8 ms·

Lots of interesting debates in this thread. I think it is worth placing writing/coding tasks into two buckets. Are you producing? Or are you learning? For exam

Lots of interesting debates in this thread. I think it is worth placing writing/coding tasks into two buckets. Are you producing? Or are you learning? For example, I have zero qualms about relying on AI at work to write progress reports and code up some scripts. I know I can do it myself but why would I? I spent many years in college learning to read and write and code. AI makes me at least 2x more efficient at my job. It seems irrational not to use it. Like a farmer who tills his land by hand rather than relying on a tractor because it builds character or something. But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come... On the other hand, if you are a student trying to learn something new, relying on AI requires walking a fine line. You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply. At the same time, if you under-rely on AI, you drastically decrease the rate at which you can learn new things. In the old days, people were fit because of physical labor. Now people are fit because they go to the gym. I wonder if there will be an analog for intellectual work. Will people be going to "mental" gyms in the future?

booleandilemma 2y ago
I used to have dozens of phone numbers memorized. Once I got a cell phone I forgot everyone's number. I don't even know the phone number of my own mother. I don't want to lose my ability to think. I don't want to become intellectually dependent on AI in the slightest. I've been programming for over a decade without AI and I don't suddenly need it now.
- keeganpoppen 2y ago
  well true to your name you are reducing it to a boolean dilemma
  - goatlover 2y ago
    When is the Butlerian Jihad scheduled?
- lolinder 2y ago
  It's more complicated than that—this trade-off between using a tool to extend our capabilities and developing our own muscles is as old as history. See the dialog between Theuth and Thamus about writing. Writing does have the effects that Socrates warned about, but it's also been an unequivocal net positive for humanity in general and for most humans in particular. For one thing, it's why we have a record of the debate about the merits of writing. > O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm
  - beckford 2y ago
    TIL: Another instance of history repeating itself.
- Falimonda 2y ago
  I'm curious what your exposure to the available tools has been so far. Which, if any, have you used? Did you give them a fair shot on the off-chance that they aid you in getting orders of magnitude more work done than you did previously while still leveraging the experience you've gained?
- brookst 2y ago
  Interesting perspective. I read your first line about phone numbers as a fantastic thing -- people used to have to memorize multiple 10 digit phone numbers, now you can think about your contacts' names and relationships. But... I think you were actually bemoaning the shift from numbers to names as a loss?
  - selcuka 2y ago
    These things are not mutually exclusive. Remembering numbers didn't hinder our ability to remember our contacts' names. We don't know how brain exactly works, but I don't think we can now do some things better just because we are not using another function of our brains anymore.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    (not op) for me its a matter of dependency. great, as long as i have my phone I can just ask siri to call my sister, but if I need to use someone else's phone because mines lost or dead, well, how am I going to do that? Same as AI. Cool it makes you 5x as efficient at your job. But after a decade of using it, can you got back to 1x efficiency without it? Or are you just making the highly optimistic leap that you will retain access to the tech in perpetuity.
  - girvo 2y ago
    Have you not run into trouble when your phone is dead but you have to contact someone? I have, it's frustrating. Thankfully I remember my partners number, though its the only one these days.
    - 542354234235 2y ago
