6 ms·

AI isn't a stylistic preference or minor enhancement, but cognitive augmentation that allows developers to navigate complexity at scales human cognition wasn't

AI isn't a stylistic preference or minor enhancement, but cognitive augmentation that allows developers to navigate complexity at scales human cognition wasn't designed for. Just as the developer who refused to adopt version control, IDEs, or Stack Overflow eventually became unemployable, those who reject tools that fundamentally expand their problem-solving capacity will find themselves unable to compete with those who can architect solutions across larger possibility spaces on smaller teams. Will it be used for absolutely every problem? No - There are clearly places where humans are needed. But rejecting the enormous impact this will have on the workforce is trading hype goggles for a bucket of sand.

catmanjan 1y ago
Maybe somehow this will be true in the future, but I am finding that as soon as you work on a novel or undocumented or non internet available problem it is just a hallucinating junior dev
- mcny 1y ago
  The dirty secret is most of the time we are NOT working on anything novel at all. It is pretty much a CRUD application and it is pretty much a master detail flow.
  - jennyholzer 1y ago
    I work on novel technologies.
    - catmanjan 1y ago
      Yeah me too, better off buying something if it already exists
  - NoGravitas 1y ago
    Even for completely uninteresting CRUD work, you're better off with better deterministic tooling (scaffolding for templates, macros for code, better abstractions generally). Unfortunately, past a certain low level, we're stuck rolling our own for these things. I'm not sure why, but I am guessing it has to do with them not being profitable to produce and sell.
n4r9 1y ago
This may not be the strong argument you think it is. There are plenty of highly productive senior developers who either don't use IDEs or SO or use them very minimally. Even version control, if they're working alone. Smart devs will find out how to be virtually as productive in a terminal as they would be with an IDE. Potentially more productive when solving edge case issues with processes that IDEs abstract
- oblio 1y ago
  IDEs can be iffy, but any project bigger than a 20 line throwaway script needs/deserves version control.
conartist6 1y ago
Really, scales human cognition wasn't designed for? Human cognition wasn't designed to make rockets or AIs, but we went to the moon and the LLMs are here. Thinking and working and building communities and philosophies and trust and math and computation and educational institutions and laws and even Sci Fi shows is how we do
- Chris2048 1y ago
  > we went to the moon We also killed quite a few astronauts.
  - conartist6 1y ago
    RIP Grissom, White and Chaffee. But the loss of their lives also proves a point: that achievement isn't a function of intelligence but of many more factors like people willing to risk and to give their lives to make something important happen in the world. Loss itself drives innovation and resolve. For evidence, look to Gene Kranz: https://wdhb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Kranz-Dictum.pdf https://wdhb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Kranz-Dictum.pdf
    - Chris2048 1y ago
      In that case, the decision to launch was taken not by the astronauts risking their lives, but by NASA management, against the recommendation of Morton Thiokol's engineers. This was not simply an unfortunate "accident", but an entirely preventable gamble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Flawed_launch_decision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Flawe... > Loss itself drives innovation and resolve True, but did NASA in 1986 really need to learn this lesson? This isn't (just) rocket science, it's the fundamentals of risk liability, legality and process that should be well established in a (quasi-military) agency such as this.
      - conartist6 1y ago
        Yeah I think they did need to learn it. They knew they were taking some gambles to try to catch up in the Space Race. The urgency that justified those gambles was the Cold War. People have a social tendency to become complacent about catastrophic risks when there hasn't been a catastrophe recently. There's a natural pressure to "stay chill" when the people around you have decided to do so. Speaking out about risk is scary unless there's a culture of people encouraging other to speak out and taking the risks seriously because they all remember how bad things can be if they don't. Someone actually has to stand up and say "if something is wrong I really actually want to and need to know." And the people hearing that message have to believe it, because usually it is said in a way that it is not believed.
jraph 1y ago
> cognitive augmentation that allows developers to navigate complexity at scales human cognition wasn't designed for I don't think you should use LLMs for something you can't master without. > will find themselves unable to compete I'd wait a bit more before concluding so affirmatively. The AI bubble would very much like us to believe this, but we don't yet know very well the long term effects of using LLMs on code, both for the project and for the developer, and we don't even know how available and in which conditions the LLMs will be in a few months as evidenced by this HN post. That's not a very solid basis to build on.
- laughingcurve 1y ago
  “I don’t think you should pay others for something you can’t master without [paying].” is one a hell of an argument to make. Good luck trying.
  - jraph 1y ago
    > is one a hell of an argument to make. I agree, but it's not mine.
- aeon_ai 1y ago
  Two masters go head to head. One uses AI tools (wisely - after all, they're a master!), the other refuses to. Which one wins? To your second point -- With as much capital as is going into data center buildout, the increasing availability of local coding LLMs that near the performance of today's closed models, and the continued innovation on both open/closed models, you're going to hang your hat on the possibility that LLMs are going to be only available in a 'limited or degraded' state? I think we simply don't have similar mental models for predicting the future.
  - jraph 1y ago
