5 ms·

If you use AI agents for all your work as a novice do you ever make it out of the valley?

ivape 1y ago
Yeah. Most people have not deployed enough critical code that was mostly written with AI. It's when that stuff breaks, and they have to debug it with AI, that's when they'll have to contend with the blood, sweat, and tears. That's when the person will swear that they'll never use AI again. The thing is, we can never not use AI ever again. So, this is the trial by fire where many will figure out the depth of the valley and emerge from it with all the lessons. I can only speculate, but I suspect the lessons will be something along the lines of "some things should use less AI than others". I think it's a cool journey, best of luck to the AI-first crowd, you will learn lessons the rest of us are not brave enough to embark on. I already have a basket of lessons, so I travel differently through the valley (hint: My ship still has a helm).
- juliushuijnk 1y ago
  > that's when they'll have to contend with the blood, sweat, and tears. Or, most software will become immutable. You'll just replace it. You'll throw away the mess, and let a newer LLM build a better version in a couple of days. You ask the LLM to write down the specs for the newer version based on the old code. If that is true, then the crowd that is not brave enough to do AI-first will just be left behind.
  - ivape 1y ago
    If that is true, then the crowd that is not brave enough to do AI-first will just be left behind. Not even, devoured might be more apt. If I'm manually moving through this valley and a flood is coming through, those who are sticking automatic propellers and navigation systems on their ship are going to be the ones that can surf the flood and come out of the valley. We don't know, this is literally the adventure. I'm personally on the side of a hybrid approach. It's fun as hell, best of luck to everyone. It's in poor taste to bring up this example, but I'll mention it as softly as I can. There were some people that went down looking for the Titanic recently. It could have worked, you know what I mean? These are risks we all take. Quoting the Admiral from Starcraft Broodwars cinematic (I'm a learned person): "... You must go into this with both eyes open"
    - dbalatero 1y ago
      > It's in poor taste to bring up this example, but I'll mention it as softly as I can. There were some people that went down looking for the Titanic recently. It could have worked, you know what I mean? Not sure if you drew the right conclusion from that one.
  - aerhardt 1y ago
    The scenario you paint sounds very implausible for non-trivial applications, but even if it ends up becoming the development paradigm, I doubt anyone will be "left behind" as such. People will have time to re-skill. The question is whether some will ever want to or would prefer to take up woodworking.
    - skeledrew 1y ago
      Whether one takes up woodworking or not depends on whether or not development was primarily for profit, with little to not intrinsic enjoyment of the role.
      - weq 1y ago
        Coding and woodworking are similiar from my perspective, they are both creative arts. I like coding in different lanuages, woodworking is simply a physical manifestion of such. In a world where you only need agents, is not a world where nerds will be employed. Traditional nerds cant stand out from the crowd anymore. This is peak AI, it only goes downhill from here in terms of quality, the AI first flows will be replaceable. Those offshored teams that we have suffered with for years now will be primarly replaced (google first programmers). And developers will continue, working around the edges. The differences will be that startups wont be able to use technology horading to stifle competition, unless they make themselves immune from the ai vacumes. I can appreciate the comments further up around how AI can help unravel the mysterys of a legacy codebase. Being able to ask questions about code in quick succession will mean that we will feel more confident. AI is lossy, hard to direct, yet very confident always. We have 10k line functions in our legacy code that nests and nest. How confident are you to let ai go and refactor this code without oversight and ship to a customer? Thus far im not, maybe i dont know the best model and tools to use and how to apply them, but even if one of those logic branches gets hallucinated im in for a very bumpy ride. Watching non-technical people at my org get frusted and stuck with it in a loop is a lot more common then the successes which seem to be the opposite of the experienced engineers who use it as a tool, not a savour. But every situation is different. If you think you company can be a differentiator in the market because it has access to the same AI tool as every other company? We'll well see about that. I believe there has to be more. Im an experienced engineer of 30+yrs. Technology comes and goes. AI is just a another tool in the chest. I use it primarily because i dont have to deal with ads. I also use it to be a electrical engineer, designing circuts in areas i am not familiar with. I can see very simply the noivce side of the coin, it feels like you have super powers because you just dont know enough about the subject to be aware of anything else. Its sped up the learning cycle considerably beacause of the conversational nature. After a few years of projects, i know how to ask better questions to get better results.
  - JoshuaDavid 1y ago
    > Or, most software will become immutable. You'll just replace it. The joys of dependency hell combined with rapid deprecation of the underlying tooling.
  - spookie 1y ago
    Slaves to the system. Do we really want that? To be beholden to the hands of a few? Hell, you can't even purchase a GPU with high enough VRAM these days for an acceptable amount of money. In part because of geopolitics. I wonder how many morerestrictions are there to come. There's a lot of FOMO going around, those honing their programming skills will continue to thrive, and that's a guarantee. Don't become a vassal when you can be a king.
  - conartist6 1y ago
    Just... WAT. That's like saying "I'll just burn down my house because I can replace it. Anyone who repairs their house will be left behind." It's true, you can replace it, so I can't put my finger on what has been stopping people from burning their houses down instead of, say, spring cleaning
- andrekandre 1y ago
  > that's when they'll have to contend with the blood, sweat, and tears. That's when the person will swear that they'll never use AI again. sounds like me after my first hangover...
- conartist6 1y ago
  What leads you to believe non-AI coding is over? I'm not using AI and I'm still an incredibly high velocity engineer because I own my codebase. I've written each line ten times over, like a player who has become highly skilled at one particular game.

