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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#81

Post by jasonjmcghee »

bpye wrote: post #50
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #24

There are plenty of engineers that couldn't work without a modern IDE or in languages without memory management. Or without the ability to use a library from GitHub / their package manager. It doesn't feel THAT much different to me. "Engineer" as a term might drift. There are "web developers" that can only use webflow / wordpress.

At least today, it isn't practical for most people to run these models locally- I think adding a dependency on a cloud service is different enough to some local (possibly open source) tool like an IDE.

Slack, GitHub, Figma, AWS, etc

Lots of people use firebase, supabase etc.

Many people's jobs are centered around using Salesforce

It all makes me uncomfortable- I want to be able to work without internet. But it's getting more difficult to do it

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#82

Post by clutter55561 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #17

No, AI is not creating that group of people. They already existed. They were the people who would google for StackOverflow snippets and copy+paste them without even reading the entire snippet, much less understand them. Same people, new tool.

Exactly what I posted as well!

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#86

Post by clutter55561 »

_pdp_ wrote: post #41

Huberman: Your brain has a region that only grows when you do things you don't want to do ...or as I interpret it your brain grows only when it does things that are difficult. If you remove the difficulty, it will atrophy into a hum of a mindless chit-chat. Engineering the data structures and control flows from scratch is a completely different than asking an LLM to scaffold them for you.

I love programming, but I don’t love working. I’m about 10 years away from retiring and can’t wait. Does that count? ;-)

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#87

Post by shagie »

joe_mamba wrote: post #5
CorbenDallas wrote: post #3

There are plenty of engineers, who simply can't think, AI will not change anything in this regard.

How do you graduate your engineering degree without being able to think? Even my colleagues who cheated their way through uni still needed critical thinking to do that and get away with cheating without being caught. People might hate this but being a good cheat requires a lot of critical thinking.

A degree is passing the test. Not all degree programs get into more advanced topics nor do they necessarily require that someone is able to work through how to solve a problem that they haven't seen before.

--

A lot of students (and developers out there too) are able to pass follow instructions and pass the test.

A smaller portion of them are able to divide up a task into the "this is what I need to do to accomplish that task".

Even fewer of them are able to work through the process of identifying the cause of a problem they haven't seen before and work through to figure out what the solution for that problem is.

--

... There are also a lot of people out there that aren't even able to fall into the first group without copying and pasting from another source. I've seen the "stack sort" at work https://xkcd.com/1185/ https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/ professionally. People copying and pasting from Stack Overflow (back in the day) without understanding what they're writing.

Now, they do it with AI. Take the contents of the Jira description, paste it into some text box, submit the new code as a PR, take the feedback from the PR and paste it back into the box and repeat that a few times. I've seen PRs with "you're absolutely correct, here are the updates you requested" be sent back to me for review again.

This is not a new thing. AI didn't cause it, but AI is exacerbating the issue with professional programming by having the people who are not much more than some meat between one text box and another (yes, I'm being a bit harsh there) and the people who need instructions but don't understand design to be more "productive" while overwhelming the more senior developers.

... And this also becomes a set of permanent training wheels on developers who might be able to learn more if they had to do it. That applies at all levels. One needs to practice without training wheels and learn from mistakes to get better.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#88

Post by ua709 »

xnx wrote: post #75
staticshock wrote: post #66

The eloquence with which this point gets (repeatedly) made is continuing to improve each next time I read it. However, I still feel like we haven't nailed it. That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse (e.g. "the medium is the message", "you ship your org chart", "9 mothers can't make a baby in a month"), in which the most pointed version of this critique packs a punch in just a few words that r…

This concept won't reach that point because when you chisel too hard it crumbles. There are countless lower level tasks that typical programmers no longer learn how to do. Our capacity for knowledge is not unlimited so we offload everything we can to move to the next level of abstraction.

I get your point, I just wonder how accurate it is. We basically never look at the output of the compiler, so I agree that tool allows one to operate at a higher level than assembly. But I always have to wade through the output from AI so I’m not sure I got to move to the next level of abstraction. But maybe that’s just me.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#89

Post by what-the-grump »

joe_mamba wrote: post #5
CorbenDallas wrote: post #3

There are plenty of engineers, who simply can't think, AI will not change anything in this regard.

How do you graduate your engineering degree without being able to think? Even my colleagues who cheated their way through uni still needed critical thinking to do that and get away with cheating without being caught. People might hate this but being a good cheat requires a lot of critical thinking.

I don't know but I can point at more than half of the people that I work with that can't think, and every time they try to, takes a whole group of people that can think to undo their mess, they all have degrees and I don't.

So what does that tell me?

Better yet, for about 30% having the LLM slop it would have yielded better outcomes, but having them slop something nets terrible slop. But at least I can reshape because even the LLM wont do something that stupid.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#90

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Ekaros wrote: post #48
saadn92 wrote: post #10

Hard disagree. I feel like I'm thinking a lot more now because I have so many parallel projects going on at the same time. AI has allowed me to really, truly create in a way that I've never done before. Yes, my coding skills probably aren't as sharp as they used to be, but my system design skills are at an all time high. Don't blame the tool.

For how many different parallel projects can you really keep proper mental model in your head at one time? Or put enough effort to seriously consider all aspects. I think number varies between simple and more complex. But still, could that number be lower than many think it is?

It really depends on who you consider the "many" to be. I've seen people who claim they can meaningfully iterate on 10 projects simultaneously, and I'm skeptical of that. My personal experience is that my decisions are noticeably degraded at 3-4 parallel workstreams, and with even the simplest projects I'm non-functional past 6.

But I can juggle 2 workstreams in a day easily, and I can trivially swap projects in and out of the "hot path" as demanded by prioritization or blockers; before LLM coding both of those were a lot harder.

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