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AI is turning us into glue
- turtlebits 1y ago"I like fixing thorny bugs". Not me. Any tool that can get me to the solution faster is always welcome. IME, AI does well handling the boring parts.
- dehrmann 1y agoAnd both are valid. Some people like building new products and features, some would rather fix existing ones.
- xnx 1y agoI don't think that's the split being referred to. Some people (like myself) see code as a way to achieve a goal, and some people like writing code for the puzzle of it.
- minimaxir 1y agoIt depends on the thorny bug. I like fixing bugs where the solution is to implement something clever and I learn something in the process. I don't like fixing bugs where I forget a comma or do a subtle one-off error. Most thorny bugs fall into the latter in my experience.
- Gigachad 1y agoOn the plus side, at least when I'm old and not so mentally sharp, my personal AI can tell me when I'm being scammed or why the wifi isn't working.
- plsbenice34 1y agoYou really don't believe it will be the one scamming you?
- matthewmueller 1y agoVery well-articulated article on a shared feeling!
- blogabegonija 1y agoGuys like these need dmt. srlsly.
- LoganDark 1y agoI would highly caution against recommending DMT to random strangers. It is not for the faint of heart and it is also nowhere near a magic fix-all. Also, its routes of administration mostly suck (smoking/vaping or MAOIs).
- blogabegonija 1y agoLammers should try anyway. Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) and psychedelic medicines are among the most high-profile evolving disruptive innovations within mental healthcare in recent years. Although AI and psychedelics may not have historically shared any common ground, there exists the potential for these subjects to combine in generating innovative mental health treatment approacheshttps://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.15229?af=R https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.15...
- LoganDark 1y agoThat application of psychedelics is almost entirely dissimilar to what you are proposing. While a lot of the emerging research in the field is nice (and long overdue in my opinion), I would be absolutely floored if any of it recommended DMT for the treatment of dissenting opinions. It's not like I just also could use some DMT either, since I already use psychedelics on a damn near weekly basis. It's just not something that you should be telling random strangers to try. It works differently on everyone, is not always helpful, and can even be harmful.
- blogabegonija 1y agoWell, this field would not advance without experiments either https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-flip-two-atoms-in-lsd-and-unlock-a-game-changing-mental-health-treatment/ https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-flip-two-atoms-in-lsd-an... https://www.amazon.com/AI-DMT-Simulating-Experience-through/dp/B0CZPC39SK https://www.amazon.com/AI-DMT-Simulating-Experience-through/...
- thomastraum 1y agothese well articulated articles will soon turn into pure despair. Happened to me.
- spacebanana7 1y agoAI is unlikely to take away jobs from software engineers. There’s no natural upper bound on the amount of software people can consume - unlike cars, food or houses. Software engineers ultimately are people with “will to build”. Just as hedge fund people have a “will to trade”. The code or tooling is just a means to an end.
- spencerflem 1y agoHuh, I have the opposite feeling- that people already have most of the software they want a this point.
- spacebanana7 1y agoThink about your browsing history over the last year. You’ve probably consumed an obscene amount of React components, maybe millions. Your car has way more code than a decade ago and so does your TV. These things might make you miserable but it’s still “demand” in the economic sense of the term. It keeps developers employed.
- hnhn34 1y ago>Think about your browsing history over the last year. You’ve probably consumed an obscene amount of React components, maybe millions. Yeah, most of which are rehashes of the same thing, and most of them on the same ~10 websites.
- eacapeisfutuile 1y ago640k should be enough for anybody
- myhf 1y agoWhy do articles like this always say things like "I've used LLMs to get some stuff done faster" and then go on to describe how LLMs get them to spend more time and money to do a worse job? You don't need LLMs to frustrate you into lowering your standards, the power to do that was within you all along.
- arctek 1y agoHas anyone actually measured this yet? Much of this feels like when they did studies on people who take mushrooms for example feel like they are more productive, but when you actually measure it they aren't. It's just their perception. To me the biggest issue is that search has been gutted out and so for many questions the best results come from asking an LLM. But this is far different from using it to generate entire codebases.