Yeah. Most people have not deployed enough critical code that was mostly written with AI. It's when that stuff breaks, and they have to debug it with AI, that's when they'll have to contend with the blood, sweat, and tears. That's when the person will swear that they'll never use AI again. The thing is, we can never not use AI ever again. So, this is the trial by fire where many will figure out the depth of the valley and emerge from it with all the lessons. I can only speculate, but I suspect the lessons will be something along the lines of "some things should use less AI than others". I think it's a cool journey, best of luck to the AI-first crowd, you will learn lessons the rest of us are not brave enough to embark on. I already have a basket of lessons, so I travel differently through the valley (hint: My ship still has a helm).

juliushuijnk 1y ago
> that's when they'll have to contend with the blood, sweat, and tears. Or, most software will become immutable. You'll just replace it. You'll throw away the mess, and let a newer LLM build a better version in a couple of days. You ask the LLM to write down the specs for the newer version based on the old code. If that is true, then the crowd that is not brave enough to do AI-first will just be left behind.
- ivape 1y ago
  If that is true, then the crowd that is not brave enough to do AI-first will just be left behind. Not even, devoured might be more apt. If I'm manually moving through this valley and a flood is coming through, those who are sticking automatic propellers and navigation systems on their ship are going to be the ones that can surf the flood and come out of the valley. We don't know, this is literally the adventure. I'm personally on the side of a hybrid approach. It's fun as hell, best of luck to everyone. It's in poor taste to bring up this example, but I'll mention it as softly as I can. There were some people that went down looking for the Titanic recently. It could have worked, you know what I mean? These are risks we all take. Quoting the Admiral from Starcraft Broodwars cinematic (I'm a learned person): "... You must go into this with both eyes open"
  - dbalatero 1y ago
    > It's in poor taste to bring up this example, but I'll mention it as softly as I can. There were some people that went down looking for the Titanic recently. It could have worked, you know what I mean? Not sure if you drew the right conclusion from that one.
- aerhardt 1y ago
  The scenario you paint sounds very implausible for non-trivial applications, but even if it ends up becoming the development paradigm, I doubt anyone will be "left behind" as such. People will have time to re-skill. The question is whether some will ever want to or would prefer to take up woodworking.
  - skeledrew 1y ago
    Whether one takes up woodworking or not depends on whether or not development was primarily for profit, with little to not intrinsic enjoyment of the role.
    - weq 1y ago
      Coding and woodworking are similiar from my perspective, they are both creative arts. I like coding in different lanuages, woodworking is simply a physical manifestion of such. In a world where you only need agents, is not a world where nerds will be employed. Traditional nerds cant stand out from the crowd anymore. This is peak AI, it only goes downhill from here in terms of quality, the AI first flows will be replaceable. Those offshored teams that we have suffered with for years now will be primarly replaced (google first programmers). And developers will continue, working around the edges. The differences will be that startups wont be able to use technology horading to stifle competition, unless they make themselves immune from the ai vacumes. I can appreciate the comments further up around how AI can help unravel the mysterys of a legacy codebase. Being able to ask questions about code in quick succession will mean that we will feel more confident. AI is lossy, hard to direct, yet very confident always. We have 10k line functions in our legacy code that nests and nest. How confident are you to let ai go and refactor this code without oversight and ship to a customer? Thus far im not, maybe i dont know the best model and tools to use and how to apply them, but even if one of those logic branches gets hallucinated im in for a very bumpy ride. Watching non-technical people at my org get frusted and stuck with it in a loop is a lot more common then the successes which seem to be the opposite of the experienced engineers who use it as a tool, not a savour. But every situation is different. If you think you company can be a differentiator in the market because it has access to the same AI tool as every other company? We'll well see about that. I believe there has to be more. Im an experienced engineer of 30+yrs. Technology comes and goes. AI is just a another tool in the chest. I use it primarily because i dont have to deal with ads. I also use it to be a electrical engineer, designing circuts in areas i am not familiar with. I can see very simply the noivce side of the coin, it feels like you have super powers because you just dont know enough about the subject to be aware of anything else. Its sped up the learning cycle considerably beacause of the conversational nature. After a few years of projects, i know how to ask better questions to get better results.
- JoshuaDavid 1y ago
  > Or, most software will become immutable. You'll just replace it. The joys of dependency hell combined with rapid deprecation of the underlying tooling.
- spookie 1y ago
  Slaves to the system. Do we really want that? To be beholden to the hands of a few? Hell, you can't even purchase a GPU with high enough VRAM these days for an acceptable amount of money. In part because of geopolitics. I wonder how many morerestrictions are there to come. There's a lot of FOMO going around, those honing their programming skills will continue to thrive, and that's a guarantee. Don't become a vassal when you can be a king.
- conartist6 1y ago
  Just... WAT. That's like saying "I'll just burn down my house because I can replace it. Anyone who repairs their house will be left behind." It's true, you can replace it, so I can't put my finger on what has been stopping people from burning their houses down instead of, say, spring cleaning
andrekandre 1y ago
> that's when they'll have to contend with the blood, sweat, and tears. That's when the person will swear that they'll never use AI again. sounds like me after my first hangover...
conartist6 1y ago
What leads you to believe non-AI coding is over? I'm not using AI and I'm still an incredibly high velocity engineer because I own my codebase. I've written each line ten times over, like a player who has become highly skilled at one particular game.