4 ms·

> It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in

> It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. I am from the generation whose only options on the table were RTFM and/or read the source code. Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbots are. I welcome chatbots. They greatly simplify research tasks. We are no longer bound to stake/poorly written docs. I think we have a lot of old timers ramping up on their version of "I walked 10 miles to school uphill both ways". Not a good look. We old timers need to do better.

megadata 2y ago
SO was never a problem. Low effort questions were. "This doesn't work, why?" followed by 300 lines of code.
opan 2y ago
The issues I see are that private chats are information blackholes whereas public stuff like SO can show up in a search and help more than just the original asker (can also be easily referenced / shared). Also the fact that these chatbots are wrong / make stuff up a lot.
- andyferris 2y ago
  I had never thought about that - I guess the privacy cuts both ways.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    That's not really a problem with LLMs, which are trained on material that is, or was, otherwise accessible on the Internet, and they themselves remain accessible. No, the problem is created and perpetuated by people defaulting to building communities around Discord servers or closed WhatsApp groups. Those are true information black holes. And yes, privacy and commons are in opposition. There is a balance to be had. IMHO, in the past few years, we've overcorrected way too much in the privacy direction.
    - K0balt 2y ago
      Unfortunately though it isn’t actually privacy in most cases. It’s just a walled garden where the visibility is limited to users and some big tech goons who eventually will sell it all.
- block_dagger 2y ago
  LLMs are trained on public data though.
  - maxbaines 2y ago
    Less and less now actually. Synthetic data is now being used on most new models as the public data runs out.
    - sevenseacat 2y ago
      I'm sorry, are you suggesting that AIs are being trained on AI-generated data? What can possibly go wrong?!?
  - ncruces 2y ago
    Only if for as long as public data continues to exist.
- fowlie 2y ago
  Are you saying that black holes don't share any information? xD
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
Oh, heck. We didn’t need AI to do that. That’s been happening forever. It’s not just bad optics; it’s destructive. It discourages folks from learning. AI is just another tool. There’s folks that sneer at you if you use an IDE, a GUI, a WYSIWYG editor, or a symbolic debugger. They aren’t always boomers, either. As a high school dropout, with a GED, I’ve been looking up noses, my entire life. Often, from folks much younger than me. It’s really about basic human personal insecurity, and we all have that, to some degree. Getting around it, is a big part of growing up, so a lot of older folks are actually a lot less likely to pull that crap than you might think.
nerdponx 2y ago
> Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore And it kind of was a problem. There was an underclass of people who simply could not get anything done if it wasn't already done for them in a Stackoverflow answer or a blog post or (more recently and bafflingly) a Youtube video. These people never learned to read a manual and spent their days flailing around wondering why programming seemed so hard for them. Now with AI there will be more of these people, and they will make it farther in their careers before their lack of ability will be noticeable by hiring managers.
- eMPee584 2y ago
  .. for the brief period of time before machines will take care of the whole production cycle. Which is a great opportunity btw to drive forward a transition to a post-monetary, non-commercial post-scarcity open-source open-access commons economy.
- stereolambda 2y ago
  I would even say there's a type of comment along the lines of "we've been adding Roentgens for decades, surely adding some more will be fine so stop complaining". As a second-order effect, I think there's a decline in expected docs quality (of course depends on the area). Libraries and such don't expect people to read through them, so they are spotty and haphazard, with only some random things mentioned. No wider overviews and explanations, and somewhat rightly so, why try to write it if (nearly) no one will read it. So only tutorials and Q&A sites remain besides of API dumps.
usrbinbash 2y ago
> Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. No, it wasn't. What such comments were directed at, and with good reason, where 'SO-"Coders"', aka. people when faced with any problem, just googled a vague description of it, copypasted the code from the highest scoring SO answer into their project, and called it a day. SO is a valueable resource. AI Systems are a valueable resource. I use both every day, same as I almost always have one screen dedicated to some documentation page. The problem is not using the tools available. The problem is relying 100% on these tools, with no skill or care of ones own.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  I agree. Claude is very useful to me because I know what I am doing and I know what I want it to do. Additionally, I keep telling my friend who is studying data science to use LLMs to his advantage. He could learn a lot and be productive.
- jstummbillig 2y ago
  But skill will be needed. It's everything that is still necessary between nothing and (good) software existing. It will just rapidly be something that we are not used to, and the rate of change will be challenging, specially for those with specialized, hard earned skills and knowledge that become irrelevant.
- strken 2y ago
  Yes, they were, for reasons that have turned out to be half-right and half-wrong. At least by some people. Ctrl-c ctrl-v programming was widely derided, but people were also worried about a general inability to RTFM. I had the good fortune to work with a man who convinced me to go read the spec of some of the programming languages I used. I'm told this was reasonably common in the days of yore, but I've only rarely worked on a team with someone else who does it. Reading a spec or manual helps me understand the language and aids with navigating the text later when I use it as documentation. That said, if all the other programmers can do their jobs anyway, is it really so awful for them to learn from StackOverflow and Google? Probably not. I imagine the same is true of LLMs.
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