      I had to maintain a little physical phone book because, while I can memorize 10 people’s numbers, I cant memorize 25, 50, 100. Not having that with me when I needed it, or if you lost it and had no backup, was far less convenient than today. It feels like this is a case of magnifying a minor, rare modern inconvenience and ignoring all the huge inconveniences of the past in favor of a super narrow case where it was debatably “better”.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Well, sure. I can remember phone numbers from 30+ years ago approximately instantly. I don't have to remember most of them from today, so I simply don't. (I do keep a few current numbers squirreled away in my little pea brain that will help me get rolling again, but I'll probably only ever need to actually use those memories if I ever fall out of the sky and onto a desert island that happens to have a payphone with a bucket of change next to it.) On a daily, non-outlier basis, I'm no worse for not generally remembering phone numbers. I might even be better off today than I was decades ago, by no longer having to spend the brainpower required for programming new phone numbers into it. I mean: I grew up reading paper road maps and [usually] helping my dad plan and navigate on road trips. The map pocket in the door of that old Chevrolet was stuffed with folded maps of different areas of the US. But about the time I started taking my own solo road trips, things like the [OG] MapBlast! website started calculating and charting driving directions that could be printed. This made route planning a lot faster and easier. Later, we got to where we are today with GPS navigation that has live updates for traffic and road conditions using systems like Waze. This has almost completely eliminated the chores of route planning and remembering directions (and alternate routes) from my life, and while I do have exactly one road map in my car that I do keep updated I haven't actually ever used it for anything since 2008 or so. And am I less of a person today than I was back when paper maps were the order of the day? No, I don't think that I am -- in fact, I think these kinds of tools have made me much more capable than I ever was. We call things like this "progress." I do not yearn for the days before LLM any more than I yearn for the days before the cotton gin or the slide rule or Stack Overflow.
- guappa 2y ago
  I still remember the numbers I used as a kid. Anyway now as an adult I have to remember a lot of pin codes. * Door to home * Door to office * Door to gf's place * Bank card #1 * Bank card #2 * Bank card #3 * Phone #1 * Phone #2
alwayslikethis 2y ago
> a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential Honestly, I'm not sure this would account for most of the difficulty in learning. In my experience most of the difficulty involved in learning something involved a few missing pieces of insight. It often took longer to understand the few missing pieces than the rest of the topic. If they are accurate enough, LLMs are great for getting yourself unstuck and keep yourself moving. Although it has always been a part of the learning experience, I'm not sure frantically looking through hundreds of explanations for a missing detail is a better use of one's time than to dig deeper in the time you save.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  ideally you look and fail and exhaust your own efforts, then get unblocked with a tool or assistant or expert. With LLMs at your finger tips who has both the grit to struggle and the self discipline not to quit early? at the age of the typical student - very few.
  - krsdcbl 2y ago
    one could argue aswell that having at least generally satisfying, but at the same time omnipresent "expert assistance" might rather end up empowering you. Feeling confident to be able to shrug off blockers, that might otherwise turn exploration into a painful egg hunt for trivial unknowns, can easily mean the difference between learning and abandoning.
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    Do you advocate that students learn without the help of teachers until they exhaust their own efforts?
    - TSP00N3 2y ago
      That actually is an approach. Some teachers make you read the lesson before class, others give you homework on the lesson before lecturing it, and some even quiz you on it on top of that before allowing you to ask questions. I personal feel that trying to learn the material before class helped me learn the material better than coming into class blind.
sbuttgereit 2y ago
"But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come..." "You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply." These two ideas are closely related and really just different aspects of the same basic frailty of the human intellect. Understanding that I think can really inform you about how you might use these tools in work (or life) and where the lines need to be drawn for your own personal circumstance. I can't say I disagree with anything you said and think you've made an insightful observation.
- margalabargala 2y ago