    > Which one wins? We don't really know yet, that's my point. There are contradictory studies on the topic. See for instance [1] that sees productivity decrease when AI is used. Other studies show the opposite. We are also seeing the first wave of blog posts from developers abandoning the LLMs. What's more, most people are not masters. This is critically important. If only masters see a productivity increase, others should not use it... and will still get employed because the masters won't fill in all the positions. In this hypothetical world, masters not using LLMs also have a place by construction. > With as much capital as is going into Yes, we are in a bubble. And some are predicting it will burst. > the continued innovation That's what I'm not seeing. We are seeing small but very costly improvements on a paradigm that I consider fundamentally flawed for the tasks we are using it for. LLMs still cannot reason, and that's IMHO a major limitation. > you're going to hang your hat on the possibility that LLMs are going to be only available in a 'limited or degraded' state? I didn't say I was going to, but since you are asking: oh yes, I'm not putting my eggs in a box that could abruptly disappear or become very costly. I simply don't see how this thing is going to be cost efficient. The major SaaS LLM providers can't seem to manage profitability, and maybe at some point the investors will get bored and stop sending billions of dollars towards them? I'll reconsider when and if LLMs become economically viable. But that's not my strongest reason to avoid the LLMs anyway: - I don't want to increase my reliance on SaaS (or very costly hardware) - I have not caved in yet in participating in this environmental disaster, and in this work pillaging phenomenon (well, that last part, I guess I don't really have a choice, I see the dumb AI bots hammering my forgejo instance). [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166497223000755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016649722...
jennyholzer 1y ago
IMO Version Control, IDEs, and Stack Overflow are many degrees of magnitude more valuable than GPT tools. The use cases of these GPT tools are extremely limited. They demo well and are quite useful for highly documented workflows (E.G. they are very good at creating basic HTML/JS layouts and functionality). However, even the most advanced GPT tools fall flat on their face when you start working with any sort of bleeding edge, or even just less-ubiquitous technology.
- philipp-gayret 1y ago
  That is interesting, in my experience these tools work quite well on larger codebases but it depends how you use them and I haven't really found a counterexample. Do you maybe have a practical example, like a repo you could link that just doesn't work for AI?
  - jennyholzer 1y ago
    GPT tools give piss-poor suggestions when working with the Godot game engine. The Godot engine is an open-source project that has matured significantly since GPT tools hit the market. The GPTs don't know what the new Godot features are, and there is a training gap that I'm not sure Open AI and their competitors will ever be able to overcome. Do you work on web applications? I've found that GPT tools get pretty stupid once you stop working with HTML/JS.
    - Kim_Bruning 1y ago
      I stopped using GPT for coding long ago, mostly because I use Claude. With Claude I can even write IC10 code. (with a bit of help and understanding of how Claude works) IC10 is a fictional, MIPS-like CPU in the game Stationeers. So that's pretty promising for most other things.
    - philipp-gayret 1y ago
      Thanks for the Godot example. I experimented with it through Claude Code (I have no prior experience with it). Got a Vampire Survivors-esque game working from scratch with plain shapes representing the game elements like player or enemies in 70 minutes on and off. It included a variety of 5 weapons, enemies moving to the player, player movement, little experience orbs on enemies expiring, a projectile and area of effect damage system, and a levelling up and upgrade system and UI which influenced weapon behaviours. Godot with AI was definitely a worse experience than usual for me. I did not use the Godot editor. It seems like the development flow for Godot however is based around it. Scenes were generated through a Python script, which was of course written by Claude Code. Personally, I reviewed no line of code during the process. My findings afterwards are; 1) Code quality was not good. Personally I have a year of experience working with Unity and online the code examples tend to be of incredibly poor quality. My guess is if AI is trained on the online corpus of game development forums, the output should be absolutely terrible. For the field of game development especially AI is tainted with this poor quality. It did indeed not follow modern practices, even after having hooked up a context MCP which provides code examples. 2) It was able to refactor the codebase to modern practices upon instructing it to; I told it to figure out what modern practices were and to apply them; it started making modifications like adding type hints and such. Commonly you would use predefined rules for this with an LLM tool, I did not use any for my experiment. That would be a one-time task after which the AI will prefer your way of working. An example for Godot can be found here: https://github.com/sanjeed5/awesome-cursor-rules-mdc/blob/main/rules-mdc/godot.mdc https://github.com/sanjeed5/awesome-cursor-rules-mdc/blob/ma... 3) It was very difficult to debug for Claude Code. The platform seems to require working with a dedicated editor, and the flow for debugging is either through that editor or by launching the game and interacting with it. This flow is not suitable at the moment for out of the box Claude Code or similar tools which need to be able to independently verify that certain functions or features work as expected. > Do you work on web applications? I've found that GPT tools get pretty stupid once you stop working with HTML/JS. Not really - I work on developer experience and internal developer platforms. That is 80~90% Python, Go, Bash, Terraform and maybe a 10~20% Typescript with React depending on the project.
contravariant 1y ago
If reading your code requires navigating complexity that human cognition wasn't designed for then something has gone terribly wrong.
boleary-gl 1y ago
Author and Kilo Code team member here - this is a much better explanation of what I mean. And honestly, it's a quick phrase I've been using that is shorthand really for THIS much better-written take.
kibwen 1y ago
> Just as the developer who refused to adopt version control, IDEs, or Stack Overflow eventually became unemployable This passage forces me to concluse that this comment is sarcasm. Neither IDEs nor the use of Stack Overflow is anywhere near a requirement for being a professional programmer. Surely you realize there are people out there who are happily employed while still using stock Vim or Emacs? Surely you realize there are people out there who solve problems simply by reading the docs and thinking deeply rather than asking SO? The usage of LLM assistance will not become a requirement for employment, at least not for talented programmers. A company gating on the use of LLMs would be preposterously self-defeating.
drw85 1y ago
I think this is a somewhat short sighted perspective. It's not really augmenting, but replacing cognition. I see people starting to unlearn working by themselves rapidly and becoming dependant on GPT, making themselves quite useless in the process. They no longer understand what they're working with and need the help from the tool to work. They're also entirely helpless when whatever 'AI' tool they use can't fix their problem. This makes them both more replaceable and less marketable than before. It will have and already has a huge impact. But it's kinda like the offshoring hype from a decade ago. Everyone moved their dev departments to a cheaper country, only to later realize that maybe cheap does not always mean better or even good. And it comes with a short term gain and a long term loss.

