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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

#991

Post by aagha »

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'm curious if you saw the top voted post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583507

What's happening here? Why is there such a massive disconnect between your experience and there's?

If you assume they're a good programmer, why is your experience so vastly different?

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

#992

Post by daxfohl »

sublinear wrote: post #635
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 "…

This doesn't make any sense. If the business can get rid of their engineers, then why can't the user get rid of the business providing the software? Why can't the user use AI to write it themselves? I think instead the value is in getting a computer to execute domain-specific knowledge organized in a way that makes sense for the business, and in the context of those private computing resources. It's not about the abi…

In some cases that could happen; in particular there may be a lot of UI and cross-app-integration style stuff that starts to get offloaded to users, so users can have AI code up their own UI for using some services together in the way that they want.

But in most cases businesses still need to own their own logic and data, so businesses will still be owning plenty of their own software. Otherwise customers could just write software to buy all your business's products for 99% off!

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

#993

Post by GreenWatermelon »

daxfohl wrote: post #548

The last 20 years has seen a brain drain from other engineering and science into software. My guess is we'll see that finally start to reverse. Which, I think is great! How much value can yet another CRUD app possibly add to the world anymore anyway?

> value can yet another CRUD app possibly add

Possibly significant e.g connecting multiple governmental agencies so citizens can finish their paperwork in days instead of weeks, schedule appointments instead of waiting from 8am untill 2pm to have you matters settled, etc...

Of course, there isn't much shareholder value on this, so perhaps when Software Engineering becomes a modest profession like many others, improvements to society might start happening.

The industry as it currently stands is significantly antisocial.

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

#994

Post by archalex »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #330
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…

This article is not about whether programming is fun, elegant, creative, or personally fulfilling. It is about business value. Programming exists, at scale, because it produces economic value. That value translates into revenue, leverage, competitive advantage, and ultimately money. For decades, a large portion of that value could only be produced by human labor. Now, increasingly, it cannot be assumed that this will…

I have been reading over your comments for nearly two hours now. I find your writing suspiciously sterile, and I have trouble understanding how any one person could produce so much of it in such a small space of time.

The content is overwhelmingly compelling, and I think that any thinking person would have difficulty disagreeing with you.

I begin to wonder, cynically, that someone might enjoy presenting such a devastating, radically destabilizing picture.

Do you know how this thing works, that you can confidently claim, or even dare plant the seed in someone else's mind, that replacement is inevitable?

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

#995

Post by Closi »

ahtihn wrote: post #729
Closi wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try learning to vibe code on something totally greenfield without looking at the code and see if it changes your mind. Ignore code quality, “does it work” and “am i happy with the app” are the only metrics. Code quality is an issue you need to ignore with vibe coding - if code quality is important to your project or you then it’s not an issue. But if you abandon this concept and build things small enough or modular e…

If you start greenfield and ignore the code quality, how do you know you can maintain it long term? Greenfield is fundamentally easier than maintaining existing software. Once software exists, users expect it to behave a certain way and they expect their data to remain usable in new versions. The existing software now imposes all sorts of contraints that may not be explicit in the spec. Some of these constraints end…

In practice, this is managed by:

1) Making the application small enough, and breaking it apart if needed (e.g. I've refactored my old 'big' app into 10 micro-apps).

2) Selecting an architecture that will work, looking after the data modelling and architecture yourself rather than delegating this to the LLM (it can implement it - but you need to design it).

3) Trusting that the LLM is capable enough to implement new requirements or fixes as required.

If requirements change so substantially that it's not possible, you can write new software as requirements change - as per point 1, you will have made your application modular enough that this isn't a significant concern.

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

#996

Post by rbits »

> Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. And now you can build more and better, if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still there, untouched.

"Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn painting, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you painted till night to see your finished artwork? It was creating. And now you can create more and better, if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still there, untouched."

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

#997

Post by akkad33 »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #559
akkad33 wrote: post #558

There's no skill in using AI. I spent 3 hours trying to build something like a table visualiser that creates a visualization of SQL schema relationship. I wrote simple prompts, tailored them using LLMs and fed them back into another LLM. Went on about 2 hours iterating on outputs until it looked like what I want. Result? It produces an output. The outputs worked well for most part but the results were variable. The a…

You say that there's no skill in using AI, and then go on to explain how you used AI in an unskilled way to produce something that neither worked correctly nor taught you anything. It strikes me that if you developed your skill set around using AI more effectively, you could have both developed a deep understanding and gotten what you wanted, and done it in less time and at higher quality than you could have done sol…

That's not my point. My point is it's unreliable at best.

> strikes me that if you developed your skill set around using AI more effectively, you could have both developed a deep understanding and gotten what you wanted, and done it in less time and at higher quality than you could have done solo.

Why is this a given? I don't think there's a secret incantation that could have gotten better results. It's an inherent limitations of the system. If you have resources for me to learn I'm open to discover

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

#998

Post by klustregrif »

csmpltn wrote: post #414
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…

So where’s all of this cutting edge amazing and flawless stuff you’ve built in a weekend that everybody else couldn’t because they were too dumb or slow or clueless?

Asking Simon Willis “where is all this amazing stuff you’ve built” is crazy. I assume you didn’t know who you were responding to. Not only is he insanely productive, but he’s also incredibly open and sharing about his work and his work gets posted to hackernews constantly. It was the top most upvoted blog of 2024 by almost twice the as much as the next runner up.

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

#999

Post by mayhemducks »

simonw wrote: post #889
mayhemducks wrote: post #880

This is content that the LLMs will, probably already have, suck up and incorporate into their corpus. Saying that it doesn't matter if the stock market crashes because in the long run, the technology will create more economic value to make up for it certainly reveals the age and/or financial position of the author! When the market crashes, some people will not be able to retire, and will become a financial burden to…

"It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run. [...] Programming changed forever, anyway." That's not saying that it's OK for the market to crash. It's saying that whether the market crashes or not won't change the fact that "Programming changed forever, anyway" - so don't use "this is a bubble and will all crash s…

Don't mistake my comment for an excuse not to use the technology. Saying that the externalities of developing AI don't matter in the long run legitimizes the hyperbole that fuels irrational investment. Not to mention the profound lack of acknowledgment of privilege.

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

#1000

Post by samuell »

20k wrote: post #788
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> non-trivial coding tasks I’ve come back to the idea LLMs are super search engines. If you ask it a narrow, specific question, with one answer, you may well get the answer. For the “non-trivial” questions, there always will be multiple answers, and you’ll get from the LLM all of these depending on the precise words you use to prompt it. You won’t get the best answer, and in a complex scenario requiring highly recurs…

I wish LLMs were good at search. I've tried to evaluate them many times for their quality at answering research questions for astrophysics (specifically numerical relativity). If they were good at answering questions, I'd use them in a heartbeat Without exception, every technical question I've ever asked an LLM that I know the answer to, has been substantially wrong in some fashion. This makes it just.. absolutely us…

Did you try https://elicit.org ?

I have been impressed by its results.

I think this fact stems more from its initial search phase than its pure LLM processing power, but to me it seems the approach works really well.

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