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> If you're a skilled, experienced engineer and you fear that AI will make you unemployable, adopt a more nuanced view. LLMs can't replace human engineering. I

> If you're a skilled, experienced engineer and you fear that AI will make you unemployable, adopt a more nuanced view. LLMs can't replace human engineering. I don't think LLMs were ever meant to completely replace human engineering, at least in the way we think of engineering as a craft. But the truth is the world is changing, and with LLMs/AI, the goalposts are changing, too. With massive economies of scale and huge output, the goal is less and less good engineering and more and more pure output. Put it another way, the post-AI world considers a reduction of quality to be an acceptable tradeoff for the massive short-term gains. Moreover, although quantity over quality is not exactly a new concept, what AI does is magnify and distill that concept as a prime directive. Code doesn't have to work well to be profitable given how cheaply in can be produced, and that's a general effect of technology that can reach global audiences, and AI is the apex of that technology. I don't think there is a nuanced view: AI is an all-around bad thing and its positives in the short-term will be vastly dwarfed by its negatives except for those who have become specialized at concentrating wealth at the expense of the common good.

karn97 1y ago
Even the latest models are terrible, absolute garbage at engineering. They can't engineer solutions at all. Even in the simplest of cases. Tells me a lot about people like you who make these comments rather than llms.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  Not sure what you mean by your snarky comment but I never claimed that LLMs produced any good solutions.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
I agree with your main point, and almost as if to nitpick: more and more output (specifically in the context of LLM-produced code) is paradoxical to economies of scale, precisely because LLMs make too many mistakes at scale. So then we necessarily have to limit their use to relatively simple and mundane tasks. That is, of course, still valuable in itself, but history teaches us that there _will_ be a mass movement to building large, complex, risky products using LLMs. I don't believe that that's something that we can stop. Somehow, I feel like the popularization of LLMs is a force of natural selection where those who are smart enough to keep training their minds will find themselves more financially secure than those who don't, and therefore more likely to survive.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  > I don't believe that that's something that we can stop. Somehow, I feel like the popularization of LLMs is a force of natural selection where those who are smart enough to keep training their minds will find themselves more financially secure than those who don't, and therefore more likely to survive. Yes, that's exactly right, it's the prisoner's dilemma. You articulated it perfectly.
0xAFFFF 1y ago
> the goal is less and less good engineering and more and more pure output Code is a liability. Code is expensive to maintain, has bugs, security issues, performance issues. The short-term profitable solutions will have a very narrow window to succeed because they will quickly crumble under their own weight.

karn97 1y ago

Even the latest models are terrible, absolute garbage at engineering. They can't engineer solutions at all. Even in the simplest of cases. Tells me a lot about people like you who make these comments rather than llms.

vouaobrasil 1y ago
Not sure what you mean by your snarky comment but I never claimed that LLMs produced any good solutions.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago

I agree with your main point, and almost as if to nitpick: more and more output (specifically in the context of LLM-produced code) is paradoxical to economies of scale, precisely because LLMs make too many mistakes at scale. So then we necessarily have to limit their use to relatively simple and mundane tasks. That is, of course, still valuable in itself, but history teaches us that there _will_ be a mass movement to building large, complex, risky products using LLMs. I don't believe that that's something that we can stop. Somehow, I feel like the popularization of LLMs is a force of natural selection where those who are smart enough to keep training their minds will find themselves more financially secure than those who don't, and therefore more likely to survive.

vouaobrasil 1y ago
> I don't believe that that's something that we can stop. Somehow, I feel like the popularization of LLMs is a force of natural selection where those who are smart enough to keep training their minds will find themselves more financially secure than those who don't, and therefore more likely to survive. Yes, that's exactly right, it's the prisoner's dilemma. You articulated it perfectly.

0xAFFFF 1y ago

> the goal is less and less good engineering and more and more pure output Code is a liability. Code is expensive to maintain, has bugs, security issues, performance issues. The short-term profitable solutions will have a very narrow window to succeed because they will quickly crumble under their own weight.