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I think many developers of today agree. Todays programmers can see copilot output and probably think “well that’s not optimal”. Fast forward five years, new CS

I think many developers of today agree. Todays programmers can see copilot output and probably think “well that’s not optimal”. Fast forward five years, new CS grads are using Copilot 3.0, and are used to specific auto-completes that copilot gives for certain tasks, as they may have never needed to go beyond some of the more basic suggestions. It “feels” like an older programmer seeing a younger web dev and going “you’re wasting MB of memory!” While true the web has gotten slower in many regards, and indeed memory may have been wasted, business value creation typically doesn’t care if a few MB is sub optimally wasted, while the previous generation does.

mikewarot 4y ago
>It “feels” like an older programmer seeing a younger web dev and going “you’re wasting MB of memory!” I crammed a gigabyte of ASCII into a string in FreePascal, it was glorious! Waste all the MB you want! (I'm 59)
partdavid 4y ago
This is a whole class of problem, it seems to me. A semi-automated approach can seem fine when there's an executive function over the top of it, exercised by someone who has not just the knowledge, but current and honed knowledge. But over time, what's keeping that knowledge current and honed? The airline industry has talked about this, of course, and adoption of robotic surgery has opened up a whole new training problem, because its escape hatches when it goes wrong or can't complete a procedure is often "complete the surgery manually". Which is fine on Day 1 of robotic surgery, but what about day 2 when surgeons typically don't have hundreds of similar procedures under their belts? And where the only time they're called on to exercise the skill is in difficult edge cases? We have basically turned driving a standard transmission into a weird old person quirk or niche enthusiant skill in the United States. If an automatic transmission required a similar manual fallback or check, how well would that work? Well, it would work fine if basically everyone already had a lot of practice driving a manual--but now? It wouldn't work well at all. Of course, automatic transmission don't fail like that, and are a lot better at switching gears than AI assistants are at generating code. I worry about the semi-automated approach to self-driving, where the driver may not actually have currency with their driving skill, and where--in the instance that it's necessary--a driver has to react to more complicated situations (they don't have practice with the simple ones, and they have to react not to a hazard but to their car's failure to react to a hazard).

mikewarot 4y ago

>It “feels” like an older programmer seeing a younger web dev and going “you’re wasting MB of memory!” I crammed a gigabyte of ASCII into a string in FreePascal, it was glorious! Waste all the MB you want! (I'm 59)

partdavid 4y ago

This is a whole class of problem, it seems to me. A semi-automated approach can seem fine when there's an executive function over the top of it, exercised by someone who has not just the knowledge, but current and honed knowledge. But over time, what's keeping that knowledge current and honed? The airline industry has talked about this, of course, and adoption of robotic surgery has opened up a whole new training problem, because its escape hatches when it goes wrong or can't complete a procedure is often "complete the surgery manually". Which is fine on Day 1 of robotic surgery, but what about day 2 when surgeons typically don't have hundreds of similar procedures under their belts? And where the only time they're called on to exercise the skill is in difficult edge cases? We have basically turned driving a standard transmission into a weird old person quirk or niche enthusiant skill in the United States. If an automatic transmission required a similar manual fallback or check, how well would that work? Well, it would work fine if basically everyone already had a lot of practice driving a manual--but now? It wouldn't work well at all. Of course, automatic transmission don't fail like that, and are a lot better at switching gears than AI assistants are at generating code. I worry about the semi-automated approach to self-driving, where the driver may not actually have currency with their driving skill, and where--in the instance that it's necessary--a driver has to react to more complicated situations (they don't have practice with the simple ones, and they have to react not to a hazard but to their car's failure to react to a hazard).