  In the presence of sufficiently good and ubiquitous tools, knowing how to do some base thing loses most or all of its value. In a world where everyone has a phone/calculator in their pocket, remembering how to do long division on paper is not worthwhile. If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454", it is not worth your time to do that by hand rather than plugging it into your phone's calculator. In a world where AI can immediately produce any arbitrary 20-line glue script that you would have had to think about and remember bash array syntax for, there's not a reason to remember bash array syntax. I don't think we're quite at that point yet but we're astonishingly close.
  - aquariusDue 2y ago
    This is both inspiring and terrifying at the same time. That being said I usually prefer to do something the long and manual way, write the process down sometimes, and afterwards search for easier ways to do it. Of course this makes sense on a case by case basis depending on your personal context. Maybe stuff like crosswords and more will undergo a renaissance and we'll see more interesting developments like Gauguin[0] which is a blend of Sudoku and math. [0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.piepmeyer.gauguin/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.piepmeyer.gauguin/
  - treflop 2y ago
    Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours. The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right. If we get a point where the output of AI is trustworthy, that's a whole different kind of world altogether.
mav3ri3k 2y ago
A current 3rd year college student here. I really want LLMs to help me in learning but the success rate is 0. They often can not generate relatively trivial code When they do, they can not explain that code. For example, I was trying to learn socket programing in C. Claude generated the code, but when I stared asking about stuff, it regressed hard. Also, often the code is more complex than it needs to be. When learning a topic, I want that topic, not the most common relevant code with all the spagheti used on github. For other subjects, like dbms, computer network, when asking about concepts, you better double check, because they still make stuff up. I asked ChatGPT to solve prev year question for dbms, and it gave a long, answer which looked good on surface. But when I actually read through because I need to understand what it is doing, there were glaring flaws. When I point them out, it makes other mistakes. So, LLMs struggle to generate concise to the point code. They can not explain that code. They regularly make stuff up. This is after trying Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini with their paid versions in various capacities. My bottom line is, I should NEVER use a LLM to learn. There is no fine line here. I have tried again and again because tech bros keep preaching about sparks of AGI, making startup with 0 coding skills. They are either fools or genius. LLMs are useful strictly if you already know what you are doing. That's when your productivity gains are achieved.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Care to share any of these chats?
- owenpalmer 2y ago
  I'm starting to suspect that people generally have poor experiences with LLMs due to bad prompting skills. I would need to see your chats with it in order to know if you're telling the truth.
  - WhyOhWhyQ 2y ago
    The simpler explanation is that LLMs are not very good.
    - owenpalmer 2y ago
strken 2y ago
How long are your progress reports? Mine are a one sentence message like "Hey, we've got a fix for the user profile bug, but we can't deploy it for an hour minimum because we've found an edge case to do with where the account signed up from" and I'm not sure where the AI comes in.
- skydhash 2y ago
  I could probably copy it straight from my commits log if my team is amenable to bullet point format.
- scruple 2y ago
  I keep mine pretty short and have been writing them up bullet-style in org-mode for like 15 years. I can scan back over the entire year when I need to deal with my annual review and I don't think I spend more than 5 minutes on this in any given week. Converting from my notes to something I would deliver to someone else might take a few minutes of formatting since I tend to write in full sentences as-is. I can't imagine turning to an AI tool for this shit.
- guappa 2y ago
  AI comes to write it 10x longer so you pretend you worked a lot and think the reader can't realise your report is just meaningless words because you never read anything yourself.
8note 2y ago
> But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. YMMV, but I didn't ride a bike for 10ish years, and then got back on and I was happily riding quickly after. I also use zsh and ctrl+r for every Linux command, but I can still come up with the command of I need to, just, slowly. Ive overall found that if I learn a thing, it's learnt. Stuff I didn't learn in university, but passed anyways, like Jacobians, I still don't know, but I've got the gyst of it. I do keep getting better and better at the banjo the less I play it, and getting back to the drumming plateau is quick. Maybe the drumming plateau is the thing? You can quickly get back to similar skill levels after not doing the thing in a while, but it's very hard to move that plateau upwards
