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"People who don't use AI will be left behind"

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Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#91

Post by scrumbledober »

spamizbad wrote: post #33

The statement is absurd because the skill curve for AI tooling is so small you can can mess around for a day or two and get "caught up" with the zeitgeist. And what you need to know to get started is actually far less these days than it was 1.5 years ago thanks to all the product refinement that took place in the space. The only real risk is that today there's an expectation from employers that you've got some AI exp…

6-12 months ago I felt like i was constantly behind the curve with all the different things people were doing to get more out of their claude code. as the year has progressed though, all of those features keep making their way into vanilla claude code, at a faster and faster rate. Now someone working on the bleeding edge is using things that i'll be using without having to think about them a month from now. It has really reduced my anxiety of being left behind.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#92

Post by dsiegel2275 »

jerhewet wrote: post #87

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it. IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and re…

Take me with you, please.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#93

Post by irishcoffee »

sdevonoes wrote: post #62

Any engineer (any person actually) can “learn to use AI” in a couple of days. It’s not rocket science; there’s no chance of left behind. If you haven’t use LLMs at all, a weekend would be enough to be on par with everyone else in the industry

/thread

If one has been reading a wide variety of books/papers/articles/whatever their whole life, and one has been mindful of how to communicate with the "written word" as it were, it takes about 3 hours to be wildly effective with this technology. I think it took longer to learn google-fu than it did to learn how to use this technology effectively.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#94

Post by suriya-ganesh »

bluegatty wrote: post #82

People not using AI will 100% get left behind as sure as those refusing to 'cars' or 'computers'. There is absolutely not doubt; and it will be impossible to avoid as using 'plastic' or 'electricity'. The narrow challenges of 'AI aided development' or 'AI aided creative work' are legitimate - that part is real and fair, but it'd be an over-statement to contemplate 'not using it'. The cyclists who keep their muscles s…

this is definitely not true.

with AI agents, you're obtaining a mildly lossy perspective of the code itself. whereas if you wrote it by hand, you'd have a more concrete understanding.

This is not too different from an engineering manager directing junior developers.

The stereotype of the engineering manager who forgot to write a line of code is not wrong.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#95

Post by ericd »

virissimo wrote: post #37
saadn92 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also used to say that Google or calculators will make you dumber. Neither happened. Won't happen with this either.

People are worse at mental arithmetic than they were in the recent past, so it's not clear that they aren't "dumber" in the sense people meant at the time.

And did our thinking about the importance of being good at arithmetic change in response? I think so.

We also used to be much better remembering things, when we relied on oral histories, our memory skills have degraded quite a bit. And there's a quote from Socrates criticizing how writing is a crutch that degrades our skill (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1... , the last bit). Over time, we've just moved to valuing other things more.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#96

Post by notahacker »

jojomodding wrote: post #14

I sympathise with the author and the argument. I know the text is a rant. As such, I can understand that the proposed consequences might not make sense. Yet still, there is a fun game you can play, where you replace AI by "chess engine" and you get a text that would be fitting for a late 90s chess grandmaster but seen as totally anachronistic today: "Chess players who don't use engines will be left behind", they say.…

Sounds like something Magnus Carlsen might say. I hear he's doing quite well out of the game of chess, and pointedly not playing how a computer would play, even though Deep Blue is clearly capable of winning more than he is and from more difficult positions.

Also, the world isn't as trivially solved by computation as a game of chess, so maybe delegating your job or how to be a better human to ChatGPT isn't as much of a winning strategy as getting the computer to suggest chess moves.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#97

Post by avgDev »

mlinhares wrote: post #83
spamizbad wrote: post #33

The statement is absurd because the skill curve for AI tooling is so small you can can mess around for a day or two and get "caught up" with the zeitgeist. And what you need to know to get started is actually far less these days than it was 1.5 years ago thanks to all the product refinement that took place in the space. The only real risk is that today there's an expectation from employers that you've got some AI exp…

You're discounting the "being able to write properly and put ideas into inteligible text" skill piece here.

Most people who have been programming for a while should have those skills. If they don't then learning AI is not the issue but communication is.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#98

Post by skydhash »

mlinhares wrote: post #83
spamizbad wrote: post #33

The statement is absurd because the skill curve for AI tooling is so small you can can mess around for a day or two and get "caught up" with the zeitgeist. And what you need to know to get started is actually far less these days than it was 1.5 years ago thanks to all the product refinement that took place in the space. The only real risk is that today there's an expectation from employers that you've got some AI exp…

You're discounting the "being able to write properly and put ideas into inteligible text" skill piece here.

Most good programmers are good at writing. If you’re capable at simultaneously writing instructions for a dumb abstract machine and have those instructions being understandable for humans, you’re clearly good at expressing at least technical ideas.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#99

Post by joe_mamba »

jerhewet wrote: post #87

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it. IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and re…

[flagged]

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#100

Post by pydry »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #80
sdevonoes wrote: post #62

Any engineer (any person actually) can “learn to use AI” in a couple of days. It’s not rocket science; there’s no chance of left behind. If you haven’t use LLMs at all, a weekend would be enough to be on par with everyone else in the industry

The better you are at architecting or even directing a junior developer, the better your output too. Dont let AI make decisions, its supposed to take your decisions and turn those into code. When AI makes decisions, well the unexpected outcome is always on you.

i always found it to be easier to write code myself than to direct a junior developer.

the level of teaching involved would always mean the overall velocity of work slowed down.

some people say you can throw them the drudge work but i find that if you're doing coding right (e.g. you dont let your code base degenerate into a mess of boilerplate), there is barely any drudge work to do.

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