5 ms·

My experience is exactly the opposite of "AI reduces cognitive engagement with tasks": I have to constantly be on my toes to follow what the LLMs are proposing

My experience is exactly the opposite of "AI reduces cognitive engagement with tasks": I have to constantly be on my toes to follow what the LLMs are proposing and make sure they are not getting off track over-engineering things, or entering something that's likely to turn into a death loop several turns later. AI use definitely makes my brain run warmer, got to get a FLIR camera to prove it I guess...

walleeee 1y ago
So, reduces cognitive engagement with the actual task at hand, and forces a huge attention share to hand-holding. I don't think you two are disagreeing. I have noticed this personally. It's a lot like the fatigue one gets from too long scrolling online. Engagement is shallower but not any less mentally exhausting than reading a book. You end up feeling more exhausted due to the involuntary attention-scattering.
- notyourwork 1y ago
  It would be analogous to having to double check the IDE added the lines of code I actually typed. That’s not a great productivity boost, it’s a toy still in many ways.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > reduces cognitive engagement with the actual task at hand, and forces a huge attention share to hand-holding You're in some senses managing an idiot savant, emphasis on the idiot part, except they're also a narcissist who will happily go out of scope if you let it. If you have management experience, the analogy is immediately obvious. If you don't, I can see how having speed run learning it with a kid running around with dynamite would be taxing.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    Text completer is still the most apt allegory. If you ask it to open a file and do something with it, often it wont open the file and just text complete the output. That failure mode never happens in any sort of human, it just happens because its a text completer. Many people hate when you don't anthropomorphize LLM though, but that is the best way to understand how they can fail so spectacularly in ways we would never expect a human to fail.
    - commakozzi 1y ago
      Except many of us not having the problems you are having. I don't have LLMs "fail so spectacularly". Interestingly, I have friends who aren't coders who use LLMs for various personal needs, and they run into the same kind of problems you are describing. 100% of the time, i've found that it's that they do not understand how to work with an LLM. Once i help them, they start getting better results. I do not have any need to anthropomorphize an LLM. I do however understand that I can use natural language to get quite complex and yes ACCURATE results from AI, IF i know what i'm doing and how to ask for it. It's just a tool, not a person.
wildzzz 1y ago
I'm an electrical engineer. One of my jobs is maintaining a couple racks of equipment and the scripts we use to test hardware. I've never been expected to be a programmer beyond things like Matlab but over the past several years, I've been maintaining a python project we use to run these tests. With equipment upgrades and my amateur python skills, we now have a fully automated test, plug in the hardware, hit the green button, and wait for tests to complete and data to be validated. Codesurf absolutely chokes when trying to work on my code, it's just too much of a mess to handle. But I have been using our in-house chatgpt to write some utilities that I've been procrastinating on for years. Like I needed a debug tool to view live telemetry and send commands as required and have been procrastinating for a long time to write this. My existing scripts aren't flexible, they are literally just a script for the test runner to follow. I have an old debug tool but it's not compatible with the existing workflow so it's a pain to run. I told chatgpt what I needed, gave it some specs on the functions it would need from libraries I've written (but didn't want it to see), and it cranked out a perfectly functional python script. I ended up doing a bit of work on the script it gave me since I didn't trust it completely or knew if I could even get it to expand on the work properly. It would have taken me much longer to write on my own so I'm very grateful I could save so much time. Just last week, I had another idea for a different debug tool and did the same process (here's my idea, here's the specs, go) and after a few rounds of "can you add this next?", I had another quality tool ready to go with absolutely no touch-up work needed on my end. I want my tools to have simple Tkinter GUIs but I hate writing GUIs so I'm absolutely thrilled chatgpt can handle that for me. I'm a bit of a luddite, I still just use notepad++ and a terminal window to develop my code. I don't want to get bogged down in using vscode so trusting AI to handle things beyond "can you make this email sound better?" has been a big leap for me.
- jenkinomics 1y ago
  In a few to several months you will learn the meaning of "big ball of mud". Then you will either speedrun the last 20-30 years of software development tooling evolution or crash out of your current modus operandi and help fuel future demand for actual software developers.
  - 1y ago
lkey 1y ago
Echoing wallee, This task: "I have to constantly be on my toes to follow what the LLMs are proposing" and "understanding, then solving the specific problems you are being paid to solve" are not the same thing. It's been linked endlessly here but Programming as Theory Building is as relevant today as it was in '85: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

walleeee 1y ago

So, reduces cognitive engagement with the actual task at hand, and forces a huge attention share to hand-holding. I don't think you two are disagreeing. I have noticed this personally. It's a lot like the fatigue one gets from too long scrolling online. Engagement is shallower but not any less mentally exhausting than reading a book. You end up feeling more exhausted due to the involuntary attention-scattering.