- reacharavindh 2y ago
  Dont you see the survivorship bias in your thinking? You learnt the bike and practiced it rigorously before stoppping for 10 years, and you're able to pick it up. You _knew_ the commands because you learned the them the manual/hard way, and then used assistance to to do it for you.. Now, do you think it will apply to someone who begins their journey with LLMs and doesnt quite develop the skill of "Does this even look right?!", and says to themselves "if LLMs could write this module why bother learning what that thing actually does?" and then get bitten by it due to LLM hallucinations and stare like a deer in headlights.
devjab 2y ago
Our internal metrics show a decrease in productivity when more inexperienced developers use AI, and an increase when experienced developers with 10+ years use it. We see a decrease in code quality across experience levels which needs to be rectified across all experience levels but even with the time spent refactoring it’s still an increase in productivity. I think I should note that we don’t use these metrics for employee review in any way. The reason we have them is because they come with the DORA (eu regulation) compliance tool we use to monitor code-quality. They won’t be used for employee measurement while I work here. I don’t manage people, but I was brought in to help IT transition from startup to enterprise so set the direction with management confidence. I’m a little worried about developers turning to LLMs instead of official documentation as the first thing they do. I still view LLMs as mostly being fancy auto-complete with some automation capabilities. I don’t think they are very good at teaching you things. Maybe they are better than Google programming, but the disadvantage LLMs have seem to be that our employees tend to trust the LLMs more than they would trust what they found on Google. I don’t see an issue with people using LLMs on fields they aren’t too experienced with yet however. We’ve already seen people start using different models to refine their answers, we’ve also seen an increase in internal libraries and automation in place of external tools. Which is what we want, again because we’re under some heavy EU regulations where even “safe” external dependencies are a bureaucratic nightmare. I really do wonder what it’ll do to general education though. Seeing how terrible and great these tools can be from a field I’m an expert in.
ben_w 2y ago
> I wonder if there will be an analog for intellectual work. Will people be going to "mental" gyms in the future? Already do — that's what "brain training" apps; consumer EdTech like Duolingo and Brilliant; and educational YouTube and podcasts like 3blue1brown, Easy German, ElectroBOOM, Overly Sarcastic Productions all are.
- nertirs1 2y ago
  AFAIK, none of these teach person, how to research a topic.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Neither did University, for me. I just liked learning as far back as my memories go, so I've been jumping into researching topics because I wanted to know things. Universe just gave me course materials, homework, and a lot of free time. Jobs took up a lot of time, but didn't make learning meaninfgully different than it always has been for me.
sam0x17 2y ago
> Are you producing? Or are you learning? > AI makes me at least 2x more efficient at my job. It seems irrational not to use it Fair, but there is a corollary here -- the purpose of learning at least in part is to prepare you for the workforce. If that is the case, then one of the things students need to get good at is conversing with LLMs, because they will need to do so to be competitive in the workplace. I find it somewhat analogous to the advent of being able to do research on the internet, which I experienced as an early 90s kid, where everyone was saying "now they won't know how to do research anymore, they won't know the Dewey decimal system, oh no!". Now the last vestiges of physical libraries being a place where you even can conduct up-to-date research on most topics are crumbling, and research _just is_ largely done online in some form or another. Same thing will likely happen with LLMs, especially as they improve in quality and accuracy over the next decade, and whether we like it or not.
- behringer 2y ago
  A big one for me was nobody will know how to look up info in a dictionary or encyclopedia. Yep I guess that's true. And nobody would want to now either!

