6 ms·

This isn’t just about individual laziness—it’s a systemic arms race towards intellectual decay.[0] With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the

by andai 2y ago

This isn’t just about individual laziness—it’s a systemic arms race towards intellectual decay.[0] With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. So the problem seems to boil down to, how can we convince everyone to go against the basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance. So it seems to be less about specific techniques and technologies, and more about a basic approach to life itself? In terms of integrating that approach into your actual work (so you can stay sharp through your career), it's even worse than just laziness, it's fear of getting fired too, since doing things the human way doubles the time required (according to Microsoft), and adding little AI-tutor-guided coding challenges to enhance your understanding along the way increases that even further. And in the context of "this feature needs to be done by Tuesday and all my colleagues are working 2-3x faster than me (because they're letting AI do all the work)... you see what I mean! It systemically creates the incentive for everyone to let their cognitive abilities rapidly decline. [0] GPT-4.5

GoblinSlayer 2y ago
The purpose of the least resistance instinct is to conserve resources of the organism due to scarcity of food. Consequently in absence of scarcity of food this instinct is suboptimal.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Even in abundance, least-resistance instinct is strictly beneficial when applied to things you need to do, as opposed to things you want to do.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Time is always scarce.
  - GoblinSlayer 2y ago
    For short term wins you pay with long term losses.
    - brulard 2y ago
      That doesn't need to be zero sum game.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      That's not true in general.
      - GoblinSlayer 2y ago
        In general time management isn't trivial. There's risk management, security, technical debt, incremental degradation, debuggability and who knows what else, we only recently began to understand these things.
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        True. Still, the idea that short-term gains = long-term losses does not generalize, because it depends on the shape of the reward landscape. In the common, simple case, the short-term wins are steps leading straight to long-term wins. I'd go as far as to say, it's so common that we don't notice or talk about it much.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - consteval 2y ago
    We also never gain any time from productivity. When sewing machines were invented and the time to make a garment went down 100x, you didn’t work 15 minutes a day. Instead, those people are actually now much poorer and work much more. What was a respectable job is grunt work, and they’re sweat shop warm bodies. The gains of their productivity was, predictably, siphoned upwards.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. That's not true. Yes, you can get more effective at something with more effort, but you can get even more effective at it if you find a way to get results without actually doing the work yourself in the first place. That's literally the entirety of human technological advancement, in a nutshell. We'd ideally avoid all effort that's incidental to the goal, but if we can't (we usually can't), we invent tools that reduce this effort - and iterate on them, reducing the effort further, until eventually, hopefully, the human effort goes to 0. Is that a "basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance"? Perhaps. But then, that's progress, not a problem.
- alonsonic 2y ago
  It's ironic to see people say this type of things and not think about old software engineer practices that are now obsolete because overtime we have created more and more tools to simplify the craft. This is yet another step in that evolution. We are no longer using punch cards or writing assembly code, and we might not write actual code in the future anymore and just instruct ais to achieve goals. This is progress
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Elsewhere in this discussion thread[0], 'ChrisMarshallNY compares this to feelings of insecurity: > 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 (...) I believe he's right. It makes me think back to my teenage years, when I first learned to program because I wanted to make games. Within the amateur gamedev community, we had this habit of sneering at "clickers" - Klik&Play & other kinds of software we'd today call "low-code", that let you make games with very little code (almost entirely game logic, and most of it "clicked out" in GUI), and near-zero effort on the incidental aspects like graphics, audio, asset management, etc. We were all making (or pretending to make) games within scope of those "clickers", but using such tools felt like cheating compared to doing it The Right Way, slinging C++ through blood, sweat and tears. It took me over a decade to finally realize how stupid that perspective was. Sure, I've learned a lot; a good chunk of my career skills date back to those years. However, whatever technical arguments we levied against "clickers", most of them were bullshit. In reality, this was us trying to feel better, special, doing things The Hard Way, instead of "taking shortcuts" like those lazy people... who, unlike us, actually released some playable games. I hear echoes of this mindset in a lot of "LLMs will rot your brain" commentary these days. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351486
4ndrewl 2y ago
Your cognitive abilities to do programming may cognitively decline, but that's not the aim here is it? The aim is to solve a problem for a user, not to write code? If we solve that using different tools maybe our cognitive abilities will just focus on something else?
- brulard 2y ago
  Exactly. If there is a tool that can do a lot of the low level work for us, we are free to do more of the higher level tasks and have higher output overall. Programming should be just a means to an end, not the end itself.
  - ThrowawayR2 2y ago
    Or, more likely, most of us will be much lower paid or simply out of a job as our former customers input their desires into the AI themselves and it spits out what they want.
    - 4ndrewl 2y ago
      Same as artists etc. Only we did it to ourselves.
  - 957497573 2y ago
    > Programming should be just a means to an end, not the end itself. That's just, like, your opinion man. I know for a fact that I didn't study to be a software engineer just so I could end up wrangling LLMs trained on stolen code into writing crappy code for me.
    - brulard 2y ago
      I believe there are still many ways how to use AI in your workflow. For example I don't like the concept of Vibe coding, but it's amazing for people with little or no skill. They can do fun stuff which they couldn't before. Neither I studied for such a reason. I studied it because I like to solve problems, and solutions are (from my perspective) software. If there are tools that can help me make such solutions quicker with acceptable quality, I'm going to use it. I don't want to use it to write "crappy" code although I know it is fully capable of doing so. But I believe there come the skills of software engineer to supervise and manage it. I don't think you can go far with LLMs without some real knowledge, neither now, nor in the following few years.
brulard 2y ago
> because they're letting AI do all the work This is an unnecessary hyperbole. It's like saying that your reportees do all the work for you. You need to put in an effort to understand the strengths and weaknesses of AI and put it to good work and make sure to double check its result. Low-skill individuals are not going to get great results for moderately complex tasks with AI. It's absurd to think it will do "all the work". I believe we are on the point of SW engineering skills shifting from understanding all the details of programming language and tooling more to higher level thinking and design. Although I see without proper processes (code reviews, guidelines, etc.) use of AI can get out of hand to the point of a very bloated and unmaintainable code base. Well, as with any powerful technology it has to be handled with care.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Those damn kids, compilers and linters doing all the work for them. Back in my day we punched bits into a card by hand. /s It's just people ranting about another level of abstraction, like always.
  - Tainnor 2y ago
    Those other levels of abstraction that you mentioned are deterministic and predictable. I think that's a massive difference and it justifies why one should be more skeptical towards AI generated code (skeptical doesn't mean "outright dismissing" tbf).
    - moffkalast 2y ago
      Deterministic tab completion generates horseshit half the time too, at the end of the day you have to know what you're doing in either case imo. You can also run an LLM in deterministic mode, but performance is usually worse.
    - SleepyMyroslav 2y ago
      Fun fact that we have burned those bridges years ago. Every time big codebase updates it's main optimizing toolchain (compiler/linker) ... there is nothing deterministic and predictable. There is only what has been re-tested and what has not been.
BoredPositron 2y ago
Are you going to take my washing machine next? AI is a gateway to spend more time, to do whatever you want. It's your decision to let your brain rot away or not.
- 957497573 2y ago
  We work harder than people at any other point in history, despite all our technological advances. What makes you think AI will be different?
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    No, we don't. >> We are down in working hours per year from 3.500h in 1870 to around 1400h now.
- slater 2y ago
  > AI is a gateway to spend more time, to do whatever you want That's not how any previous advancement has worked. "Work expands to fill the time saved" and all that.
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    We are down in working hours per year from 3.500h in 1870 to around 1400h now.
    - slater 2y ago
      Yes, thanks to laws put in place, not because of technical progress. Come on.
      - BoredPositron 2y ago
        Well whatever it is and if there is correlation or not. We work less now.
      - joegibbs 2y ago
exe34 2y ago
> whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague sounds like you're against corporate hierarchy too? or would you agree that having underlings do stuff for you at a reasonable price helps you achieve more?
- andai 2y ago
  Well, we're about to automate/replace the entire laborer class, or at least we're putting trillions of dollars into making that happen as soon as possible. I'm not sure what effect that will have on the hierarchy, since it seems like they will replace the top half of the company as well.
raincole 2y ago
> effectiveness is a function of effort In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a mistake?
- williamcotton 2y ago
  Is humanity itself a mistake? The fall of man himself? Are we to be redeemed through blog posts in the great 21st century AI flamewars? There's a reason these technologies are so controversial. They question our entire existence. These threads of conversation border on religious debate.
unclebucknasty 2y ago
>the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. I think AI is being driven most by those interested in the "promise" of eliminating workers altogether. But, if by "AI epidemic", you more mean the increasing uptake of AI by workers/devs themselves (versus the overall frenzy), then I think the characterizations of "avoiding effort" and "laziness" are a bit harsh. I mean, of course people don't generally want to take the path of most resistance. And, there's value in efficiency being an "approach to life". But, I think there's still more from the human side: that is, if the things you're spending your time on have less value of the sort emphasized in your environment, then your interest will likely naturally wane over time. I think this is especially true of something tedious like coding. So, I believe there's a human/social element that goes beyond the pressure to keep up for the sake of job security.
- andai 2y ago
  What I meant specifically was overreliance on AI, in the sense that I'm now hearing that many junior devs can't do basic coding without AI. (The parallel that comes to my mind is that programmers raised without garbage collection learned to write more efficient code, and now a text editor uses several gigabytes. But yeah, someone called me a "dinosaur" already in this thread ;) Though this "increase in incompetence" might be a case of selection effect rather than degradation of ability, i.e. people who wouldn't even have gotten the job before are now getting into the industry. I'm not sure, it's probably a bit of both. I guess it's nothing new! See this great article from nearly 20 years ago: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
  - unclebucknasty 2y ago
    Understood. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, I've been in the game for "a while" myself. The example you gave with garbage collection reminds me of stories I've heard about Assembly language programmers back in the day, declaring that devs who use high level languages (like C) don't really know how to write good code. There's probably something to that, but it does beg the question "what's the right tradeoff?" Not only do we not have to deal with memory management, but also data structures and common algorithms, etc. I do think understanding those things made me a better coder, but perhaps progressively less meaningfully so, as time marched on and the lower level stuff was abstracted away by more and more layers on our move up stack to solve harder problems. So, the emphasis on writing code from scratch lessened over the years, and development became more about integrating other people's code (frameworks, libraries, API's, etc). So, I think that kind of teed up this AI approach to writing code, in that it's just more code to integrate that you didn't write. But, it is qualitatively different from the "natural progression", in that they're not writing code at all. In that way it feels like the last stop on the coding continuum. I suppose that makes sense, since we're told that we soon won't need human coders at all.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> against the basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance. Fitness. Nobody takes a run because they're needing to waste a half hour. Okay, some people just have energy and time to burn, and some like to code for the sake of it (I used to). We need to do things we don't like from time to time in order to stay fresh. That's why we have drills and exercises.
sycren 2y ago
I think this boils the problem down solely to the individual. What if companies realised this issue and made a period of time during the day devoted solely to learning, knowledge management and innovation. If their developers only use AI to be more productive, then the potential degradation of intellect could stifle innovation and make the company less competitive in the market. It would be interesting if we start seeing a resurgence of Google's mythical 10% rule with companies more inclined to let any employee create side projects using AI (like Cursor) that could benefit the company.
- eqmvii 2y ago
  The problem is motivation. I’ve worked at companies that use policies like this, but you often only see a handful of def motivated folks really make use of it.
rkuodys 2y ago
For me the question is different- you can ask "how to become better coder" for which the answer might be - to write more code. But the question I'm asking is what's the job of system/software developer. And to that the answer is very different. At least for me it is"building solutions to business problems, in the most efficient way". So in that case more/better code does not necessarily bring you closer to your goal.
- lyu07282 2y ago
  Good point I think there is a fundamental difference in the way people see software engineering, this doesn't have anything to do with generative AI, the disagreement existed way before then: * for some it is a form of art or craftsmanship, they take pride of their work and view it not just as a means to an end, they hone their skills just like any craftsman will, they believe that the quality of the work and the goal or purpose it serves are intrinsically linked and can never be separated * for others its a means to an end, the process or object it produces is irrelevant EXCEPT for the purpose it serves, only the end goal matters, things like software quality are irrelevant distractions that must be optimized away since they serve no inherent purpose There is no way to reconcile this, these are just radically different perspectives. If you only care about the goal then of course raising questions about the quality of the output of current state of generative AI will be of no concern to you.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > For me the question is different- you can ask "how to become better coder" for which the answer might be - to write more code. The problem with this answer is that there is little to learn from a lot of code that is written in a corporate environment. You typically only learn from brutally hard bleeding-edge challenges that you set to yourself, which you will barely ever find at work.
  - nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
    Exactly. This is always why the "x years of experience" metric is frequently useless.
- 2y ago
ashoeafoot 2y ago
But in case of a halway collapse of human society , ai can play pretend society is still going on and recovering .
immibis 2y ago
You have to learn what's underneath the shortcuts, and then use the shortcuts because they are genuinely more productive. I've heard it recommended that you should always understand one layer deeper than the layer you're working at.
beernet 2y ago
This is a dinosaur's view. I guess there were people who said the same back when calculators were invented.
dartos 2y ago
> instinct to take the path of least resistance. It’s least resistance initially, but much harder in the long run. It’s like the children with marshmallows experiment. Give a kid a marshmallow and tell them if they don’t eat it for 20min, they’ll get 2 more. Some kids will eat it right away and some will wait. We’re just seeing that play out for adults.