catmanjan 1y ago

Maybe somehow this will be true in the future, but I am finding that as soon as you work on a novel or undocumented or non internet available problem it is just a hallucinating junior dev

mcny 1y ago
The dirty secret is most of the time we are NOT working on anything novel at all. It is pretty much a CRUD application and it is pretty much a master detail flow.
- jennyholzer 1y ago
  I work on novel technologies.
  - catmanjan 1y ago
    Yeah me too, better off buying something if it already exists
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  Even for completely uninteresting CRUD work, you're better off with better deterministic tooling (scaffolding for templates, macros for code, better abstractions generally). Unfortunately, past a certain low level, we're stuck rolling our own for these things. I'm not sure why, but I am guessing it has to do with them not being profitable to produce and sell.

n4r9 1y ago

This may not be the strong argument you think it is. There are plenty of highly productive senior developers who either don't use IDEs or SO or use them very minimally. Even version control, if they're working alone. Smart devs will find out how to be virtually as productive in a terminal as they would be with an IDE. Potentially more productive when solving edge case issues with processes that IDEs abstract

oblio 1y ago
IDEs can be iffy, but any project bigger than a 20 line throwaway script needs/deserves version control.

conartist6 1y ago

Really, scales human cognition wasn't designed for? Human cognition wasn't designed to make rockets or AIs, but we went to the moon and the LLMs are here. Thinking and working and building communities and philosophies and trust and math and computation and educational institutions and laws and even Sci Fi shows is how we do

