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AI code generation tools provide a dubious boost to short term productivity at the expense of extra work in the medium term and skill atrophy in the long term.

AI code generation tools provide a dubious boost to short term productivity at the expense of extra work in the medium term and skill atrophy in the long term. At the moment, sure. They've only been available for about 5 minutes in the grand scheme of dev tools. If you believe that AI assistants are going to be put back in the box then you are just flat out wrong. They'll improve significantly. I'm very skeptical of the claims that AI is writing significant amounts of working code for people You may be right, but people write far too much code as it is. Software development should be about thinking more than typing. Maybe AI's most useful feature will be writing something that's slightly wrong in order to get devs to think about a good solution to their problem and then they can just fix the AI's code. If that results in better software then it's a huge win worth billions of dollars. The belief that AI is worthless unless it's writing the code that a good dev would write is a trap that you should avoid.

moron4hire 2y ago
> At the moment, sure. They've only been available for about 5 minutes in the grand scheme of dev tools. If you believe that AI assistants are going to be put back in the box then you are just flat out wrong. They'll improve significantly. I am extremely skeptical that LLM-based generative AI running in silicon-based digital computers will improve to a significant degree over what we have today. Ever. GPT-2 to GPT-3 was a sea change improvement, but every since then, new models are really only incrementally improving, despite taking exponentially more power and compute to train. Coupled with the fact that processor are only getting wider, not faster, or less energy consuming, then without an extreme change in computing technology, we aren't getting there with LLMs. Either the processors or the underlying AI tech need to change, and there is no evidence this is the case. > The belief that AI is worthless unless it's writing the code that a good dev would write is a trap that you should avoid. I have no idea what you're even trying to say but this. Is this some kind of technoreligion that thinks AGI is worth the endeavor regardless of the harm that comes to people along the way?
- ModernMech 2y ago
  Same. I've heard that this area is improving exponentially for years now, but I can't really say the results I'm getting are any better than I originally experienced with ChatGTP. The dev tooling has gotten better; I use the integrated copilot every day and it saves me from writing a lot of boilerplate. But it's not really replacing me as a coder. Yeah I can go further faster. I can fill in gaps in knowledge. Mostly, I don't have to spend hours on forums and stack overflow anymore trying to work out an issue. But it's not replacing me because I still have to make fine-grained decisions and corrections along the way. To use an analogy, it's a car but not a self-driving one -- it augments my natural ability to super-human levels; but it's not autonomous, I still have to steer it quite a lot or else it'll run into oncoming traffic. So like a Tesla. And like you I don't see how to get there from where we are. I think we're at a local maxima here.
  - onion2k 2y ago
    To use an analogy, it's a car but not a self-driving one -- it augments my natural ability to super-human levels; but it's not autonomous, I still have to steer it quite a lot or else it'll run into oncoming traffic. So like a Tesla. And like you I don't see how to get there from where we are. I think we're at a local maxima here. To continue the car analogy - are you really suggesting we're at 'peak car'? You don't believe that cars in 20 years time are going to be significantly better than the cars we have today? That's very pessimistic.
    - moron4hire 2y ago
      The cars we have today are not so far off from the cars of 100 years ago. So yes, I highly doubt another 20 years of development, after all the low hanging fruit has already been picked, will see much change at all.
      - ModernMech 2y ago
        "after all the low hanging fruit has already been picked" Another great analogy. LLMs allow us to pick low hanging fruit faster. If we want to pick the higher fruit, we'll need fundamentally different equipment, not automated ways to pick low hanging fruit.
- onion2k 2y ago
  I have no idea what you're even trying to say but this. Is this some kind of technoreligion that thinks AGI is worth the endeavor regardless of the harm that comes to people along the way? I'm saying there is a lot of value in tools that are merely 'better than the status quo'. An AI assistant doesn't need to be as good as a dev in order to be useful.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    These tools don't behave like assistants though, despite being advertised as being assistants They turn you into the assistant instead of the programmer in the driver seat Whenever you use them, you have to shift "code review mode", which is not the role of the primary programmer on a task, it is the role of a secondary programmer doing a PR It's "a lot of value" if you like being the assistant to a very inconsistent junior programmer

moron4hire 2y ago

> At the moment, sure. They've only been available for about 5 minutes in the grand scheme of dev tools. If you believe that AI assistants are going to be put back in the box then you are just flat out wrong. They'll improve significantly. I am extremely skeptical that LLM-based generative AI running in silicon-based digital computers will improve to a significant degree over what we have today. Ever. GPT-2 to GPT-3 was a sea change improvement, but every since then, new models are really only incrementally improving, despite taking exponentially more power and compute to train. Coupled with the fact that processor are only getting wider, not faster, or less energy consuming, then without an extreme change in computing technology, we aren't getting there with LLMs. Either the processors or the underlying AI tech need to change, and there is no evidence this is the case. > The belief that AI is worthless unless it's writing the code that a good dev would write is a trap that you should avoid. I have no idea what you're even trying to say but this. Is this some kind of technoreligion that thinks AGI is worth the endeavor regardless of the harm that comes to people along the way?

ModernMech 2y ago
Same. I've heard that this area is improving exponentially for years now, but I can't really say the results I'm getting are any better than I originally experienced with ChatGTP. The dev tooling has gotten better; I use the integrated copilot every day and it saves me from writing a lot of boilerplate. But it's not really replacing me as a coder. Yeah I can go further faster. I can fill in gaps in knowledge. Mostly, I don't have to spend hours on forums and stack overflow anymore trying to work out an issue. But it's not replacing me because I still have to make fine-grained decisions and corrections along the way. To use an analogy, it's a car but not a self-driving one -- it augments my natural ability to super-human levels; but it's not autonomous, I still have to steer it quite a lot or else it'll run into oncoming traffic. So like a Tesla. And like you I don't see how to get there from where we are. I think we're at a local maxima here.
- onion2k 2y ago
  To use an analogy, it's a car but not a self-driving one -- it augments my natural ability to super-human levels; but it's not autonomous, I still have to steer it quite a lot or else it'll run into oncoming traffic. So like a Tesla. And like you I don't see how to get there from where we are. I think we're at a local maxima here. To continue the car analogy - are you really suggesting we're at 'peak car'? You don't believe that cars in 20 years time are going to be significantly better than the cars we have today? That's very pessimistic.
  - moron4hire 2y ago
    The cars we have today are not so far off from the cars of 100 years ago. So yes, I highly doubt another 20 years of development, after all the low hanging fruit has already been picked, will see much change at all.
    - ModernMech 2y ago
      "after all the low hanging fruit has already been picked" Another great analogy. LLMs allow us to pick low hanging fruit faster. If we want to pick the higher fruit, we'll need fundamentally different equipment, not automated ways to pick low hanging fruit.
onion2k 2y ago
I have no idea what you're even trying to say but this. Is this some kind of technoreligion that thinks AGI is worth the endeavor regardless of the harm that comes to people along the way? I'm saying there is a lot of value in tools that are merely 'better than the status quo'. An AI assistant doesn't need to be as good as a dev in order to be useful.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  These tools don't behave like assistants though, despite being advertised as being assistants They turn you into the assistant instead of the programmer in the driver seat Whenever you use them, you have to shift "code review mode", which is not the role of the primary programmer on a task, it is the role of a secondary programmer doing a PR It's "a lot of value" if you like being the assistant to a very inconsistent junior programmer