by andai 2y ago

GoblinSlayer 2y ago

The purpose of the least resistance instinct is to conserve resources of the organism due to scarcity of food. Consequently in absence of scarcity of food this instinct is suboptimal.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Even in abundance, least-resistance instinct is strictly beneficial when applied to things you need to do, as opposed to things you want to do.
HPsquared 2y ago
Time is always scarce.
- GoblinSlayer 2y ago
  For short term wins you pay with long term losses.
  - brulard 2y ago
    That doesn't need to be zero sum game.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    That's not true in general.
    - GoblinSlayer 2y ago
      In general time management isn't trivial. There's risk management, security, technical debt, incremental degradation, debuggability and who knows what else, we only recently began to understand these things.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        True. Still, the idea that short-term gains = long-term losses does not generalize, because it depends on the shape of the reward landscape. In the common, simple case, the short-term wins are steps leading straight to long-term wins. I'd go as far as to say, it's so common that we don't notice or talk about it much.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- consteval 2y ago
  We also never gain any time from productivity. When sewing machines were invented and the time to make a garment went down 100x, you didn’t work 15 minutes a day. Instead, those people are actually now much poorer and work much more. What was a respectable job is grunt work, and they’re sweat shop warm bodies. The gains of their productivity was, predictably, siphoned upwards.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. That's not true. Yes, you can get more effective at something with more effort, but you can get even more effective at it if you find a way to get results without actually doing the work yourself in the first place. That's literally the entirety of human technological advancement, in a nutshell. We'd ideally avoid all effort that's incidental to the goal, but if we can't (we usually can't), we invent tools that reduce this effort - and iterate on them, reducing the effort further, until eventually, hopefully, the human effort goes to 0. Is that a "basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance"? Perhaps. But then, that's progress, not a problem.

alonsonic 2y ago
It's ironic to see people say this type of things and not think about old software engineer practices that are now obsolete because overtime we have created more and more tools to simplify the craft. This is yet another step in that evolution. We are no longer using punch cards or writing assembly code, and we might not write actual code in the future anymore and just instruct ais to achieve goals. This is progress
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Elsewhere in this discussion thread[0], 'ChrisMarshallNY compares this to feelings of insecurity: > 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 (...) I believe he's right. It makes me think back to my teenage years, when I first learned to program because I wanted to make games. Within the amateur gamedev community, we had this habit of sneering at "clickers" - Klik&Play & other kinds of software we'd today call "low-code", that let you make games with very little code (almost entirely game logic, and most of it "clicked out" in GUI), and near-zero effort on the incidental aspects like graphics, audio, asset management, etc. We were all making (or pretending to make) games within scope of those "clickers", but using such tools felt like cheating compared to doing it The Right Way, slinging C++ through blood, sweat and tears. It took me over a decade to finally realize how stupid that perspective was. Sure, I've learned a lot; a good chunk of my career skills date back to those years. However, whatever technical arguments we levied against "clickers", most of them were bullshit. In reality, this was us trying to feel better, special, doing things The Hard Way, instead of "taking shortcuts" like those lazy people... who, unlike us, actually released some playable games. I hear echoes of this mindset in a lot of "LLMs will rot your brain" commentary these days. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351486

4ndrewl 2y ago

Your cognitive abilities to do programming may cognitively decline, but that's not the aim here is it? The aim is to solve a problem for a user, not to write code? If we solve that using different tools maybe our cognitive abilities will just focus on something else?

