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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#901

Post by 1dom »

skydhash wrote: post #614
1dom wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this take on modern tech motivations. The thing that I struggle with is I agree with it, but I also get a lot of value in using AI to make me more productive - to me, it feels like it lets me focus on producing substance and actions, freeing me up from having to some tedious things in some tedious ways. Without getting into the debate about if it's productive overall, there are certain tasks which it feels irr…

Just one nitpick. The thing about test is that it’s repetitive enough to be automated (in a deterministic way) or abstracted into a framework. You don’t need an AI to generate it.

I find it helpful for generating automated test suites in the style of the rest of the codebase. When working across multiple projects and clients, it reduces the mental load of having to remember or figure out how tests are expected to work in each codebase.

I agree with your theory about tests. The reality of it is most code is garbage - often including my own - and in a lot of environments, the task is to get the job done in a way that fits in with what's there.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#902

Post by lurking_swe »

nils-m-holm wrote: post #891
lurking_swe wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you see any benefits to using AI to check your book for typos, grammatical issues, or even just general “feedback” prior to publishing? Seems like there are uses for AI other than “please write it all for me”, no?

I use a spell checker to catch typos. Occasional quirky grammar is mine. Feedback will be provided by the audience. Why would I let a statistical model judge my work? This is how you kill originality.

i didn’t imply you’d need an LLM to “rate” your content. More so asking questions during and before the publishing step to help you improve your work. Not removing your identity from your work. Examples questions of what you could ask an LLM:

• are there any redundant sentences or points in this chapter?

• i’m trying to remember an expression used to convey X, can you remind me what it is?

• i’m familiar with X from my industry Y, but i’m trying to convey this to an audience from industry Z. Can you help brainstorm some words or examples they may be more familiar with?

Things like that. I think of it like having a virtual rubber duck that can help you debug code, or anything really.

Obviously these are just some suggestions. If you don’t find any of this useful, or even interesting, then carry on. :)

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#903

Post by namaria »

techdmn wrote: post #547
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google didn't change it, it embodied it. The problem isn't AI, it's the pervasive culture of PR and advertising which appeared in the 50s and eventually consumed its host. Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate. PR and ad cul…

Thank you, you've stated this all very clearly. I've been thinking about this in terms of "doing work", where you care about the results, and "performing work", where you care about how you are evaluated. I know someone who works in a lab, and pointed out that some of the equipment being used was out of spec and under-serviced to the point that it was essentially a random number generator. Caring about this is "doing…

The slippage between work and meaning is due to the arrival of post scarcity.

There isn't enough meaningful work to go around because work is still predicated on delivering some useful transformation. But when 80% of the useful transformations can be done by 20% of the people and we have enough to keep civilization going, you don't need full employment any more. But due to the moral hazard doctrine, the elites want to retain control and discipline as is.

For being afraid of a world where people don't care about maintaining the system anymore because it's not needed to house and feed everyone and people can just do art or learn or rest, the system keeps inventing meaningless work.

We're shipping fruit half way across the world to be packaged and then halfway back to be consumed. None of this is efficient or necessary. But it keeps the control system intact and that's the goal.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#904

Post by koliber »

Gigachad wrote: post #120
irisgrunn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the major problem. People will blindly trust the output of AI because it appears to be amazing, this is how mistakes slip in. It might not be a big deal with the app you're working on, but in a banking app or medical equipment this can have a huge impact.

I feel like I’m being gaslit about these AI code tools. I’ve got the paid copilot through work and I’ve just about never had it do anything useful ever. I’m working on a reasonably large rails app and it can’t seem to answer any questions about anything, or even auto fill the names of methods defined in the app. Instead it just makes up names that seem plausible. It’s literally worse than the built in auto suggestion…

My experience is anecdotal, based on a sample size of one. I'm not writing to convince, but to share. Please take a look at my resume to see my background, so you can weight what I write.

I tried cursor because a technically-minded product manager colleague of mine managed to build a damned solid MVP of an AI chat agent with it. He is not a programmer, but knows enough to kick the can until things work. I figured if it worked for him, I might invest an hour of my time to check it out.

I went in with a time-boxed one hour time to install cursor and implement a single trivial feature. My app is not very sophisticated - mostly a bunch of setup flows and CRUD. However, there are some non-trivial things which I would expect to have documented in a wiki if I was building this with a team.

Cursor did really well. It generated code that was close to working. It figured out those not-obvious bits as well and the changes it made kept them in mind. This is something I would not expect from a junior dev, had I not explained those cross-dependencies to them (mostly keeping state synchronized according to business rule across different entities).

It did a poor job of applying those changes to my files. It would not add the code it generated in the right places and mess things up along the way. I felt I was wrestling with it a but too much to my liking. But once I figured this out I started hand-applying it's changes and reviewing them as I incorporated them into my code. This workflow was beautiful.

It was as if I sent a one paragraph description of the change I want, and received a text file with code snippets and instructions where to apply them.

I ended up spending four hours with cursor and giving it more and more sophisticated changes and larger features to implement. This is the first AI tool I tried where I gave it access to my codebase. I picked cursor because I've heard mixed reviews about others, and my time is valuable. It did not disappoint.