Chris2048 1y ago
> we went to the moon We also killed quite a few astronauts.
- conartist6 1y ago
  RIP Grissom, White and Chaffee. But the loss of their lives also proves a point: that achievement isn't a function of intelligence but of many more factors like people willing to risk and to give their lives to make something important happen in the world. Loss itself drives innovation and resolve. For evidence, look to Gene Kranz: https://wdhb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Kranz-Dictum.pdf https://wdhb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Kranz-Dictum.pdf
  - Chris2048 1y ago
    In that case, the decision to launch was taken not by the astronauts risking their lives, but by NASA management, against the recommendation of Morton Thiokol's engineers. This was not simply an unfortunate "accident", but an entirely preventable gamble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Flawed_launch_decision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Flawe... > Loss itself drives innovation and resolve True, but did NASA in 1986 really need to learn this lesson? This isn't (just) rocket science, it's the fundamentals of risk liability, legality and process that should be well established in a (quasi-military) agency such as this.
    - conartist6 1y ago
      Yeah I think they did need to learn it. They knew they were taking some gambles to try to catch up in the Space Race. The urgency that justified those gambles was the Cold War. People have a social tendency to become complacent about catastrophic risks when there hasn't been a catastrophe recently. There's a natural pressure to "stay chill" when the people around you have decided to do so. Speaking out about risk is scary unless there's a culture of people encouraging other to speak out and taking the risks seriously because they all remember how bad things can be if they don't. Someone actually has to stand up and say "if something is wrong I really actually want to and need to know." And the people hearing that message have to believe it, because usually it is said in a way that it is not believed.

jraph 1y ago

> cognitive augmentation that allows developers to navigate complexity at scales human cognition wasn't designed for I don't think you should use LLMs for something you can't master without. > will find themselves unable to compete I'd wait a bit more before concluding so affirmatively. The AI bubble would very much like us to believe this, but we don't yet know very well the long term effects of using LLMs on code, both for the project and for the developer, and we don't even know how available and in which conditions the LLMs will be in a few months as evidenced by this HN post. That's not a very solid basis to build on.

laughingcurve 1y ago
“I don’t think you should pay others for something you can’t master without [paying].” is one a hell of an argument to make. Good luck trying.
- jraph 1y ago
  > is one a hell of an argument to make. I agree, but it's not mine.
aeon_ai 1y ago
Two masters go head to head. One uses AI tools (wisely - after all, they're a master!), the other refuses to. Which one wins? To your second point -- With as much capital as is going into data center buildout, the increasing availability of local coding LLMs that near the performance of today's closed models, and the continued innovation on both open/closed models, you're going to hang your hat on the possibility that LLMs are going to be only available in a 'limited or degraded' state? I think we simply don't have similar mental models for predicting the future.
- jraph 1y ago
  > Which one wins? We don't really know yet, that's my point. There are contradictory studies on the topic. See for instance [1] that sees productivity decrease when AI is used. Other studies show the opposite. We are also seeing the first wave of blog posts from developers abandoning the LLMs. What's more, most people are not masters. This is critically important. If only masters see a productivity increase, others should not use it... and will still get employed because the masters won't fill in all the positions. In this hypothetical world, masters not using LLMs also have a place by construction. > With as much capital as is going into Yes, we are in a bubble. And some are predicting it will burst. > the continued innovation That's what I'm not seeing. We are seeing small but very costly improvements on a paradigm that I consider fundamentally flawed for the tasks we are using it for. LLMs still cannot reason, and that's IMHO a major limitation. > you're going to hang your hat on the possibility that LLMs are going to be only available in a 'limited or degraded' state? I didn't say I was going to, but since you are asking: oh yes, I'm not putting my eggs in a box that could abruptly disappear or become very costly. I simply don't see how this thing is going to be cost efficient. The major SaaS LLM providers can't seem to manage profitability, and maybe at some point the investors will get bored and stop sending billions of dollars towards them? I'll reconsider when and if LLMs become economically viable. But that's not my strongest reason to avoid the LLMs anyway: - I don't want to increase my reliance on SaaS (or very costly hardware) - I have not caved in yet in participating in this environmental disaster, and in this work pillaging phenomenon (well, that last part, I guess I don't really have a choice, I see the dumb AI bots hammering my forgejo instance). [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166497223000755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016649722...

jennyholzer 1y ago

IMO Version Control, IDEs, and Stack Overflow are many degrees of magnitude more valuable than GPT tools. The use cases of these GPT tools are extremely limited. They demo well and are quite useful for highly documented workflows (E.G. they are very good at creating basic HTML/JS layouts and functionality). However, even the most advanced GPT tools fall flat on their face when you start working with any sort of bleeding edge, or even just less-ubiquitous technology.