brulard 2y ago
Exactly. If there is a tool that can do a lot of the low level work for us, we are free to do more of the higher level tasks and have higher output overall. Programming should be just a means to an end, not the end itself.
- ThrowawayR2 2y ago
  Or, more likely, most of us will be much lower paid or simply out of a job as our former customers input their desires into the AI themselves and it spits out what they want.
  - 4ndrewl 2y ago
    Same as artists etc. Only we did it to ourselves.
- 957497573 2y ago
  > Programming should be just a means to an end, not the end itself. That's just, like, your opinion man. I know for a fact that I didn't study to be a software engineer just so I could end up wrangling LLMs trained on stolen code into writing crappy code for me.
  - brulard 2y ago
    I believe there are still many ways how to use AI in your workflow. For example I don't like the concept of Vibe coding, but it's amazing for people with little or no skill. They can do fun stuff which they couldn't before. Neither I studied for such a reason. I studied it because I like to solve problems, and solutions are (from my perspective) software. If there are tools that can help me make such solutions quicker with acceptable quality, I'm going to use it. I don't want to use it to write "crappy" code although I know it is fully capable of doing so. But I believe there come the skills of software engineer to supervise and manage it. I don't think you can go far with LLMs without some real knowledge, neither now, nor in the following few years.

brulard 2y ago

> because they're letting AI do all the work This is an unnecessary hyperbole. It's like saying that your reportees do all the work for you. You need to put in an effort to understand the strengths and weaknesses of AI and put it to good work and make sure to double check its result. Low-skill individuals are not going to get great results for moderately complex tasks with AI. It's absurd to think it will do "all the work". I believe we are on the point of SW engineering skills shifting from understanding all the details of programming language and tooling more to higher level thinking and design. Although I see without proper processes (code reviews, guidelines, etc.) use of AI can get out of hand to the point of a very bloated and unmaintainable code base. Well, as with any powerful technology it has to be handled with care.

moffkalast 2y ago
Those damn kids, compilers and linters doing all the work for them. Back in my day we punched bits into a card by hand. /s It's just people ranting about another level of abstraction, like always.
- Tainnor 2y ago
  Those other levels of abstraction that you mentioned are deterministic and predictable. I think that's a massive difference and it justifies why one should be more skeptical towards AI generated code (skeptical doesn't mean "outright dismissing" tbf).
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    Deterministic tab completion generates horseshit half the time too, at the end of the day you have to know what you're doing in either case imo. You can also run an LLM in deterministic mode, but performance is usually worse.
  - SleepyMyroslav 2y ago
    Fun fact that we have burned those bridges years ago. Every time big codebase updates it's main optimizing toolchain (compiler/linker) ... there is nothing deterministic and predictable. There is only what has been re-tested and what has not been.

BoredPositron 2y ago

Are you going to take my washing machine next? AI is a gateway to spend more time, to do whatever you want. It's your decision to let your brain rot away or not.

957497573 2y ago
We work harder than people at any other point in history, despite all our technological advances. What makes you think AI will be different?
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  No, we don't. >> We are down in working hours per year from 3.500h in 1870 to around 1400h now.
slater 2y ago
> AI is a gateway to spend more time, to do whatever you want That's not how any previous advancement has worked. "Work expands to fill the time saved" and all that.
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  We are down in working hours per year from 3.500h in 1870 to around 1400h now.
  - slater 2y ago
    Yes, thanks to laws put in place, not because of technical progress. Come on.
    - BoredPositron 2y ago
      Well whatever it is and if there is correlation or not. We work less now.
    - joegibbs 2y ago

exe34 2y ago

> whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague sounds like you're against corporate hierarchy too? or would you agree that having underlings do stuff for you at a reasonable price helps you achieve more?

andai 2y ago
Well, we're about to automate/replace the entire laborer class, or at least we're putting trillions of dollars into making that happen as soon as possible. I'm not sure what effect that will have on the hierarchy, since it seems like they will replace the top half of the company as well.

raincole 2y ago

> effectiveness is a function of effort In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a mistake?

williamcotton 2y ago
Is humanity itself a mistake? The fall of man himself? Are we to be redeemed through blog posts in the great 21st century AI flamewars? There's a reason these technologies are so controversial. They question our entire existence. These threads of conversation border on religious debate.

unclebucknasty 2y ago

>the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. I think AI is being driven most by those interested in the "promise" of eliminating workers altogether. But, if by "AI epidemic", you more mean the increasing uptake of AI by workers/devs themselves (versus the overall frenzy), then I think the characterizations of "avoiding effort" and "laziness" are a bit harsh. I mean, of course people don't generally want to take the path of most resistance. And, there's value in efficiency being an "approach to life". But, I think there's still more from the human side: that is, if the things you're spending your time on have less value of the sort emphasized in your environment, then your interest will likely naturally wane over time. I think this is especially true of something tedious like coding. So, I believe there's a human/social element that goes beyond the pressure to keep up for the sake of job security.

