6 ms·

The fundamentals still matter

47 points by zekrom 1y ago

owenthejumper 1y ago
Kelsey Hightower recently talked about this in a talk titled "The Fundamentals": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlqzy02k6B8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlqzy02k6B8
voidhorse 1y ago
Yes, and I think we'll course correct, eventually. There's a reason we still (generally) teach people how to do arithmetic with pencil and paper instead of jumping straight to calculators. Learning basic algorithms for performing the computations helps solidify the concepts and the rules of the game. We'll need to do the same thing eventually with respect to LLMs and software engineering. People who skip the foundations or let their comprehension atrophy will eventually end up in a spot in which they need those skills. I basically never do arithmetic using pen and paper now, but I could if I had to, and, more importantly, the process ingrained some basic comprehension of how the integers relate under the group operations. I totally agree, re: SQL specifically, by the way. SQL is basically already natural language. It's probably the last thing that I'd need to offload to some natural language prompt. I think it's a bit of a vicious circle problem. There's a lot of people who only need to engage with SQL from time to time, so working with it is a bit awkward each time for lack of practice. This incentivizes them to offload it to the LLM just to get it out of the way, which in turn further atrophies their skills with SQL.
- throwawayoldie 1y ago
  > SQL is basically already natural language This was actually the whole point of SQL in the first place: to be a query language close enough to natural language that non-specialists could easily learn to use it.
  - pbohun 1y ago
    This was also the point of COBOL. I think one thing we've learned is non-specialists don't like thinking/problem solving, and there's no meeting them halfway on that. Asking some people to think is asking too much.
    - throwawayoldie 1y ago
      I think that's a little too cynical of a view: in years past, I did in fact teach non-specialists to use SQL (against a read-only replica, I'm not crazy) so I didn't have to run all their ad hoc queries for them, and many of them took well to it once they overcame their initial hesitance. The framing that made it click for them was "it's like Excel, but with words."
    - Ferrus91 1y ago
      Bingo. And it is on this rock that non-technical people vibe coding is going to sink.
throwawayoldie 1y ago
> Maybe another industry of cleaning up vibe coded messes will be a thing? I have seriously considered hanging out my shingle to do this freelance, I don't think the time is quite ripe yet but maybe in a few months.
- roxolotl 1y ago
  As someone who loves fixing weird bugs I kinda hope this becomes a thing. There’s nothing as satisfying as finding logic bugs.
  - throwawayoldie 1y ago
    Same, it's like solving puzzles, except with practical benefits including getting paid for it.
- merksoftworks 1y ago
  My experience has been more like this: - Write small library as contract work. - Client vibe codes with it. Code doesn't work. - End up doing good faith assurance work to fix the vibe coded bug in the client code, the issue was not in my small library. People are programming out on a limb - and blame goes to the library maintainer if the user lacks the fundamental skills to do troubleshooting.
  - throwawayoldie 1y ago
    Yeah my plan was to come in _after_ the vibe coders have done their damage, fix their mess for a somewhat extortionate amount of money, then tell them not to do it again.
    - a96 1y ago
      Sounds like a nice niche for some Instant Consulting.
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Wherever there is pain impeding capital, there is opportunity. And there is always a set of current pain points. There can only be no pain in a fully-autonomous organization with autonomous investors and customers too. It seems like the future is converging on there will 5 Matrix savant architects who make $1B/y who keep things operating while everyone else lives in a shanty or a pod.
js8 1y ago
So, Karl Marx predicted that the capitalism will eat itself because capitalists will value creating money itself (and money-making enterprises, such as asset bubbles) more than the actual production of goods. This was later elaborated by many people, but since I am not an expert in this, I'll just mention Hyman Minsky and Thomas Piketty. The OP is essentially a (white collar) labor version of this. What is evidently valued is an appearance of expertise, rather than expertise itself. Just like the capitalists who want to make money, and skipping production of actual goods in order to accomplish that, "professionals" are going to skip actual learning in order to appear knowledgeable. For 200 years, people have hoped that the "free market" will sort out the problem that Marx saw. It didn't happen - we still get financial bubbles that cause trouble for many people. So, I suspect it's a mistake to assume the learning problem will fix itself either. I suspect people (society at large) will have to consciously value the hard work of learning for this to be fixed.