- eacapeisfutuile 1y agoNo, there’s been a couple of attempts but no one would call those outcomes conclusive.
- newbie578 1y agoWell written, I agree with the basic premise of the idea, I just think the changes will be even more dramatic. A lot of us are stationary, thinking stuff and other people around us will be automated, but not us, “I am special”, well I fear a lot of people will find out just how much special they unfortunately are (not).
- rglover 1y agoReally enjoyed this post. > Putting aside existential risks, I don't see a future where a lot of jobs don't cease to exist. I'm personally betting on the plateau effect with LLMs. There are two plateaus I see coming that will require humans to fix no matter what we do: 1. The LLMs themselves plateau. We're already seeing new models get worse, not better at writing code (e.g., Sonnet 3.5 seems to be better than 3.7 at coding). This could be a temporary fluke, or, an inherent reality of how LLMs work (where I tend to land). 2. Humans will plateau. First, humans themselves will see their skills atrophy as they defer more and more to AI than struggling to solve problems (and by extension, learn new things). Second, humans will be disincentivized to create new forms of programming and write about them, so eventually the inputs to the LLM become stale. Short-term, this won't appear to be true, but long-term (on the author's 10+ year scale), it will be frightening. Doubly so when systems that were primarily or entirely "vibe coded" start to break in ways that the few remaining humans responsible for maintaining them don't understand (and can't prompt their way out of). And that's where I think the future work will be: in fixing or replacing systems unintentionally being broken by the use of AI. So, you'll either be an "AI mess fixer" or more entrepreneurial doing "artisan, hand-crafted software." Either of those I expect to be fairly lucrative.
- sarreph 1y agoOn your second point - I don’t agree that humans in general will plateau. I think instead the _gap_ between humans who crave to create and learn, and those who are ostensibly potatoes, will be magnified. I see it a bit like the creator economy, where you have these maker vs consumer tranches of people.
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoHumans are fundamentally creators of tools and art and imaginary world - this is one of the factors that distinguishes us from animals. For most of human history, most humans spent a lot of their time creating. The very recent phenomena of a large fraction of humans creating almost nothing in their adult life is caused by modern economic systems, almost all of which force people to work so much every day that all their creative energies are sapped. Go to a 4 day 24 hour work week and you will find almost everyone creating again.
- felipeccastro 1y agoI’ve been having a different experience. Asking Claude to fix the bug again and again is annoying, so I’m still working on “pull pieces at a time, understanding each” so I do fix the bug myself when it’s faster to do so. In fact, the majority of times I’ve been using the LLM to build tiny libraries for me to avoid the need for the LLM in the running app. Kind of like StackOverflow on steroids. I don’t feel as the glue, but only having a superior tooling to get info I need fast.
- holtkam2 1y agoHot take: we were already glue. We take in ideas / directives from product people and turn that into instructions for a computer to use to build a software package. The only difference in a “vibe coding” world is that now these “instructions” that we pass to the computer are in English, not Java.
- eacapeisfutuile 1y agoNot entirely, because the snippets you get when vibe coding are derived from actual coding.
- Animats 1y agoThe "glue" comment here reflects a view from someone who does mostly software work. That's been the situation since mechanized production lines were first built. The job of the humans is not direct labor. It's to monitor the machinery, restart it, and fix it. Power looms were probably the first devices like this. Somebody has to thread the loom, but then it mostly runs by itself.[1] Production lines with lots of stations will have shutdowns, where a drill bit broke or there's dirt on a lens or some consumable ran out. Exceptions are hard to automate, and factory design focuses on minimizing exceptions and bypassing stuck cells. It's helpful to understand how a factory works when watching how software development is changing. There's commonality. So the phrase "vibe coding" is only two months old.[2] How widespread will it be in two years? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyRW9XOuUdU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyRW9XOuUdU [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding
- m0llusk 1y agoReally interesting that I have so far had hardly any use for code generators except when some glue was needed. Possibly this new revolution may be headed in multiple conflicting directions simultaneously?