philipp-gayret 1y ago
That is interesting, in my experience these tools work quite well on larger codebases but it depends how you use them and I haven't really found a counterexample. Do you maybe have a practical example, like a repo you could link that just doesn't work for AI?
- jennyholzer 1y ago
  GPT tools give piss-poor suggestions when working with the Godot game engine. The Godot engine is an open-source project that has matured significantly since GPT tools hit the market. The GPTs don't know what the new Godot features are, and there is a training gap that I'm not sure Open AI and their competitors will ever be able to overcome. Do you work on web applications? I've found that GPT tools get pretty stupid once you stop working with HTML/JS.
  - Kim_Bruning 1y ago
    I stopped using GPT for coding long ago, mostly because I use Claude. With Claude I can even write IC10 code. (with a bit of help and understanding of how Claude works) IC10 is a fictional, MIPS-like CPU in the game Stationeers. So that's pretty promising for most other things.
  - philipp-gayret 1y ago
    Thanks for the Godot example. I experimented with it through Claude Code (I have no prior experience with it). Got a Vampire Survivors-esque game working from scratch with plain shapes representing the game elements like player or enemies in 70 minutes on and off. It included a variety of 5 weapons, enemies moving to the player, player movement, little experience orbs on enemies expiring, a projectile and area of effect damage system, and a levelling up and upgrade system and UI which influenced weapon behaviours. Godot with AI was definitely a worse experience than usual for me. I did not use the Godot editor. It seems like the development flow for Godot however is based around it. Scenes were generated through a Python script, which was of course written by Claude Code. Personally, I reviewed no line of code during the process. My findings afterwards are; 1) Code quality was not good. Personally I have a year of experience working with Unity and online the code examples tend to be of incredibly poor quality. My guess is if AI is trained on the online corpus of game development forums, the output should be absolutely terrible. For the field of game development especially AI is tainted with this poor quality. It did indeed not follow modern practices, even after having hooked up a context MCP which provides code examples. 2) It was able to refactor the codebase to modern practices upon instructing it to; I told it to figure out what modern practices were and to apply them; it started making modifications like adding type hints and such. Commonly you would use predefined rules for this with an LLM tool, I did not use any for my experiment. That would be a one-time task after which the AI will prefer your way of working. An example for Godot can be found here: https://github.com/sanjeed5/awesome-cursor-rules-mdc/blob/main/rules-mdc/godot.mdc https://github.com/sanjeed5/awesome-cursor-rules-mdc/blob/ma... 3) It was very difficult to debug for Claude Code. The platform seems to require working with a dedicated editor, and the flow for debugging is either through that editor or by launching the game and interacting with it. This flow is not suitable at the moment for out of the box Claude Code or similar tools which need to be able to independently verify that certain functions or features work as expected. > Do you work on web applications? I've found that GPT tools get pretty stupid once you stop working with HTML/JS. Not really - I work on developer experience and internal developer platforms. That is 80~90% Python, Go, Bash, Terraform and maybe a 10~20% Typescript with React depending on the project.

contravariant 1y ago

If reading your code requires navigating complexity that human cognition wasn't designed for then something has gone terribly wrong.

boleary-gl 1y ago

Author and Kilo Code team member here - this is a much better explanation of what I mean. And honestly, it's a quick phrase I've been using that is shorthand really for THIS much better-written take.

kibwen 1y ago

> Just as the developer who refused to adopt version control, IDEs, or Stack Overflow eventually became unemployable This passage forces me to concluse that this comment is sarcasm. Neither IDEs nor the use of Stack Overflow is anywhere near a requirement for being a professional programmer. Surely you realize there are people out there who are happily employed while still using stock Vim or Emacs? Surely you realize there are people out there who solve problems simply by reading the docs and thinking deeply rather than asking SO? The usage of LLM assistance will not become a requirement for employment, at least not for talented programmers. A company gating on the use of LLMs would be preposterously self-defeating.

drw85 1y ago

I think this is a somewhat short sighted perspective. It's not really augmenting, but replacing cognition. I see people starting to unlearn working by themselves rapidly and becoming dependant on GPT, making themselves quite useless in the process. They no longer understand what they're working with and need the help from the tool to work. They're also entirely helpless when whatever 'AI' tool they use can't fix their problem. This makes them both more replaceable and less marketable than before. It will have and already has a huge impact. But it's kinda like the offshoring hype from a decade ago. Everyone moved their dev departments to a cheaper country, only to later realize that maybe cheap does not always mean better or even good. And it comes with a short term gain and a long term loss.