I think it's unwise to naively copy code from either stack overflow or an AI, but if I had to choose, I'd pick the one that had been peer-reviewed by other humans every time.
- eMPee584 2y ago
  Ooh, the quality of "review" on SO also varies a whole lot..
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    Sure, I was more thinking of the original intent, and the early-days quality, than the current state of it. But I'd still take some review over none!
ookblah 2y ago
at risk of sounding like a grandpa this is nothing like SO. AI is just a tool for sure, one that "can" behave like an super enhanced SO and Google, but for the first time ever it can actually write for you and not just piddly lines but entire codebases. i think that represents a huge paradigm shift that we need to contend with. it isn't just "better" research. and i say this as someone who welcomes all of this that has come. IMO the skill gap just widens exponentially now. you will either have the competent developers who use these tools accelerate their learning and/or output some X factor, and on the other hand you will have literally garbage being created or people who just figure out they can now expend 1/10 the effort and time to do something and just coast, never bother to even understand what they wrote. just encountered that with some interviews where people can now scaffold something up in record time but can't be bothered to refine it because they don't know how. (ex. you have someone prompting to create some component and it does it in a minute. if you request a tweak, because they don't understand it they just keep trying re-prompt and micromanage the LLM to get the right output when it should only take another minute for someone experienced.)
- vaylian 2y ago
  > this is nothing like SO Strong agree. There have been people who blindly copied answers from Stack Overflow without understanding the code, but most of us took the time to read the explanations that accompanied the answers. While you can ask the AI to give you additional explanations, these explanations might be hallucinations and no one will tell you. On SO other people can point out that an answer or a comment is wrong.
  - motorest 2y ago
    > Strong agree. There have been people who blindly copied answers from Stack Overflow without understanding the code, but most of us took the time to read the explanations that accompanied the answers. Are you sure? Because chatbots are used exactly like SO, with the exception of usecases like a) using as glorified template and refactoring engines, b) explain existing codebases, c) automatically add unit tests and context-based documentation. Just open SO and check any random question: how to get a framework to do something, how to configure something, why something worked like this or like that, why did a code block had a bug, etc.
dijksterhuis 2y ago
> We are no longer bound to stake/poorly written docs. from what i gather, the training data often contains those same poorly written docs and often a lot of poorly written public code examples, so… YMMV with this statement as it is often fruit from the same tree. (to me LLMs are just a different interface to the same data, with some additional issues thrown in, which is why i don’t care for them). > I think we have a lot of old timers ramping up on their version of "I walked 10 miles to school uphill both ways". Not a good look. We old timers need to do better. it’s a question of trust for me. with great power (new tools) comes great responsibility — and juniors ain’t always learned enough about being responsible yet. i had a guy i was doing arma game dev with recently. he would use chatgpt and i would always warn him about not blindly trusting the output. he knew it, but i would remind him anyway. several of his early PRs had obvious issues that were just chatgpt not understanding the code at all. i’d point them out at review, he’d fix them and beat himself up for it (and i’d explain to him it’s fine don’t beat yourself up, remember next time blah blah). he was honest about it. he and i were both aware he was very new to coding. he wanted to learn. he wanted to be a “coder”. he learned to mostly use chatgpt as an expensive interface for the arma3 docs site. that kind of person using the tools i have no problem with. he was honest and upfront about it, but also wanted to learn the craft. conversely, i had a guy in a coffee shop recently claim to want to learn how to be a dev. but after an hour of talking with him it became increasingly clear he wanted me to write everything for him. that kind of short sighted/short term gain dishonesty seems to be the new-age copy/pasting answers from SO. i do not trust coffee shop guy. i would not trust any PR from him until he demonstrates that he can be trusted (if we were working together, which we won’t be). so, i get your point about doom and gloom naysaying. but there’s a reason for the naysaying from my perspective. and it comes down whether i can trust individuals to be honest about their work and how they got there and being willing to learn, or whether they just want to skip to end. essentially, it’s the same copy/pasting directly from SO problem that came before (and we’re all guilty of).
javcasas 2y ago
We old timers read the source code, which is a good proxy for what runs on the computer. From that, we construct a mental model of how it works. It is not "walking uphill 10 miles both ways". It is "understanding what the code actually does vs what it is supposed to do". So far, AI cannot do that. But it can pretend to, very convincingly.
breakfastduck 2y ago
And they were right. People who just blindly copy and paste code from SO are absolutely useless when it comes to handling real world problems, bugs etc.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
> Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbots are. I think the same tendency of some programmers to just script kiddie their way out of problems using SO answers without understanding the issue will be exacerbated by the proliferation of AI which is much more convincing about wrong answers. It's not a binary. You don't have to hate or welcome chatbots, no in between. We all use them, but we all also worry about the negatives, same with SO.
croes 2y ago
SO and Google are still a problem especially they are one of the sources of LLMs. So now we can get wrong code but written in a more confident language. If you are lucky it’s a hallucination and the error is obvious.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > So now we can get wrong code but written in a more confident language. The lesson to learn is rather that also in "real life", you shouldn't trust confident people.
  - croes 2y ago
    Mean’s don’t trust AI

