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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

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Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#901

Post by deltarholamda »

antirez wrote: post #759

Thanks for reading / commenting this post. Initially it seemed like I received a bunch of very negative comments, now I read most of the thread, and there are very good points, articulated with sensibility. Thank you. I wanted to provide some more context that is not part of the blog post. Since somebody may believe I don't enjoy / love the act of writing code. 1. I care a lot about programming, I love creating somet…

I think there is a danger in the enthusiasm for AI inside of these excellent points, namely that the skills that make a good programmer are not inherent, they are learned.

The comparison would be a guy who is an excellent journeyman electrician. This guy has visual-spatial skills that makes bending and installing conduit a kind of art. He has a deep and intuitive understanding of how circuits are balanced in a panel, so he does not overload a phase. But he was not born with them. These are acquired over many years of labor and tutelage.

If AI removes these barriers--and I think it will, as AI-enhanced programmers will out-perform and out-compete those who are not in today's employment market--then the programmer will learn different skills that may or may not be in keeping with language skills, algorithms, problem decomposition, etc. They may in fact be orthogonal to these skills.

The effect of this may be an improvement, of course. It's hard to say for sure as I left my crystal ball in my other jacket. But it will certainly be different. And those who are predisposed for programming in the old-school way may not find the field as attractive because it is no longer the same sort of engineering, something like the difference between the person that designs a Lego set and the person that assembles a Lego set. It could, in fact, mean that the very best programmers become a kind of elite, able to solve most problems with just a handful of those elite programmers. I'm sure that's the dream of Google and Microsoft. However this will centralize the industry in a way not seen since perhaps IBM, only with a much smaller chance of outside disruption.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#902

Post by simonw »

febusravenga wrote: post #777
simonw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…

> Using this stuff well is a deep topic. These things can be applied in so many different ways, and to so many different projects. The best asset you can develop is an intuition You're basically saying that using LLMs is like using magic. Telling people to use intuition is basically telling that i don't know how it works and why, but works for me sometimes. That's why we programmers hate it - we have safe space where…

Oddly enough I wrote about the magic analogy and why I stopped using is a few years ago (pre-ChatGPT, even): https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/5/spell-casting/

I am eternally frustrated that "intuition" is the key skill people need to work effectively with LLMs, because it's something I can't teach people! If I could figure out how to download my intuition into other people's heads I would do that.

Instead I have to convince people that intuition is key, and the only way to get it is to invest in experimenting.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#903

Post by mikemarsh »

nephihaha wrote: post #408

Universal Basic Income is not the panacea it's claimed to be. UBI gives government more control over individuals' finances, especially those without independent means. Poverty is also the result of unfair taxation, where poor people face onerous taxes while receiving less and less in return, and the wealthy avoid tax at every turn. Or that it is difficult for people to be self-employed due to red tape favouring big b…

Yeah, it's quite unbelievable people are still repeating the "AI everything -> UBI -> everyone comfortable and well-fed" line.

Who's to say the governments won't just let society continue on the exact same trajectory it was before generative AI: "Lost your job? Too bad for you. Here's a gig economy and maybe some minimal food stamps. Innovation marches on!"

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#904

Post by Rooster61 »

The question that I haven't seen answered yet is whether or not we will reach a sort of "peak vibe coding" phase. What I mean by that is, right now, LLM's are somewhat decent at writing workable code. That code, however, needs babysitting to keep from going off the rails. And that code is sourced from training, which has been gleaned from the billions of lines of code written by hackers everywhere and pushed to source control.

We currently have engineers competent enough to use an LLM, review the code written, and fix the places where the LLM writes poor code. We also still have engineers pushing novel code themselves. That means we are on the up-slope. Right now, nascent hackers are learning perhaps the old ways, but also are for sure paying attention to and using vibe coding. That creates a negative feedback loop. As greybeards age out of programming, so to does the knowledge foundation that allowed LLM training to take place in the first place, and more importantly, that trained the next generation of hackers. AI is going to increasingly begin consuming AI code, and I haven't seen solid evidence yet that it is capable (at least currently) of putting truly novel ideas into code.

