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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

#981

Post by aspenmartin »

concats wrote: post #778
daxfohl wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but: There's been a notable jump over the course of the last few months, to where I'd say it's inevitable. For a while I was holding out for them to hit a ceiling where we'd look back and laugh at the idea they'd ever replace human coders. Now, it seems much more like a matter of time. Ultimately I think over the next two years or so, Anthropic and OpenAI will evolve their product from "coding assistant" to "…

> Ultimately I think over the next two years or so, Anthropic and OpenAI will evolve their product from "coding assistant" to "engineering team replacement" The way I see it, there will always be a layer in the corporate organization where someone has to interact with the machine. The transitioning layer from humans to AIs. This is true no matter how high up the hierarchy you replace the humans, be it the engineers l…

I think this is the right take. In some narrow but constantly broadening contexts, agents give you a huge productivity edge. But to leverage that you need to be skilled enough to steer, design the initial prompt, understand the impact of what you produce, etc. I don't see agents in their current and medium term inception as being a replacement of engineering work, I see it as a great reshuffling of engineering work.

In some business contexts, the impact of more engineering labor on output gets capped at some point. Meaning once agent quality reaches a certain point, the output increase is going to be minimal with further improvements. There, labor is not the bottleneck.

In other business contexts, labor is the bottleneck. For instance it's the bottleneck for you as an individual: what kind of revenue could you make if you had a large team of highly skilled senior SWEs that operate for pennies on the dollar?

Labor will shift to where the ROI is highest is what I think you'll see.

To be fair, I can imagine a world where we eventually fully replace the "driver" of the agent in that it is good enough to fulfill the role of a ~staff engineer that can ingest very high level business context, strategy, politics and generate a high level system design that can then be executed by one or more agents (or one or more other SWEs using agents). I don't (at this point) see some fundamental rule of physics / economics that prevents this, but this seems much further ahead from where we are now.

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

#982

Post by camdenreslink »

dizlexic wrote: post #873

The piece I think people are missing is for years the biggest bottle neck for development has been time. These services have just ripped apart the time barrier, and the industry is still trying to wrap their head around that. To me the next obvious barrier will be size (context) barrier, and I can easily see a place for a human in that process. Sure, anyone can prompt an agent build a codebase, but as those code base…

The biggest bottleneck to development has always been what is the right thing to work on, and how should that be accomplished via code.

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

#983

Post by nitwit005 »

simonw wrote: post #160
systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

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.

It might be now, but the intent of these tools is clearly not to have to learn a bunch of work arounds to get the tool to do what you want.

If these tools do improve, that inefficiency would presumably reduce, or go away entirely, which means you wouldn't see an advantage to your head start.

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

#984

Post by ej88 »

nitwit005 wrote: post #983
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. It might be now, but the intent of these tools is clearly not to have to learn a bunch of work arounds to get the tool to do what you want. If these tools do improve, that inefficiency would presumably reduce, or go away entirely, which means you wouldn't see an advantage to your head start.

I would rather learn how to use these tools effectively now and ship more and of higher quality now.

If these tools improve to the point where anyone can pick it up - that's great! I enjoyed my head start while it lasted.

If these tools continue to require experience and a skillset to use, that's great too - I'll continue to learn and pull ahead.

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

#985

Post by notnullorvoid »

embedding-shape wrote: post #790
antirez wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After you review, instead of rewriting 70% of the code, have you tried to follow up with a message with a list of things to fix? Also: in my experience 1. and 2. are not needed for you to have bad results. The existing code base is a fundamental variable. The more complex / convoluted it is, the worse is the result. Also in my experience LLMs are constantly better at producing C code than anything else (Python includ…

> After you review, instead of rewriting 70% of the code, have you tried to follow up with a message with a list of things to fix? I think this is the wrong approach, already by having "wrong code" in the context, makes every response after this worse. Instead, try restarting, but this time specify exactly how you expected that 70% of the code to actually have worked, from the get go. Often, LLMs seem to make choices…

There are some problems where this becomes a game of whack-a-mole either way you approach it (restart or modify with existing context). I end up writing more prompts than the code I could've written myself.