megadata 2y ago

SO was never a problem. Low effort questions were. "This doesn't work, why?" followed by 300 lines of code.

opan 2y ago

The issues I see are that private chats are information blackholes whereas public stuff like SO can show up in a search and help more than just the original asker (can also be easily referenced / shared). Also the fact that these chatbots are wrong / make stuff up a lot.

andyferris 2y ago
I had never thought about that - I guess the privacy cuts both ways.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  That's not really a problem with LLMs, which are trained on material that is, or was, otherwise accessible on the Internet, and they themselves remain accessible. No, the problem is created and perpetuated by people defaulting to building communities around Discord servers or closed WhatsApp groups. Those are true information black holes. And yes, privacy and commons are in opposition. There is a balance to be had. IMHO, in the past few years, we've overcorrected way too much in the privacy direction.
  - K0balt 2y ago
    Unfortunately though it isn’t actually privacy in most cases. It’s just a walled garden where the visibility is limited to users and some big tech goons who eventually will sell it all.
block_dagger 2y ago
LLMs are trained on public data though.
- maxbaines 2y ago
  Less and less now actually. Synthetic data is now being used on most new models as the public data runs out.
  - sevenseacat 2y ago
    I'm sorry, are you suggesting that AIs are being trained on AI-generated data? What can possibly go wrong?!?
- ncruces 2y ago
  Only if for as long as public data continues to exist.
fowlie 2y ago
Are you saying that black holes don't share any information? xD

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

Oh, heck. We didn’t need AI to do that. That’s been happening forever. It’s not just bad optics; it’s destructive. It discourages folks from learning. AI is just another tool. There’s folks that sneer at you if you use an IDE, a GUI, a WYSIWYG editor, or a symbolic debugger. They aren’t always boomers, either. As a high school dropout, with a GED, I’ve been looking up noses, my entire life. Often, from folks much younger than me. It’s really about basic human personal insecurity, and we all have that, to some degree. Getting around it, is a big part of growing up, so a lot of older folks are actually a lot less likely to pull that crap than you might think.

