom tools that beat humans. In a sense, all LLM need is a way to connect to that tool ( and the same is true is for counting and many other aspects ).

Yeah, but you know that manually telling the LLM to operate other custom tools is not going to be a long-term solution. And if an LLM could design, create, and operate a separate model, and then return/translate its results to you, that would be huge, but it also seems far away. But I'm ignorant here. Can anyone with a better background of SOTA ML tell me if this is being pursued, and if so, how far away it is? (And…

This has been happening for the past year on verifiable problems (did the change you made in your codebase work end-to-end, does this mathematical expression validate, did I win this chess match, etc...). The bulk of data, RL environment, and inference spend right now is on coding agents (or broadly speaking, tool use agents that can make their own tools).

Recent advances in mathematical/physics research have all been with coding agents making their own "tools" by writing programs: https://openai.com/index/new-result-theoretical-physics/

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#82

Post by gorjusborg »

emp17344 wrote: post #68
DrewADesign wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amplified means more work done by fewer people. It doesn’t need to replace a single entire functional human being to do things like kill the demand for labor in dev, which in turn, will kill salaries.

This is incorrect. It’s basic economics - technology that boosts productivity results in higher salaries and more jobs.

Well, that depends on whether the technology requires expertise that is rare and/or hard to acquire.

I'd say that using AI tools effectively to create software systems is in that class currently, but it isn't necessarily always going to be the case.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#83

Post by emp17344 »

xlerb wrote: post #24

Humans don’t have an internal notion of “fact” or “truth.” They generate statistically plausible text. Reliability comes from scaffolding: retrieval, tools, validation layers. Without that, fluency can masquerade as authority. The interesting question isn’t whether they’re coworkers or exoskeletons. It’s whether we’re mistaking rhetoric for epistemology.

Ethical realists would disagree with you.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#84

Post by icedchai »

badgersnake wrote: post #55
givemeethekeys wrote: post #35

Closer to a really capable intern. Lots of potential for good and bad; needs to be watched closely.

I’ve been playing with qwen3-coder recently and that intern is definitely not getting hired, despite the rave reviews elsewhere.

Have you tried Claude Code with Opus or Sonnet 4.5? I've played around with a ton of open models and they just don't compare in terms of quality.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#86

Post by therealpygon »

hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

I don’t believe people who have dedicated their lives to open source will simply want to stop working on it, no matter how much is or is not written by AI. I also have to agree, I find myself more and more lately laughing about just how much resources we waste creating exactly the same things over and over in software. I don’t mean generally, like languages, I mean specifically. How many trillions of times has a form with username and password fields been designed, developed, had meetings over, tested, debugged, transmitted, processed, only to ultimately be re-written months later?

I wonder what all we might build instead, if all that time could be saved.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#87

Post by ottah »

Make centaurs, not unicorns. The human is almost always going to be the strongest element in the loop, and the most efficient. Augmenting human skill will always outperform present day SOTA AI systems (assuming a competent human).

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#88

Post by datakazkn »

The exoskeleton framing resonates, especially for repetitive data work. Parts where AI consistently delivers: pattern recognition, format normalization, first-draft generation. Parts where human judgment is still irreplaceable: knowing when the data is wrong, deciding what 'correct' even means in context, and knowing when to stop iterating.

The exoskeleton doesn't replace instinct. It just removes friction from execution so more cycles go toward the judgment calls that actually matter.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#90

Post by slopinthebag »

cogman10 wrote: post #43
finnjohnsen2 wrote: post #37

I like this. This is an accurate state of AI at this very moment for me. The LLM is (just) a tool which is making me "amplified" for coding and certain tasks. I will worry about developers being completely replaced when I see something resembling it. Enough people worry about that (or say it to amp stock prices) -- and they like to tell everyone about this future too. I just don't see it.

The more likely outcome is that fewer devs will be hired as fewer devs will be needed to accomplish the same amount of output.

When computers came onto the market and could automate a large percentage of office jobs, what happened to the job market for office jobs?
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