booleandilemma 2y ago

I used to have dozens of phone numbers memorized. Once I got a cell phone I forgot everyone's number. I don't even know the phone number of my own mother. I don't want to lose my ability to think. I don't want to become intellectually dependent on AI in the slightest. I've been programming for over a decade without AI and I don't suddenly need it now.

keeganpoppen 2y ago
well true to your name you are reducing it to a boolean dilemma
- goatlover 2y ago
  When is the Butlerian Jihad scheduled?
lolinder 2y ago
It's more complicated than that—this trade-off between using a tool to extend our capabilities and developing our own muscles is as old as history. See the dialog between Theuth and Thamus about writing. Writing does have the effects that Socrates warned about, but it's also been an unequivocal net positive for humanity in general and for most humans in particular. For one thing, it's why we have a record of the debate about the merits of writing. > O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm
- beckford 2y ago
  TIL: Another instance of history repeating itself.
Falimonda 2y ago
I'm curious what your exposure to the available tools has been so far. Which, if any, have you used? Did you give them a fair shot on the off-chance that they aid you in getting orders of magnitude more work done than you did previously while still leveraging the experience you've gained?
brookst 2y ago
Interesting perspective. I read your first line about phone numbers as a fantastic thing -- people used to have to memorize multiple 10 digit phone numbers, now you can think about your contacts' names and relationships. But... I think you were actually bemoaning the shift from numbers to names as a loss?
- selcuka 2y ago
  These things are not mutually exclusive. Remembering numbers didn't hinder our ability to remember our contacts' names. We don't know how brain exactly works, but I don't think we can now do some things better just because we are not using another function of our brains anymore.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  (not op) for me its a matter of dependency. great, as long as i have my phone I can just ask siri to call my sister, but if I need to use someone else's phone because mines lost or dead, well, how am I going to do that? Same as AI. Cool it makes you 5x as efficient at your job. But after a decade of using it, can you got back to 1x efficiency without it? Or are you just making the highly optimistic leap that you will retain access to the tech in perpetuity.
- girvo 2y ago
  Have you not run into trouble when your phone is dead but you have to contact someone? I have, it's frustrating. Thankfully I remember my partners number, though its the only one these days.
  - 542354234235 2y ago
    I had to maintain a little physical phone book because, while I can memorize 10 people’s numbers, I cant memorize 25, 50, 100. Not having that with me when I needed it, or if you lost it and had no backup, was far less convenient than today. It feels like this is a case of magnifying a minor, rare modern inconvenience and ignoring all the huge inconveniences of the past in favor of a super narrow case where it was debatably “better”.
ssl-3 2y ago
Well, sure. I can remember phone numbers from 30+ years ago approximately instantly. I don't have to remember most of them from today, so I simply don't. (I do keep a few current numbers squirreled away in my little pea brain that will help me get rolling again, but I'll probably only ever need to actually use those memories if I ever fall out of the sky and onto a desert island that happens to have a payphone with a bucket of change next to it.) On a daily, non-outlier basis, I'm no worse for not generally remembering phone numbers. I might even be better off today than I was decades ago, by no longer having to spend the brainpower required for programming new phone numbers into it. I mean: I grew up reading paper road maps and [usually] helping my dad plan and navigate on road trips. The map pocket in the door of that old Chevrolet was stuffed with folded maps of different areas of the US. But about the time I started taking my own solo road trips, things like the [OG] MapBlast! website started calculating and charting driving directions that could be printed. This made route planning a lot faster and easier. Later, we got to where we are today with GPS navigation that has live updates for traffic and road conditions using systems like Waze. This has almost completely eliminated the chores of route planning and remembering directions (and alternate routes) from my life, and while I do have exactly one road map in my car that I do keep updated I haven't actually ever used it for anything since 2008 or so. And am I less of a person today than I was back when paper maps were the order of the day? No, I don't think that I am -- in fact, I think these kinds of tools have made me much more capable than I ever was. We call things like this "progress." I do not yearn for the days before LLM any more than I yearn for the days before the cotton gin or the slide rule or Stack Overflow.
guappa 2y ago
I still remember the numbers I used as a kid. Anyway now as an adult I have to remember a lot of pin codes. * Door to home * Door to office * Door to gf's place * Bank card #1 * Bank card #2 * Bank card #3 * Phone #1 * Phone #2

alwayslikethis 2y ago

> a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential Honestly, I'm not sure this would account for most of the difficulty in learning. In my experience most of the difficulty involved in learning something involved a few missing pieces of insight. It often took longer to understand the few missing pieces than the rest of the topic. If they are accurate enough, LLMs are great for getting yourself unstuck and keep yourself moving. Although it has always been a part of the learning experience, I'm not sure frantically looking through hundreds of explanations for a missing detail is a better use of one's time than to dig deeper in the time you save.

skeeter2020 2y ago
ideally you look and fail and exhaust your own efforts, then get unblocked with a tool or assistant or expert. With LLMs at your finger tips who has both the grit to struggle and the self discipline not to quit early? at the age of the typical student - very few.
- krsdcbl 2y ago
  one could argue aswell that having at least generally satisfying, but at the same time omnipresent "expert assistance" might rather end up empowering you. Feeling confident to be able to shrug off blockers, that might otherwise turn exploration into a painful egg hunt for trivial unknowns, can easily mean the difference between learning and abandoning.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  Do you advocate that students learn without the help of teachers until they exhaust their own efforts?
  - TSP00N3 2y ago
    That actually is an approach. Some teachers make you read the lesson before class, others give you homework on the lesson before lecturing it, and some even quiz you on it on top of that before allowing you to ask questions. I personal feel that trying to learn the material before class helped me learn the material better than coming into class blind.