- MarkusQ 1y ago
  Yeah, that's why we haven't created any new goods since we embraced capitalism—the whole thing is just parasitic on the labor of the masses, and doesn't really add anything. </sarcasm> Seriously, you might want to actually do a sniff check before taking Marx's word for anything.
  - js8 1y ago
    Speaking of sniff checks, you might want to do that first, because that's not actually the prediction that Marx was making. In my understanding, Marx was actually appreciative of free market building stuff. The question he asked was this: If the workers pay for the goods produced with increasingly bigger share of private property of capitalist class, what happens once there is no more property to give away to capitalists? (And he was actually the first to ask this question, and treat capitalism as a dynamical system, which makes him into one of the greatest economists of all time.) Of course, it didn't fail completely, for two reasons. One is people actually instituted social democratic and keynesian reforms that prevented the collapse. (Marx was an optimist in that people will learn and eventually reject capital ownership completely, but they didn't.) The other reason is that we continuously invent new forms capital (private property) to inject into flailing capitalism. In other words, we find more and more public goods that can be privatized - things such as mortgages and other consumer debt, intellectual property, new financial instruments, health care insurance, private and behavioral personal information ("big data"), new forms of money such as Bitcoin, openly available information sucked up by generative AI etc. But that doesn't mean capitalism (especially its financial arm) isn't parasitic - it just didn't manage to kill the host yet.
vivzkestrel 1y ago
wasnt there a study published recently that people using LLMs more frequently tend to become less intelligent over time because their brain doesn't have to process complex tasks and workflows anymore?
begueradj 1y ago
> Yet, I see people blindly trusting LLM outputs to develop SQL queries, without knowing how to explain or debug them. The same is true about every other single instruction produced.
sarthaksoni 1y ago
I’m guilty of this. I’m trying to be more mindful when using LLM-generated code. It’s mostly a personal issue: I tend to procrastinate and hope the code “just works.” We need to stay vigilant,otherwise we will pay the cost by fixing LLM bugs later.
- DontchaKnowit 1y ago
  First time ive ever heard someone admit this, only ever heard people accuse theur coworkers of it. This is honestly a very sad thing to hear a professional dev say
  - sarthaksoni 1y ago
    Sorry, I will try to be better.
edude03 1y ago
> I worry that we are being over sold on a promise that LLMs will magically make up for a lack of proficiency in an area I saw a post on twitter about how game devs were using ChatGPT for localization and when you translated the text to English it said something like “as a chat assistant I’m unable to translate this concept” or an explanation instead of the translation. This is exactly the sort of future I imagine with AI - not that the grunts on the ground will be sold on it but management will be convinced they can fire the people who know what they’re doing and replace them with interns armed with a ChatGPT subscription
- ztetranz 1y ago
  >I saw a post on twitter about how game devs were using ChatGPT for localization and when you translated the text to English it said something like “as a chat assistant I’m unable to translate this concept” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702913.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702913.stm
nzach 1y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think the example given (creating SQL queries) is a good representation of this problem. That's because if you know a little bit of SQL and know how to validate the answer LLMs give you this becomes a non-issue. A better example would be an ambiguous prompt where the LLM can either use an array or a map to solve your problem so it chooses an array. But down the road you need a feature where direct access is what you need, but your code is already using arrays. In this situation what tends to happen is the LLMs ends up making some hack on top of your arrays to create this new feature and the code gets real bad. By not understanding the difference between these 2 data structures you aren't able to specify what needs to be done and the LLM ends up implementing your feature in an additive way. And when you add enough features in this way things get messy. What is still not clear to me is what is the proper "abstraction layer" we need to use to learn things in this new world where LLMs are available.

