5 ms·

Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making

Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer. Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)

alexchamberlain 2y ago
My biggest worry about AI is that it will do all the basic stuff, so people will never have a chance to learn and move on to the more complex stuff. I think there's a name for this, but I can't find it right now. In the hands of a tenured expert though, AI should be a big step up.
- vrighter 2y ago
  Played a game called Beyond a Steel Sky (sequel to the older beneath a steel sky). In the starting section there was an "engineer" going around fixing stuff. He just pointed his AI tool at the thing, and followed the instructions, while not knowing what he's doing at any point. That's what I see happening
  - threeseed 2y ago
    I just did that with Cursor/Claude where I asked it to port a major project. No code just prompts. Right now after a week it has 4500 compilation errors with every single file having issues requiring me to now go back and actually understand what its gone and done. Debatable whether it has saved time or not.
    - mckn1ght 2y ago
      I did the same, porting a huge python script that had grown way too unwieldy to Swift. It undoubtedly saved me time. Your project sounds a lot bigger than mine, 4500 is a lot of compilation errors. If it’s not already split into modules, could be a good time to do it piece by piece. Port one little library at a time.
- antupis 2y ago
  I think it goes the same way as compilers so bits -> assembly -> c -> jvm and now you don't need mostly care what happens at lower levels because stuff works. With AI we are now basically the bits -> assembly phase so you need to care a lot about what is happening at a lower level.
- vbezhenar 2y ago
  Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication? That's an interesting question actually. When I was a kid, calculators were not as widespread and I could easily multiply 4-digit numbers in my brain. Nowadays I'd be happy to multiply 2-digit numbers without mistakes. But I carry my smartphone with me, so there's just no need to do so... So while learning basic stuff is definitely necessary just like it's necessary to have understanding how to multiply or divide numbers of any size (kids learn that nowadays, right?), actually mastering those skills may be wasted time?
  - alexchamberlain 2y ago
    Honestly, I think we already see that in wider society, where mental arithmetic has more or less disappeared. This is in general fine ofc, but it makes it much harder to check the output of a machine if you can't do approximate calculations in your head.
  - dijksterhuis 2y ago
    > actually mastering those skills may be wasted time? this question is, i’m pretty sure it is safe to assume, the absolute bane of every maths teacher’s existence. if i don’t learn and master the fundamentals, i cannot learn and master more advanced concepts. which means no fluid dynamics for me when i get to university because “what’s the point of learning algebra, i’m never gonna use it in real life” (i mean, i flunked fluid dynamics but it was because i was out drinking all the time). i still remember how to calculate compound interest. do i need to know how to calculate compound interest today? no. did i need to learn and master it as an application of accumulation functions? absolutely. just because i don’t need to apply something i learned to master before doesn’t mean i didn’t need to learn and master it in order to learn and master something else later. mastery is a cumulative process in my experience. skipping out on it with early stuff makes it much harder to master later stuff. > Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication? yes.
- Lanolderen 2y ago