sbuttgereit 2y ago

"But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come..." "You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply." These two ideas are closely related and really just different aspects of the same basic frailty of the human intellect. Understanding that I think can really inform you about how you might use these tools in work (or life) and where the lines need to be drawn for your own personal circumstance. I can't say I disagree with anything you said and think you've made an insightful observation.

margalabargala 2y ago
In the presence of sufficiently good and ubiquitous tools, knowing how to do some base thing loses most or all of its value. In a world where everyone has a phone/calculator in their pocket, remembering how to do long division on paper is not worthwhile. If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454", it is not worth your time to do that by hand rather than plugging it into your phone's calculator. In a world where AI can immediately produce any arbitrary 20-line glue script that you would have had to think about and remember bash array syntax for, there's not a reason to remember bash array syntax. I don't think we're quite at that point yet but we're astonishingly close.
- aquariusDue 2y ago
  This is both inspiring and terrifying at the same time. That being said I usually prefer to do something the long and manual way, write the process down sometimes, and afterwards search for easier ways to do it. Of course this makes sense on a case by case basis depending on your personal context. Maybe stuff like crosswords and more will undergo a renaissance and we'll see more interesting developments like Gauguin[0] which is a blend of Sudoku and math. [0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.piepmeyer.gauguin/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.piepmeyer.gauguin/
- treflop 2y ago
  Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours. The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right. If we get a point where the output of AI is trustworthy, that's a whole different kind of world altogether.

mav3ri3k 2y ago

A current 3rd year college student here. I really want LLMs to help me in learning but the success rate is 0. They often can not generate relatively trivial code When they do, they can not explain that code. For example, I was trying to learn socket programing in C. Claude generated the code, but when I stared asking about stuff, it regressed hard. Also, often the code is more complex than it needs to be. When learning a topic, I want that topic, not the most common relevant code with all the spagheti used on github. For other subjects, like dbms, computer network, when asking about concepts, you better double check, because they still make stuff up. I asked ChatGPT to solve prev year question for dbms, and it gave a long, answer which looked good on surface. But when I actually read through because I need to understand what it is doing, there were glaring flaws. When I point them out, it makes other mistakes. So, LLMs struggle to generate concise to the point code. They can not explain that code. They regularly make stuff up. This is after trying Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini with their paid versions in various capacities. My bottom line is, I should NEVER use a LLM to learn. There is no fine line here. I have tried again and again because tech bros keep preaching about sparks of AGI, making startup with 0 coding skills. They are either fools or genius. LLMs are useful strictly if you already know what you are doing. That's when your productivity gains are achieved.

fragmede 2y ago
Care to share any of these chats?
owenpalmer 2y ago
I'm starting to suspect that people generally have poor experiences with LLMs due to bad prompting skills. I would need to see your chats with it in order to know if you're telling the truth.
- WhyOhWhyQ 2y ago
  The simpler explanation is that LLMs are not very good.
  - owenpalmer 2y ago

strken 2y ago

How long are your progress reports? Mine are a one sentence message like "Hey, we've got a fix for the user profile bug, but we can't deploy it for an hour minimum because we've found an edge case to do with where the account signed up from" and I'm not sure where the AI comes in.

skydhash 2y ago
I could probably copy it straight from my commits log if my team is amenable to bullet point format.
scruple 2y ago
I keep mine pretty short and have been writing them up bullet-style in org-mode for like 15 years. I can scan back over the entire year when I need to deal with my annual review and I don't think I spend more than 5 minutes on this in any given week. Converting from my notes to something I would deliver to someone else might take a few minutes of formatting since I tend to write in full sentences as-is. I can't imagine turning to an AI tool for this shit.
guappa 2y ago
AI comes to write it 10x longer so you pretend you worked a lot and think the reader can't realise your report is just meaningless words because you never read anything yourself.