47 points by zekrom 1y ago

Kelsey Hightower recently talked about this in a talk titled "The Fundamentals": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlqzy02k6B8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlqzy02k6B8

voidhorse 1y ago

Yes, and I think we'll course correct, eventually. There's a reason we still (generally) teach people how to do arithmetic with pencil and paper instead of jumping straight to calculators. Learning basic algorithms for performing the computations helps solidify the concepts and the rules of the game. We'll need to do the same thing eventually with respect to LLMs and software engineering. People who skip the foundations or let their comprehension atrophy will eventually end up in a spot in which they need those skills. I basically never do arithmetic using pen and paper now, but I could if I had to, and, more importantly, the process ingrained some basic comprehension of how the integers relate under the group operations. I totally agree, re: SQL specifically, by the way. SQL is basically already natural language. It's probably the last thing that I'd need to offload to some natural language prompt. I think it's a bit of a vicious circle problem. There's a lot of people who only need to engage with SQL from time to time, so working with it is a bit awkward each time for lack of practice. This incentivizes them to offload it to the LLM just to get it out of the way, which in turn further atrophies their skills with SQL.

throwawayoldie 1y ago
> SQL is basically already natural language This was actually the whole point of SQL in the first place: to be a query language close enough to natural language that non-specialists could easily learn to use it.
- pbohun 1y ago
  This was also the point of COBOL. I think one thing we've learned is non-specialists don't like thinking/problem solving, and there's no meeting them halfway on that. Asking some people to think is asking too much.
  - throwawayoldie 1y ago
    I think that's a little too cynical of a view: in years past, I did in fact teach non-specialists to use SQL (against a read-only replica, I'm not crazy) so I didn't have to run all their ad hoc queries for them, and many of them took well to it once they overcame their initial hesitance. The framing that made it click for them was "it's like Excel, but with words."
  - Ferrus91 1y ago
    Bingo. And it is on this rock that non-technical people vibe coding is going to sink.

throwawayoldie 1y ago

> Maybe another industry of cleaning up vibe coded messes will be a thing? I have seriously considered hanging out my shingle to do this freelance, I don't think the time is quite ripe yet but maybe in a few months.

roxolotl 1y ago
As someone who loves fixing weird bugs I kinda hope this becomes a thing. There’s nothing as satisfying as finding logic bugs.
- throwawayoldie 1y ago
  Same, it's like solving puzzles, except with practical benefits including getting paid for it.
merksoftworks 1y ago
My experience has been more like this: - Write small library as contract work. - Client vibe codes with it. Code doesn't work. - End up doing good faith assurance work to fix the vibe coded bug in the client code, the issue was not in my small library. People are programming out on a limb - and blame goes to the library maintainer if the user lacks the fundamental skills to do troubleshooting.
- throwawayoldie 1y ago
  Yeah my plan was to come in _after_ the vibe coders have done their damage, fix their mess for a somewhat extortionate amount of money, then tell them not to do it again.
  - a96 1y ago
    Sounds like a nice niche for some Instant Consulting.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Wherever there is pain impeding capital, there is opportunity. And there is always a set of current pain points. There can only be no pain in a fully-autonomous organization with autonomous investors and customers too. It seems like the future is converging on there will 5 Matrix savant architects who make $1B/y who keep things operating while everyone else lives in a shanty or a pod.

js8 1y ago

So, Karl Marx predicted that the capitalism will eat itself because capitalists will value creating money itself (and money-making enterprises, such as asset bubbles) more than the actual production of goods. This was later elaborated by many people, but since I am not an expert in this, I'll just mention Hyman Minsky and Thomas Piketty. The OP is essentially a (white collar) labor version of this. What is evidently valued is an appearance of expertise, rather than expertise itself. Just like the capitalists who want to make money, and skipping production of actual goods in order to accomplish that, "professionals" are going to skip actual learning in order to appear knowledgeable. For 200 years, people have hoped that the "free market" will sort out the problem that Marx saw. It didn't happen - we still get financial bubbles that cause trouble for many people. So, I suspect it's a mistake to assume the learning problem will fix itself either. I suspect people (society at large) will have to consciously value the hard work of learning for this to be fixed.