  To be honest you don't need to know the lower level things. It's just removing the need to remember the occasional boilerplate. If I need to parse a file I can just chuck it a couple lines, ask it to do it with a recommended library and get the output in 15 minutes total assuming I don't have a library in mind and have to find one I like. Of course verification is still needed but I'd need to verify it even if I wrote it myself anyway, same for optimization. I'd even argue it's better since it's someone else's code so I'm more judgemental. The issue comes when you start trying to do complex stuff with LLMs since you then tend to halfass the analysis part and get led down the development path the LLM chose, get a mish mash of the AIs codestyle and yours from the constant fixes and it becomes a mess. You can get things implemented quickly like that, which is cool, but it feels like it inevitably becomes spaghetti code and sometimes you can't even rewrite it easily since it used something that works but you don't entirely understand.
- ljm 2y ago
  Similar to the pre-COVID coding bootcamps and crash-courses we’ll likely just end up with an even larger cohort of junior engineers who have a hard time growing their career because of the expectations they were given. This is a shame but still, if such a person has the wherewithal to learn, the resources to do so are more abundant and accessible than they’ve ever been. Even the LLM can be used to explain instead of answer. LinkedIn is awash with posts about being a ‘product engineer’ and ‘vibe coding’ and building a $10m startup over a weekend with Claude 3.5 and a second trimester foetus as a cofounder, and the likely end result there is simply just another collection of startups whose founding team struggles to execute beyond that initial AI prototyping stage. They’ll mistake their prompting for actual experience not realising just how many assumptions the LLM will make on their behalf. Won’t be long before we see the AI startup equivalent of a rug-pull there.
littlestymaar 2y ago
It's not reasonable to say “I cannot do that as it would be completing your work”, no. Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, it's already problematic when they censor sexual topics but the tool makers feel entitled to configure their tools only to allow you some kind of use for your work then we're speedrunning to dystopia (as if it wasn't the case already).
- johnisgood 2y ago
  Exactly. The purpose of it is to help you, that is its one and only utility. It has one job, and it refuses to do it.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, Asimov's "three laws of robotics" beg to differ.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Only if your actions would harm another human or yourself, right? Anyhow in the caliban books the police robot could consider unethical and immoral things, and even contemplate harming humans, but it made it work really slow, almost tiring it.
rvnx 2y ago
It's because they "nerfed" Cursor by not sending the whole files anymore to Claude, but if you use RooCode, the performance is awesome and above average developer. If you have the money to pay for the queries, try it :)
threeseed 2y ago
> but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level Would strongly disagree here. They are something else entirely. They have the ability to provide an answer to any question but where its accuracy decreases significantly depending on the popularity of the task. So if I am writing a CRUD app in Python/React it is expert level. But when I throw some Scala or Rust it is 100x worse than any junior would ever be. Because no normal person would confidently rewrite large amounts of code with nonsense that doesn't even compile. And I don't see how LLMs get significantly better without a corresponding improvement in input data.
Shorel 2y ago
Still not enough. Not only that, still very far away from being good enough. An opinionated AI trying to convince me his way of doing things is the one true way and my way is not the right way, that's the stuff of nightmares. Give it a few years and when it is capable of coding a customized and full-featured clone of Gnome, Office, Photoshop, or Blender, then we are talking.