- m4rtink 1y agoThere is a story about this by Stanislaw Lem: "Elsewhere Tichy meets a race of aliens (called "Indioci" in the Polish original, "Phools" in the English translation) who, desiring perfect harmony in their lives, entrust themselves to a machine, which converts them into shiny discs to be arranged in pleasant patterns across their planet." - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijon_Tichy#Stories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijon_Tichy#Stories (Not glue, but close enough.)
- stavros 1y agoSo there's a wrong way and a right way to code with LLMs. The wrong way is to ask the LLM to write a bunch of code you don't understand, and to keep asking it to write more and more code to fix the problems each iteration has. That will lead to a massive tower built on sand, where everything is brittle and collapses at the slightest gust of wind. The right way is to have it autocomplete a few lines at a time for you. You avoid writing all the boilerplate, you don't need to look up APIs, you get to write lines in a tenth of the time it would normally take, but you still have all the context of what's happening where. If there's a bug, you don't need to ask the LLM to fix it, you just go and look, you spot it, and you fix it yourself, because it's usually something dumb. The second way wins because you don't let the LLM make grand architectural choices, and all the bugs are contained in low-level code, which is generally easy to fix if the functions, their inputs, and their outputs are sane. I like programming as much as the next person, but I'm really not lamenting the fact that I don't have to be looking up parameters or exact function names any more. Especially something like Cursor makes this much easier, because it can autocomplete as you type, rather than in a disconnected "here's a diff you won't even read" way.
- eacapeisfutuile 1y agoThat level of autocomplete has been around for many years before LLM for pretty much any used language
- skydhash 1y agoThe best completion are those that let you avoiding mistyping variable names or figure out some dependency (automatically import the modules, restrict to the current scope/structure). Those has been solved for decades now. And you can get a dumb ones by doing a list of all symbols in the project directory, removing common keyword and punctuation, and do some kind of matching for filtering. The other side of the spectrum is the kind of code indexing IDEA and LSP server do. Then you got into code boilerplate, and if you find yourself doing this a lot, that's a signal to start refactoring, add some snippets to your editor (error handling in go), write some code generators, or lament the fact that your language can't do metaprogramming. > but I'm really not lamenting the fact that I don't have to be looking up parameters or exact function names any more. That's a reckless attitude to have, especially if the function have drastic behavior switch like mutating argument or returning a fresh copy. All you do is assume that it behaves in certain way while the docs you haven't read will have the related warning label.
- Havoc 1y ago> I don't see a future where a lot of jobs don't cease to exist. And the complete lack of a game plan of a societal level is starting to get worrying. If we’re going to UBI this then we’re going to need a bit more of a plan than some toy studies
- eximius 1y agoI'm still pretty pessimistic on all this. Just today, I had what should have been an obvious win for an LLM coding assistant to help me. I was writing a go function that converts one very long struct into a second very long struct. The transformation was almost entirely wrapping the fields of the first struct in a wrapper in a completely rote way. If FieldA was an int on src, I wanted a dest{ FieldA: Wrapper{ Value: src.FieldA, Ratio: src.FieldA/Constant }, ... }. It couldn't do it. I prefilled in all the fields (hundreds) and told it just to populate them, but it tried to hallucinate new fields, it would do one or two then both delete the fields I had added and add a comment saying 'then do the rest'. I tried a bunch of different prompts. I can see how some vibe coders could make useful things, but most of my attempts to use LLMs in anything not-from-scratch are exercises in frustration.
- dinfinity 1y agoWhich one? Can we please make it a convention that whenever anybody posts anything about some LLM experience they had, that they include which model and UI driving it they used? Parent's post is like saying: I tried to send an email with a new email program and it didn't work.
- eximius 1y agoVS Code + Github Copilot (Editor Inline Chat) + GPT-4o
- garof 1y agoNothing about horses?
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoNothing stopping anyone fixing thorny bugs for fun! And hobby computing is more accessible now than ever. If you build stuff for others AI (mostly) removes typing and debugging from the equation; that frees you to think harder about what you’re building and how to make it most useful. And because you’re generally done sooner you can get the thing into your users’ hands sooner, increasing the iterations. It’s win-win.
- PorterBHall 1y agoBut I thought it was going to turn us into paper clips.