MarkusQ 1y ago
Yeah, that's why we haven't created any new goods since we embraced capitalism—the whole thing is just parasitic on the labor of the masses, and doesn't really add anything. </sarcasm> Seriously, you might want to actually do a sniff check before taking Marx's word for anything.
- js8 1y ago
  Speaking of sniff checks, you might want to do that first, because that's not actually the prediction that Marx was making. In my understanding, Marx was actually appreciative of free market building stuff. The question he asked was this: If the workers pay for the goods produced with increasingly bigger share of private property of capitalist class, what happens once there is no more property to give away to capitalists? (And he was actually the first to ask this question, and treat capitalism as a dynamical system, which makes him into one of the greatest economists of all time.) Of course, it didn't fail completely, for two reasons. One is people actually instituted social democratic and keynesian reforms that prevented the collapse. (Marx was an optimist in that people will learn and eventually reject capital ownership completely, but they didn't.) The other reason is that we continuously invent new forms capital (private property) to inject into flailing capitalism. In other words, we find more and more public goods that can be privatized - things such as mortgages and other consumer debt, intellectual property, new financial instruments, health care insurance, private and behavioral personal information ("big data"), new forms of money such as Bitcoin, openly available information sucked up by generative AI etc. But that doesn't mean capitalism (especially its financial arm) isn't parasitic - it just didn't manage to kill the host yet.

vivzkestrel 1y ago

wasnt there a study published recently that people using LLMs more frequently tend to become less intelligent over time because their brain doesn't have to process complex tasks and workflows anymore?

begueradj 1y ago

> Yet, I see people blindly trusting LLM outputs to develop SQL queries, without knowing how to explain or debug them. The same is true about every other single instruction produced.

sarthaksoni 1y ago

I’m guilty of this. I’m trying to be more mindful when using LLM-generated code. It’s mostly a personal issue: I tend to procrastinate and hope the code “just works.” We need to stay vigilant,otherwise we will pay the cost by fixing LLM bugs later.

DontchaKnowit 1y ago
First time ive ever heard someone admit this, only ever heard people accuse theur coworkers of it. This is honestly a very sad thing to hear a professional dev say
- sarthaksoni 1y ago
  Sorry, I will try to be better.

edude03 1y ago

> I worry that we are being over sold on a promise that LLMs will magically make up for a lack of proficiency in an area I saw a post on twitter about how game devs were using ChatGPT for localization and when you translated the text to English it said something like “as a chat assistant I’m unable to translate this concept” or an explanation instead of the translation. This is exactly the sort of future I imagine with AI - not that the grunts on the ground will be sold on it but management will be convinced they can fire the people who know what they’re doing and replace them with interns armed with a ChatGPT subscription

ztetranz 1y ago
>I saw a post on twitter about how game devs were using ChatGPT for localization and when you translated the text to English it said something like “as a chat assistant I’m unable to translate this concept” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702913.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702913.stm

nzach 1y ago

I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think the example given (creating SQL queries) is a good representation of this problem. That's because if you know a little bit of SQL and know how to validate the answer LLMs give you this becomes a non-issue. A better example would be an ambiguous prompt where the LLM can either use an array or a map to solve your problem so it chooses an array. But down the road you need a feature where direct access is what you need, but your code is already using arrays. In this situation what tends to happen is the LLMs ends up making some hack on top of your arrays to create this new feature and the code gets real bad. By not understanding the difference between these 2 data structures you aren't able to specify what needs to be done and the LLM ends up implementing your feature in an additive way. And when you add enough features in this way things get messy. What is still not clear to me is what is the proper "abstraction layer" we need to use to learn things in this new world where LLMs are available.