alexchamberlain 2y ago

My biggest worry about AI is that it will do all the basic stuff, so people will never have a chance to learn and move on to the more complex stuff. I think there's a name for this, but I can't find it right now. In the hands of a tenured expert though, AI should be a big step up.

vrighter 2y ago
Played a game called Beyond a Steel Sky (sequel to the older beneath a steel sky). In the starting section there was an "engineer" going around fixing stuff. He just pointed his AI tool at the thing, and followed the instructions, while not knowing what he's doing at any point. That's what I see happening
- threeseed 2y ago
  I just did that with Cursor/Claude where I asked it to port a major project. No code just prompts. Right now after a week it has 4500 compilation errors with every single file having issues requiring me to now go back and actually understand what its gone and done. Debatable whether it has saved time or not.
  - mckn1ght 2y ago
    I did the same, porting a huge python script that had grown way too unwieldy to Swift. It undoubtedly saved me time. Your project sounds a lot bigger than mine, 4500 is a lot of compilation errors. If it’s not already split into modules, could be a good time to do it piece by piece. Port one little library at a time.
antupis 2y ago
I think it goes the same way as compilers so bits -> assembly -> c -> jvm and now you don't need mostly care what happens at lower levels because stuff works. With AI we are now basically the bits -> assembly phase so you need to care a lot about what is happening at a lower level.
vbezhenar 2y ago
Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication? That's an interesting question actually. When I was a kid, calculators were not as widespread and I could easily multiply 4-digit numbers in my brain. Nowadays I'd be happy to multiply 2-digit numbers without mistakes. But I carry my smartphone with me, so there's just no need to do so... So while learning basic stuff is definitely necessary just like it's necessary to have understanding how to multiply or divide numbers of any size (kids learn that nowadays, right?), actually mastering those skills may be wasted time?
- alexchamberlain 2y ago
  Honestly, I think we already see that in wider society, where mental arithmetic has more or less disappeared. This is in general fine ofc, but it makes it much harder to check the output of a machine if you can't do approximate calculations in your head.
- dijksterhuis 2y ago
  > actually mastering those skills may be wasted time? this question is, i’m pretty sure it is safe to assume, the absolute bane of every maths teacher’s existence. if i don’t learn and master the fundamentals, i cannot learn and master more advanced concepts. which means no fluid dynamics for me when i get to university because “what’s the point of learning algebra, i’m never gonna use it in real life” (i mean, i flunked fluid dynamics but it was because i was out drinking all the time). i still remember how to calculate compound interest. do i need to know how to calculate compound interest today? no. did i need to learn and master it as an application of accumulation functions? absolutely. just because i don’t need to apply something i learned to master before doesn’t mean i didn’t need to learn and master it in order to learn and master something else later. mastery is a cumulative process in my experience. skipping out on it with early stuff makes it much harder to master later stuff. > Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication? yes.
Lanolderen 2y ago
To be honest you don't need to know the lower level things. It's just removing the need to remember the occasional boilerplate. If I need to parse a file I can just chuck it a couple lines, ask it to do it with a recommended library and get the output in 15 minutes total assuming I don't have a library in mind and have to find one I like. Of course verification is still needed but I'd need to verify it even if I wrote it myself anyway, same for optimization. I'd even argue it's better since it's someone else's code so I'm more judgemental. The issue comes when you start trying to do complex stuff with LLMs since you then tend to halfass the analysis part and get led down the development path the LLM chose, get a mish mash of the AIs codestyle and yours from the constant fixes and it becomes a mess. You can get things implemented quickly like that, which is cool, but it feels like it inevitably becomes spaghetti code and sometimes you can't even rewrite it easily since it used something that works but you don't entirely understand.
ljm 2y ago
Similar to the pre-COVID coding bootcamps and crash-courses we’ll likely just end up with an even larger cohort of junior engineers who have a hard time growing their career because of the expectations they were given. This is a shame but still, if such a person has the wherewithal to learn, the resources to do so are more abundant and accessible than they’ve ever been. Even the LLM can be used to explain instead of answer. LinkedIn is awash with posts about being a ‘product engineer’ and ‘vibe coding’ and building a $10m startup over a weekend with Claude 3.5 and a second trimester foetus as a cofounder, and the likely end result there is simply just another collection of startups whose founding team struggles to execute beyond that initial AI prototyping stage. They’ll mistake their prompting for actual experience not realising just how many assumptions the LLM will make on their behalf. Won’t be long before we see the AI startup equivalent of a rug-pull there.

littlestymaar 2y ago

It's not reasonable to say “I cannot do that as it would be completing your work”, no. Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, it's already problematic when they censor sexual topics but the tool makers feel entitled to configure their tools only to allow you some kind of use for your work then we're speedrunning to dystopia (as if it wasn't the case already).

johnisgood 2y ago
Exactly. The purpose of it is to help you, that is its one and only utility. It has one job, and it refuses to do it.
coldtea 2y ago
>Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, Asimov's "three laws of robotics" beg to differ.
- genewitch 2y ago
  Only if your actions would harm another human or yourself, right? Anyhow in the caliban books the police robot could consider unethical and immoral things, and even contemplate harming humans, but it made it work really slow, almost tiring it.

rvnx 2y ago

It's because they "nerfed" Cursor by not sending the whole files anymore to Claude, but if you use RooCode, the performance is awesome and above average developer. If you have the money to pay for the queries, try it :)

threeseed 2y ago

> but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level Would strongly disagree here. They are something else entirely. They have the ability to provide an answer to any question but where its accuracy decreases significantly depending on the popularity of the task. So if I am writing a CRUD app in Python/React it is expert level. But when I throw some Scala or Rust it is 100x worse than any junior would ever be. Because no normal person would confidently rewrite large amounts of code with nonsense that doesn't even compile. And I don't see how LLMs get significantly better without a corresponding improvement in input data.

Shorel 2y ago

Still not enough. Not only that, still very far away from being good enough. An opinionated AI trying to convince me his way of doing things is the one true way and my way is not the right way, that's the stuff of nightmares. Give it a few years and when it is capable of coding a customized and full-featured clone of Gnome, Office, Photoshop, or Blender, then we are talking.