nerdponx 2y ago

> Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore And it kind of was a problem. There was an underclass of people who simply could not get anything done if it wasn't already done for them in a Stackoverflow answer or a blog post or (more recently and bafflingly) a Youtube video. These people never learned to read a manual and spent their days flailing around wondering why programming seemed so hard for them. Now with AI there will be more of these people, and they will make it farther in their careers before their lack of ability will be noticeable by hiring managers.

eMPee584 2y ago
.. for the brief period of time before machines will take care of the whole production cycle. Which is a great opportunity btw to drive forward a transition to a post-monetary, non-commercial post-scarcity open-source open-access commons economy.
stereolambda 2y ago
I would even say there's a type of comment along the lines of "we've been adding Roentgens for decades, surely adding some more will be fine so stop complaining". As a second-order effect, I think there's a decline in expected docs quality (of course depends on the area). Libraries and such don't expect people to read through them, so they are spotty and haphazard, with only some random things mentioned. No wider overviews and explanations, and somewhat rightly so, why try to write it if (nearly) no one will read it. So only tutorials and Q&A sites remain besides of API dumps.

usrbinbash 2y ago

> Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. No, it wasn't. What such comments were directed at, and with good reason, where 'SO-"Coders"', aka. people when faced with any problem, just googled a vague description of it, copypasted the code from the highest scoring SO answer into their project, and called it a day. SO is a valueable resource. AI Systems are a valueable resource. I use both every day, same as I almost always have one screen dedicated to some documentation page. The problem is not using the tools available. The problem is relying 100% on these tools, with no skill or care of ones own.

johnisgood 2y ago
I agree. Claude is very useful to me because I know what I am doing and I know what I want it to do. Additionally, I keep telling my friend who is studying data science to use LLMs to his advantage. He could learn a lot and be productive.
jstummbillig 2y ago
But skill will be needed. It's everything that is still necessary between nothing and (good) software existing. It will just rapidly be something that we are not used to, and the rate of change will be challenging, specially for those with specialized, hard earned skills and knowledge that become irrelevant.
strken 2y ago
Yes, they were, for reasons that have turned out to be half-right and half-wrong. At least by some people. Ctrl-c ctrl-v programming was widely derided, but people were also worried about a general inability to RTFM. I had the good fortune to work with a man who convinced me to go read the spec of some of the programming languages I used. I'm told this was reasonably common in the days of yore, but I've only rarely worked on a team with someone else who does it. Reading a spec or manual helps me understand the language and aids with navigating the text later when I use it as documentation. That said, if all the other programmers can do their jobs anyway, is it really so awful for them to learn from StackOverflow and Google? Probably not. I imagine the same is true of LLMs.

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago

I think it's unwise to naively copy code from either stack overflow or an AI, but if I had to choose, I'd pick the one that had been peer-reviewed by other humans every time.

eMPee584 2y ago
Ooh, the quality of "review" on SO also varies a whole lot..
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  Sure, I was more thinking of the original intent, and the early-days quality, than the current state of it. But I'd still take some review over none!

ookblah 2y ago

at risk of sounding like a grandpa this is nothing like SO. AI is just a tool for sure, one that "can" behave like an super enhanced SO and Google, but for the first time ever it can actually write for you and not just piddly lines but entire codebases. i think that represents a huge paradigm shift that we need to contend with. it isn't just "better" research. and i say this as someone who welcomes all of this that has come. IMO the skill gap just widens exponentially now. you will either have the competent developers who use these tools accelerate their learning and/or output some X factor, and on the other hand you will have literally garbage being created or people who just figure out they can now expend 1/10 the effort and time to do something and just coast, never bother to even understand what they wrote. just encountered that with some interviews where people can now scaffold something up in record time but can't be bothered to refine it because they don't know how. (ex. you have someone prompting to create some component and it does it in a minute. if you request a tweak, because they don't understand it they just keep trying re-prompt and micromanage the LLM to get the right output when it should only take another minute for someone experienced.)