andai 2y ago
What I meant specifically was overreliance on AI, in the sense that I'm now hearing that many junior devs can't do basic coding without AI. (The parallel that comes to my mind is that programmers raised without garbage collection learned to write more efficient code, and now a text editor uses several gigabytes. But yeah, someone called me a "dinosaur" already in this thread ;) Though this "increase in incompetence" might be a case of selection effect rather than degradation of ability, i.e. people who wouldn't even have gotten the job before are now getting into the industry. I'm not sure, it's probably a bit of both. I guess it's nothing new! See this great article from nearly 20 years ago: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
- unclebucknasty 2y ago
  Understood. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, I've been in the game for "a while" myself. The example you gave with garbage collection reminds me of stories I've heard about Assembly language programmers back in the day, declaring that devs who use high level languages (like C) don't really know how to write good code. There's probably something to that, but it does beg the question "what's the right tradeoff?" Not only do we not have to deal with memory management, but also data structures and common algorithms, etc. I do think understanding those things made me a better coder, but perhaps progressively less meaningfully so, as time marched on and the lower level stuff was abstracted away by more and more layers on our move up stack to solve harder problems. So, the emphasis on writing code from scratch lessened over the years, and development became more about integrating other people's code (frameworks, libraries, API's, etc). So, I think that kind of teed up this AI approach to writing code, in that it's just more code to integrate that you didn't write. But, it is qualitatively different from the "natural progression", in that they're not writing code at all. In that way it feels like the last stop on the coding continuum. I suppose that makes sense, since we're told that we soon won't need human coders at all.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

> against the basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance. Fitness. Nobody takes a run because they're needing to waste a half hour. Okay, some people just have energy and time to burn, and some like to code for the sake of it (I used to). We need to do things we don't like from time to time in order to stay fresh. That's why we have drills and exercises.

sycren 2y ago

I think this boils the problem down solely to the individual. What if companies realised this issue and made a period of time during the day devoted solely to learning, knowledge management and innovation. If their developers only use AI to be more productive, then the potential degradation of intellect could stifle innovation and make the company less competitive in the market. It would be interesting if we start seeing a resurgence of Google's mythical 10% rule with companies more inclined to let any employee create side projects using AI (like Cursor) that could benefit the company.

eqmvii 2y ago
The problem is motivation. I’ve worked at companies that use policies like this, but you often only see a handful of def motivated folks really make use of it.

rkuodys 2y ago

For me the question is different- you can ask "how to become better coder" for which the answer might be - to write more code. But the question I'm asking is what's the job of system/software developer. And to that the answer is very different. At least for me it is"building solutions to business problems, in the most efficient way". So in that case more/better code does not necessarily bring you closer to your goal.

lyu07282 2y ago
Good point I think there is a fundamental difference in the way people see software engineering, this doesn't have anything to do with generative AI, the disagreement existed way before then: * for some it is a form of art or craftsmanship, they take pride of their work and view it not just as a means to an end, they hone their skills just like any craftsman will, they believe that the quality of the work and the goal or purpose it serves are intrinsically linked and can never be separated * for others its a means to an end, the process or object it produces is irrelevant EXCEPT for the purpose it serves, only the end goal matters, things like software quality are irrelevant distractions that must be optimized away since they serve no inherent purpose There is no way to reconcile this, these are just radically different perspectives. If you only care about the goal then of course raising questions about the quality of the output of current state of generative AI will be of no concern to you.
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> For me the question is different- you can ask "how to become better coder" for which the answer might be - to write more code. The problem with this answer is that there is little to learn from a lot of code that is written in a corporate environment. You typically only learn from brutally hard bleeding-edge challenges that you set to yourself, which you will barely ever find at work.
- nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
  Exactly. This is always why the "x years of experience" metric is frequently useless.
2y ago

ashoeafoot 2y ago

But in case of a halway collapse of human society , ai can play pretend society is still going on and recovering .

immibis 2y ago

You have to learn what's underneath the shortcuts, and then use the shortcuts because they are genuinely more productive. I've heard it recommended that you should always understand one layer deeper than the layer you're working at.

beernet 2y ago

This is a dinosaur's view. I guess there were people who said the same back when calculators were invented.

dartos 2y ago

> instinct to take the path of least resistance. It’s least resistance initially, but much harder in the long run. It’s like the children with marshmallows experiment. Give a kid a marshmallow and tell them if they don’t eat it for 20min, they’ll get 2 more. Some kids will eat it right away and some will wait. We’re just seeing that play out for adults.