I can imagine it will trip up on a larger codebase. These tools are really young still. I don't know about other AI tools, and am planning on giving them a whirl in the near future.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#905

Post by koliber »

simonw wrote: post #494
nucleardog wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat. I've tried a few of these tools and the output's generally been terrible to useless big and small. It's made up plausible-sounding but non-existent methods on the popular framework we use, something which it should have plenty of context and examples on. Dealing with the output is about the same as dealing with a code review for an extremely junior employee... who didn't even run and verify thei…

The biggest lie in all of LLMs is that they’ll work out of the box and you don’t need to take time to learn them. I find Copilot autocomplete invaluable as a productivity boost, but that’s because I’ve now spent over two years learning how to best use it! “And it's much more difficult for me to explain the solution in English than in code--I basically already have the code in my head, now I'm going through a translat…

You bring up a good point! These tools are useless if you can't prompt them effectively.

I am decent at explaining what I want in English. I have coded and managed developers for long enough to include tips on how I want something implemented. So far, I am nothing short of amazed. The tools are nowhere near perfect, but they do provide a non-trivial boost in my productivity. I feel like I did when I first used an IDE.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#906

Post by koliber »

woah wrote: post #576
layer8 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can spend my time revieweing and correcting. Do you really like spending most of your time reviewing AI output? I certainly don’t, that’s soul-crushing.

I think there are two types of developers: those who are most excited about building things, and those who are most excited about the craft of programming. If I can build things faster, then I'm happy to spend most of my time reviewing AI code. That doesn't mean that I never write code. Some things the AI is worse at, or need to be exactly write and its faster to do them manually.

> I think there are two types of developers: those who are most excited about building things, and those who are most excited about the craft of programming.

Love this. You hit the nail right on the head.

I don't know if I fit into one or the other. However, I do know that at times I feel like one, and at other times, the other.

If I am writing another new app and need to build a slew of CRUD code, I don't care about the craft. I mean, I don't want sloppy code, but I do not get joy out of writing what is _almost_ boilerplate. I still want it to reflect my style, but I don't want to type it all out. I already know how it all works in my head. The faster I get it into an IDE the better. Cursor (the AI IDE) allowed me to do this much faster than I would have by hand.

Then there is time where I do want to craft something beautiful. I had one part of this project where I needed to build a scheduler and I had very specific things I wanted it to do. I tried twice to describe what I want but the AI tool did not do what I wanted. It built a working piece of code, but I could not get it to grasp the nuance.

I sat down and wrote the code for the scheduler, but then had to deal with a bunch of edge cases. I took this code, gave it to the AI and told it to implement those edge cases. After reviewing and iterating on it, I had exactly what I wanted.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#907

Post by bburnett44 »

datahack wrote: post #894
Animats wrote: post #666

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

It’s probably generally irrelevant what they can do today, or what you’ve seen so far. This is conceptually essentially Moore’s law, but about every 5.5 months. That’s the only thing that matters at this stage. I watched everyone make the same arguments about the general Internet, and then the Web, then mobile, then Bitcoin. It’s just a toy. It’s not that useful. Is this supposed to be the revolution? It uses too muc…

I think we can pretty safely say bitcoin was a dead end other than for buying drugs, enabling ransomware payments, or financial speculation.

Show me an average person who has bought something real w bitcoin (who couldn’t have bought it for less complexity/transaction cost using a bank) and I’ll change my mind

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#908

Post by _heimdall »

low_tech_love wrote: post #874
_heimdall wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, I'm not going to criticize anyone that does it, like I said, you have to, that's it. Why do you say people have to do it? People absolutely can choose not to use LLMs and to instead write their own words and thoughts, just like developers can simply refuse to build LLM tools, whether its because they have safety concerns or because they simply see "AI" in its current state as a doomed marketing play that is no…

If you find yourself in a situation where you write one book at the same time as your peers are writing ten, how can you keep up? Also how can you justify to yourself not using it if nobody around you seems to value that, and even worse, is pushing you to actually use it? I find it hard to find a reason why you would. Unless we see a super strong reader revolution that collectively decides to shun AI and pay more mon…

What you're describing here is actually a much more broad problem in the book industry, in my opinion. Almost every book written today is written with only one goal in mind, selling as many copies as possible.

People don't have to use LLMs (they don't seem to be AI yet) because they can simply choose not to. For authors, write books that you want to write because you believe you have a story to tell. Worry about perfecting your stories and enjoy the process of writing, don't be an author just for the sales. Once you peek behind the curtain and learn the economics of the book industry, you'll realize there's very little opportunity for making enough cash to even worry about shotgunning a mountain of LLM books into the world anyway.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#909

Post by corimaith »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #472
StrLght wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extrapolation of past progress isn't evidence.

You don't have to extrapolate. There's a frenzy of talent being applied to this problem, it's drawing more brainpower the more progress that is made. Young people see this as one of the most interesting, prestigious, and best-paying fields to work in. A lot of these researchers are really talented, and are doing more than just scaling up. They're pushing at the frontiers in every direction, and finding methods that w…

This getting too abstract. The core issue of LLMs that others have pointed out is the lack of accuracy; Which is how they are supposed to work because they should be paired with a knowledge representation system in a proper chatbot system.

We've been trying to build a knowledge representation system powerful enough to capture the world for decades, but this is something that goes more into the foundations of mathematics and philosophy that it has to do with the majority of engineering research. You need a literal genius to figure that out. The majority of those "talented" people and funding aren't doing that.

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