vaylian 2y ago
> this is nothing like SO Strong agree. There have been people who blindly copied answers from Stack Overflow without understanding the code, but most of us took the time to read the explanations that accompanied the answers. While you can ask the AI to give you additional explanations, these explanations might be hallucinations and no one will tell you. On SO other people can point out that an answer or a comment is wrong.
- motorest 2y ago
  > Strong agree. There have been people who blindly copied answers from Stack Overflow without understanding the code, but most of us took the time to read the explanations that accompanied the answers. Are you sure? Because chatbots are used exactly like SO, with the exception of usecases like a) using as glorified template and refactoring engines, b) explain existing codebases, c) automatically add unit tests and context-based documentation. Just open SO and check any random question: how to get a framework to do something, how to configure something, why something worked like this or like that, why did a code block had a bug, etc.

dijksterhuis 2y ago

> We are no longer bound to stake/poorly written docs. from what i gather, the training data often contains those same poorly written docs and often a lot of poorly written public code examples, so… YMMV with this statement as it is often fruit from the same tree. (to me LLMs are just a different interface to the same data, with some additional issues thrown in, which is why i don’t care for them). > I think we have a lot of old timers ramping up on their version of "I walked 10 miles to school uphill both ways". Not a good look. We old timers need to do better. it’s a question of trust for me. with great power (new tools) comes great responsibility — and juniors ain’t always learned enough about being responsible yet. i had a guy i was doing arma game dev with recently. he would use chatgpt and i would always warn him about not blindly trusting the output. he knew it, but i would remind him anyway. several of his early PRs had obvious issues that were just chatgpt not understanding the code at all. i’d point them out at review, he’d fix them and beat himself up for it (and i’d explain to him it’s fine don’t beat yourself up, remember next time blah blah). he was honest about it. he and i were both aware he was very new to coding. he wanted to learn. he wanted to be a “coder”. he learned to mostly use chatgpt as an expensive interface for the arma3 docs site. that kind of person using the tools i have no problem with. he was honest and upfront about it, but also wanted to learn the craft. conversely, i had a guy in a coffee shop recently claim to want to learn how to be a dev. but after an hour of talking with him it became increasingly clear he wanted me to write everything for him. that kind of short sighted/short term gain dishonesty seems to be the new-age copy/pasting answers from SO. i do not trust coffee shop guy. i would not trust any PR from him until he demonstrates that he can be trusted (if we were working together, which we won’t be). so, i get your point about doom and gloom naysaying. but there’s a reason for the naysaying from my perspective. and it comes down whether i can trust individuals to be honest about their work and how they got there and being willing to learn, or whether they just want to skip to end. essentially, it’s the same copy/pasting directly from SO problem that came before (and we’re all guilty of).

javcasas 2y ago

We old timers read the source code, which is a good proxy for what runs on the computer. From that, we construct a mental model of how it works. It is not "walking uphill 10 miles both ways". It is "understanding what the code actually does vs what it is supposed to do". So far, AI cannot do that. But it can pretend to, very convincingly.

breakfastduck 2y ago

And they were right. People who just blindly copy and paste code from SO are absolutely useless when it comes to handling real world problems, bugs etc.

aprilthird2021 2y ago

> Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbots are. I think the same tendency of some programmers to just script kiddie their way out of problems using SO answers without understanding the issue will be exacerbated by the proliferation of AI which is much more convincing about wrong answers. It's not a binary. You don't have to hate or welcome chatbots, no in between. We all use them, but we all also worry about the negatives, same with SO.

croes 2y ago

SO and Google are still a problem especially they are one of the sources of LLMs. So now we can get wrong code but written in a more confident language. If you are lucky it’s a hallucination and the error is obvious.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> So now we can get wrong code but written in a more confident language. The lesson to learn is rather that also in "real life", you shouldn't trust confident people.
- croes 2y ago
  Mean’s don’t trust AI