There will be an inflection point where AI's are consuming their own output more than that from competent hackers, and that's when things will go downhill unless there is a significant breakthrough in actual reasoning in AI.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#905

Post by simonw »

matsemann wrote: post #803
simonw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…

I learned Django 15 years after its inception. After 5 years of experience I'm probably not too far behind someone doing the exact same work as me but for 15 years. Or would you say people shouldn't learn Django now? As it's useless as they're already far behind? They shouldn't study computer science, as it will be too late? Every profession have new people continuously entering the workforce, that quickly get up to…

I would not say that about a framework like Django - though I would encourage people not to under-invest in understanding web fundamentals since once you have those Django, Rails, Next.js etc are all quick to pick up.

I would say that about LLMs.

That's why I'm ringing the alarm bells here. LLM skills are not the same as framework or library usage skills. They aren't clearly documented or predictable - they're really weird!

If you assume learning to use coding agents is the same category of challenge as learning to use something like Django you'll get burned by that assumption.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#906

Post by f1shy »

james_a_craig wrote: post #898
f1shy wrote: post #881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm exactly on the same boat. To anybody who want to try, a concrete example, that I have tested in all available LLMs: Make a prompt to get a common lisp application which makes a "hello triangle" in open gl, without using SDL or any framework, only OpenGL and GLFW bindings. None of the replies even compiled. I kept asking at least 5 times, with error feedback, to see if AI can do it. It did't work. Never. The best…

"Please write me a program in Common LISP (SBCL is installed) which will render a simple "hello world" triangle in OpenGL. You should use only OpenGL and GLFW (using sbcl's FFI) for this, not any other existing 3D graphics framework." This worked in codex-cli, albeit it took three rounds of passing back the errors. https://gist.github.com/jamesacraig/9ae0e5ed8ebae3e7fe157f67... has the resulting code.

That is using sb-alien and sb-sys, which basically is no common lisp anymore. That is basically sbcl. I didn’t get anything in that direction (my prompt said nothing about a CL implementation) but I would have rejected it. I just wanted to see glfw and opengl in the :use clause. I have to do something that has to work in Mac, Linux and Windows, with at least ECL, sbcl and ccl.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#907

Post by simonw »

water-drummer wrote: post #847
simonw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…

> Using this stuff well is a deep topic. These things can be applied in so many different ways, and to so many different projects. The best asset you can develop is an intuition for what works and what doesn't, and getting that intuition requires months if not years of personal experimentation. You feel that way because it took you years or months to reach that point. But after reaching that point, do you really thin…

The more I see of how different people use LLMs the more convinced I am that communication skills differ wildly between different people.

Clear, unambiguous communication is a key skill to unlock LLMs. I suspect it's a lot less common than you think!

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#908

Post by simonw »

hexbin010 wrote: post #850
simonw wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think antirez wrote that with AI then your AI detection insincts are way off . It reads like someone with (good) English as a second language. LLMs don't write like that.

It wouldn't be a bad thing though would it? Because AI is in fact amazing.

I don't like reading undisclosed AI writing. It feels disrespectful of my time.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#909

Post by f1shy »

Philpax wrote: post #897
f1shy wrote: post #881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm exactly on the same boat. To anybody who want to try, a concrete example, that I have tested in all available LLMs: Make a prompt to get a common lisp application which makes a "hello triangle" in open gl, without using SDL or any framework, only OpenGL and GLFW bindings. None of the replies even compiled. I kept asking at least 5 times, with error feedback, to see if AI can do it. It did't work. Never. The best…

It sounds like you're using LLMs directly, instead of a coding agent. Agents are capable of testing their own code and using that to fix issues, which is what makes them so powerful. Using Claude Code, I was able to successfully produce the Hello Triangle you asked for (note that I have never used CL before): https://github.com/philpax/hello-triangle-cl For reference, here is the transcript of the entire interaction…

Nice. The code I got running from gemini was much much cleaner, it did not work, but after the manual changes it did work. I will hive it a try with the next task: put text and generate primitives like rectangle, circle, polygon, etc…
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