8note 2y ago

> But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. YMMV, but I didn't ride a bike for 10ish years, and then got back on and I was happily riding quickly after. I also use zsh and ctrl+r for every Linux command, but I can still come up with the command of I need to, just, slowly. Ive overall found that if I learn a thing, it's learnt. Stuff I didn't learn in university, but passed anyways, like Jacobians, I still don't know, but I've got the gyst of it. I do keep getting better and better at the banjo the less I play it, and getting back to the drumming plateau is quick. Maybe the drumming plateau is the thing? You can quickly get back to similar skill levels after not doing the thing in a while, but it's very hard to move that plateau upwards

reacharavindh 2y ago
Dont you see the survivorship bias in your thinking? You learnt the bike and practiced it rigorously before stoppping for 10 years, and you're able to pick it up. You _knew_ the commands because you learned the them the manual/hard way, and then used assistance to to do it for you.. Now, do you think it will apply to someone who begins their journey with LLMs and doesnt quite develop the skill of "Does this even look right?!", and says to themselves "if LLMs could write this module why bother learning what that thing actually does?" and then get bitten by it due to LLM hallucinations and stare like a deer in headlights.

devjab 2y ago

Our internal metrics show a decrease in productivity when more inexperienced developers use AI, and an increase when experienced developers with 10+ years use it. We see a decrease in code quality across experience levels which needs to be rectified across all experience levels but even with the time spent refactoring it’s still an increase in productivity. I think I should note that we don’t use these metrics for employee review in any way. The reason we have them is because they come with the DORA (eu regulation) compliance tool we use to monitor code-quality. They won’t be used for employee measurement while I work here. I don’t manage people, but I was brought in to help IT transition from startup to enterprise so set the direction with management confidence. I’m a little worried about developers turning to LLMs instead of official documentation as the first thing they do. I still view LLMs as mostly being fancy auto-complete with some automation capabilities. I don’t think they are very good at teaching you things. Maybe they are better than Google programming, but the disadvantage LLMs have seem to be that our employees tend to trust the LLMs more than they would trust what they found on Google. I don’t see an issue with people using LLMs on fields they aren’t too experienced with yet however. We’ve already seen people start using different models to refine their answers, we’ve also seen an increase in internal libraries and automation in place of external tools. Which is what we want, again because we’re under some heavy EU regulations where even “safe” external dependencies are a bureaucratic nightmare. I really do wonder what it’ll do to general education though. Seeing how terrible and great these tools can be from a field I’m an expert in.

ben_w 2y ago

> I wonder if there will be an analog for intellectual work. Will people be going to "mental" gyms in the future? Already do — that's what "brain training" apps; consumer EdTech like Duolingo and Brilliant; and educational YouTube and podcasts like 3blue1brown, Easy German, ElectroBOOM, Overly Sarcastic Productions all are.

nertirs1 2y ago
AFAIK, none of these teach person, how to research a topic.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Neither did University, for me. I just liked learning as far back as my memories go, so I've been jumping into researching topics because I wanted to know things. Universe just gave me course materials, homework, and a lot of free time. Jobs took up a lot of time, but didn't make learning meaninfgully different than it always has been for me.

sam0x17 2y ago

> Are you producing? Or are you learning? > AI makes me at least 2x more efficient at my job. It seems irrational not to use it Fair, but there is a corollary here -- the purpose of learning at least in part is to prepare you for the workforce. If that is the case, then one of the things students need to get good at is conversing with LLMs, because they will need to do so to be competitive in the workplace. I find it somewhat analogous to the advent of being able to do research on the internet, which I experienced as an early 90s kid, where everyone was saying "now they won't know how to do research anymore, they won't know the Dewey decimal system, oh no!". Now the last vestiges of physical libraries being a place where you even can conduct up-to-date research on most topics are crumbling, and research _just is_ largely done online in some form or another. Same thing will likely happen with LLMs, especially as they improve in quality and accuracy over the next decade, and whether we like it or not.

behringer 2y ago
A big one for me was nobody will know how to look up info in a dictionary or encyclopedia. Yep I guess that's true. And nobody would want to now either!