This isn't to say I don't think LLMs are an asset, they have helped me solve problems and grow in domains where I lack experience.

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

#986

Post by notnullorvoid »

simonw wrote: post #630
vignesh37 wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest frustration with LLMs for me is people telling me I'm not promoting it in a good way. Just think about any product where they are selling a half baked product, and repeatedly telling the user you are not using it properly.

But that's not how most products work. If you buy a table saw and can't figure out how to cut a straight line in a piece of wood with it - or keep cutting your fingers off - but didn't take any time at all to learn how to use it, that's on you. Likewise a car, you have to take lessons and a test before you can use those! Why should LLMs be any different?

No one knows what the actual "right way" to hold (prompt) an LLM is. A certain style or pattern to prompting may work in one scenario for one LLM, but change the scenario or model and it often loses any advantage and can give worse output than a different style/pattern.

In contrast table saws and cars have pretty clear rules of operation.

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

#987

Post by notnullorvoid »

embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

For me it's not the typing that is satisfying, but rather building the program in my head first, and internally validating. Describing to an LLM how to output the program I built in my head just isn't possible without taking more time than it does to write the code myself.

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

#988

Post by apstls »

ericmcer wrote: post #963
daxfohl wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but: There's been a notable jump over the course of the last few months, to where I'd say it's inevitable. For a while I was holding out for them to hit a ceiling where we'd look back and laugh at the idea they'd ever replace human coders. Now, it seems much more like a matter of time. Ultimately I think over the next two years or so, Anthropic and OpenAI will evolve their product from "coding assistant" to "…

If you research how something like Cursor works I don't think you would believe it is inevitable. The jump that would have to happen for it to replace engineers entirely is insurmountable. They can keep expanding contexts and coming up with clever ways to augment generation but I don't see it ever actually having full vision on the system, product and users. Beyond that it is incredibly biased towards existing code &…

Sit down and re-read your comment one night with your "I am an engineer and will solve this as an engineering problem" hat firmly on. If you stop thinking of LLMs as lobotimized coworkers trapped inside an API wrapper and instead as computational primitives then things become much more interesting and the future becomes clearer to see.

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

#989

Post by h14h »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

In my experience, using AI coding agents need highly specific success criteria, and an easy way to verify its output against that criteria.

My biggest successes have come when I take a TDD approach. First I identify a subset of my work into a module with an API that can be easily tested, then I collaborate with the agent on writing correct test-cases, and finally I tell it to implement the module such that the test cases pass without any lint or typing errors.

It forces me to spend much more time thinking about use cases, project architecture, and test coverage than about nitty-gritty implementation details. I can imagine that in a system that evolved over time without a clear testing strategy, AI would struggle mightily to be even barely useful.

Not saying this applies to your system, but I've definitely worked on systems in the past that fit the "big ball of mud" description pretty neatly, and I have zero clue how I'd have been able to make effective use of these AI tools.

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

#990

Post by msla »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #70
serf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the mindset because I began my foray into open source exactly because I wanted to distribute and share my code. in other words, i've never been in the position that I felt my charitable givings anywhere were ever stolen . Some people write code and put it out there without caveats. Some people jump into open source to be license warriors. Not me. I just write code and share it. If youre a person, g…

Me too. I’ve never been a fan of coercive licensing. I don’t consider that “open.” It’s “strings-attached.” I make mine MIT-licensed. If someone takes my stuff, and gets rich (highly unlikely), then that’s fine. I just don’t want some asshole suing me, because they used it inappropriately, or a bug caused them problems. I don’t even care about attribution. I mainly do it, because it forces me to take better care, whe…

There's no such thing as coercive licensing, and thinking there is is buying into the myths proprietary vendors perpetuate because they're tired of not being able to farm labor from Open Source developers. It's very interesting that the "viral" nonsense came from Microsoft, isn't it?
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