notyourwork 1y ago
It would be analogous to having to double check the IDE added the lines of code I actually typed. That’s not a great productivity boost, it’s a toy still in many ways.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> reduces cognitive engagement with the actual task at hand, and forces a huge attention share to hand-holding You're in some senses managing an idiot savant, emphasis on the idiot part, except they're also a narcissist who will happily go out of scope if you let it. If you have management experience, the analogy is immediately obvious. If you don't, I can see how having speed run learning it with a kid running around with dynamite would be taxing.
- Jensson 1y ago
  Text completer is still the most apt allegory. If you ask it to open a file and do something with it, often it wont open the file and just text complete the output. That failure mode never happens in any sort of human, it just happens because its a text completer. Many people hate when you don't anthropomorphize LLM though, but that is the best way to understand how they can fail so spectacularly in ways we would never expect a human to fail.
  - commakozzi 1y ago
    Except many of us not having the problems you are having. I don't have LLMs "fail so spectacularly". Interestingly, I have friends who aren't coders who use LLMs for various personal needs, and they run into the same kind of problems you are describing. 100% of the time, i've found that it's that they do not understand how to work with an LLM. Once i help them, they start getting better results. I do not have any need to anthropomorphize an LLM. I do however understand that I can use natural language to get quite complex and yes ACCURATE results from AI, IF i know what i'm doing and how to ask for it. It's just a tool, not a person.

wildzzz 1y ago

I'm an electrical engineer. One of my jobs is maintaining a couple racks of equipment and the scripts we use to test hardware. I've never been expected to be a programmer beyond things like Matlab but over the past several years, I've been maintaining a python project we use to run these tests. With equipment upgrades and my amateur python skills, we now have a fully automated test, plug in the hardware, hit the green button, and wait for tests to complete and data to be validated. Codesurf absolutely chokes when trying to work on my code, it's just too much of a mess to handle. But I have been using our in-house chatgpt to write some utilities that I've been procrastinating on for years. Like I needed a debug tool to view live telemetry and send commands as required and have been procrastinating for a long time to write this. My existing scripts aren't flexible, they are literally just a script for the test runner to follow. I have an old debug tool but it's not compatible with the existing workflow so it's a pain to run. I told chatgpt what I needed, gave it some specs on the functions it would need from libraries I've written (but didn't want it to see), and it cranked out a perfectly functional python script. I ended up doing a bit of work on the script it gave me since I didn't trust it completely or knew if I could even get it to expand on the work properly. It would have taken me much longer to write on my own so I'm very grateful I could save so much time. Just last week, I had another idea for a different debug tool and did the same process (here's my idea, here's the specs, go) and after a few rounds of "can you add this next?", I had another quality tool ready to go with absolutely no touch-up work needed on my end. I want my tools to have simple Tkinter GUIs but I hate writing GUIs so I'm absolutely thrilled chatgpt can handle that for me. I'm a bit of a luddite, I still just use notepad++ and a terminal window to develop my code. I don't want to get bogged down in using vscode so trusting AI to handle things beyond "can you make this email sound better?" has been a big leap for me.

jenkinomics 1y ago
In a few to several months you will learn the meaning of "big ball of mud". Then you will either speedrun the last 20-30 years of software development tooling evolution or crash out of your current modus operandi and help fuel future demand for actual software developers.
- 1y ago

lkey 1y ago

Echoing wallee, This task: "I have to constantly be on my toes to follow what the LLMs are proposing" and "understanding, then solving the specific problems you are being paid to solve" are not the same thing. It's been linked endlessly here but Programming as Theory Building is as relevant today as it was in '85: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf