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I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own orig

by lrvick 1y ago

I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no AI has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evolving from that point, and are unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable. If this pisses you off, ask yourself why.

GaryBluto 1y ago
Is copy-pasting from Wikipedia an "opinion" from Wikipedia?
- lrvick 1y ago
  Even that annoys me because who knows how accurate that is at any moment. Wikipedia is great for getting a general intro to a thing, but it is not a source. I would rather people go find the actual whitepaper or source in the footnotes and give me that, and/or give me their own opinion on it.
- XorNot 1y ago
  No, but it's also equally not a useful contribution. If wikipedia says something then I'm going to link the article, then give a quick summary of what in the article relates to whatever my point is. Not write "Wikipedia says..." and paste the entire article verbatim.
paulcole 1y ago
> If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. Why would it piss me off that you’re so closed minded about an incredible technology?
- lrvick 1y ago
  Using an AI to think for me would be like going to a gym and paying a robot to lift weights for me. Like sure that is cool that is possible, but if I do not do the work myself I will not get stronger. Our brains are the same way. I also do not use a GPS because there are literally studies with MRI scans proving it makes an entire section of our brain go dark compared to London taxi drivers required by law to navigate with their brains. I also navigate life without a smartphone at all, and it has given me what feels like focus super powers compared to those around me, when in reality probably most people had that level of focus before smartphones were a thing. All said AI is super interesting when doing specialized work at scale no human has time for, like identifying cancer by training on massive datasets. All tools have uses and abuses.
  - paulcole 1y ago
    Sounds fun!
  - lostmsu 1y ago
    > Our brains are the same way. How many IQ points do you gain per year of subjecting yourself to this?
    - lrvick 1y ago
      No idea if it actually makes me smarter, but I have noticed I have an atypically high level of mental pain tolerance to pursue things many told me were impossible and quickly gave up on.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
    > Using an AI to think for me People are using LLMs to generate code without doing this.
markfeathers 1y ago
I do not use books for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no writer has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from a book, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evolving from that point, and are unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable. If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. (You can replace AI with any resource and it sounds just as silly :P)
- bgwalter 1y ago
  What is this new breed of interactive books that give you half baked opinions and incorrect facts in response to a prompt?
  - tensility 1y ago
    It's called a "scam". You're welcome.
- theamk 1y ago
  Yes, if you find a book that is as bad as AI advice, you should definitely throw it away and never read it. If someone is quoting a known-bad book, you should ignore their advice (and as a courtesy, tell them their book is bad) It's so strange that pro-AI people don't see this obvious fact and keep trying to compare AI with things that are actually correct.
  - simonw 1y ago
    It's so strange that anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book.
    - saulpw 1y ago
      That "a good model (if you know how to operate it well)" is doing a lot of lifting. To be sure, there are a lot of bad books, and you can get negative advice from them, but a book has fixed content that can gain and lose a reputation, whereas a model (even a good one!) has highly variable content dependent on "if you know how to operate it well". So when someone or some group that I respect recommends a book, I can read the words with some amount of trust that the content is valuable. When someone quotes a model's response without any commentary or affirmation, it does not inspire any trust that the content is valuable. It just indicates that the person has abdicated their thought process.
ninkendo 1y ago
Eh… your complaint describes every single piece of information available on the internet. Let’s try it with other stuff: “Looking at solutions on stack overflow outsources your brain” “Searching arxiv for literature on a subject outsources your brain” “Reading a tutorial on something outsources your brain” There’s nothing that makes ChatGPT et al appreciably different from the above, other than the tendency to hallucinate. ChatGPT is a better search engine than search engines for me, since it gives links to cite what it’s talking about and I can check those, but it pays attention to precisely what I asked about and generally doesn’t include unrelated crap. The only complaint I have is the hallucinations, but it just means I have to check its sources, which is exactly the case already for something as mundane as Wikipedia. Ho hum. Maybe take some time to reevaluate your conclusions here.
- tensility 1y ago
  That tendency to hallucinate that you so conveniently downplay is a major problem. I'll take reading the reference manual myself all day rather than sifting through the output of a bullshit generator.
  - ninkendo 1y ago
    I'm not trying to downplay it, it absolutely is a major problem. But it's a very different problem from "outsourcing your brain". In fact, the tendency to hallucinate is the very reason you still need to use your brain when using an LLM. As I said, it's not any different from a web search or a wikipedia read: It's one input, and you still have to think for yourself.
rileymat2 1y ago
For me, I am not sure it has eliminated thinking. I have recently started to use codex on the command line. Before I put the prompt in, I get an idea in my head of what should happen. Then I give it the instructions, sometimes clarifying my own thoughts while doing it. These are high level instructions, not "change this file". Then it bumps away for minutes at a time, after which I diff the results and consider if it matches up to what I would expect. At that point lower level instructions if appropriate. Consider whether it was a better solution or not, then ask questions around the edges that I thought were wrong. It turns my work from typing code in to pretty much code design and review. These are the hard tasks.
brookst 1y ago
Is it OK to outsource to engineers who are either more senior or more junior, or must one do every aspect of every project entirely oneself?
- theamk 1y ago
  Sure it is, as long as those engineers apply and honest effort and learn from their mistakes. Even if they don't do things faster then you initially, at least they learned something. Unfortunately that logic does not apply to models.
  - brookst 1y ago
    Then I’m lost. I thought this was about the laziness of outsourcing thinking. Why would the outsourcee’s ability to learn impact whether it’s lazy or not?
    - cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]
    - skylurk 1y ago
      LLM are plenty useful, don't get me wrong, but: If your interaction with the junior dev is not much different than interacting with an LLM, something is off. Training a junior dev will make you a better dev. Teaching is learning. And a junior dev will ask questions that challenge your assumptions. It's the opposite of "outsourcing."
jasonlotito 1y ago
> I do not use AI for engineering work and never will So, working with CLAUDE doesn't count. Gotcha. > If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. It doesn't piss me off, but your comment is disingenuous at best.
- OptionOfT 1y ago
  I really dislike how the companies try to antromorphisize their software offerings. At my previous company they called it 'sparring with <name of the software>'. You don't 'work' with Claude. You use the software, you instruct it what to do. And it gives you an output that you can then (hopefully) utilize. It's not human.
- lrvick 1y ago
  I actually do not use any proprietary software of any kind in my work. Any tools I can not alter to my liking are not -my- tools and could be taken away from me or changed at any time.
- tensility 1y ago
  Why do you believe it's disingenuous when a capable person tells you that they don't need the crutches that you are advertising? We've accomplished millennia of engineering without the need for a bullshit generator, but you somehow assume everyone needs such a tool just because you are such a fanboy for it? Talk about disingenuous...
conartist6 1y ago
<3
sanswork 1y ago
I will not use Jr developers for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of a Jr..... You don't have to outsource your thinking to find value in AI tools you just have to find the right tasks for them. The same as you would with any developer jr to you. I'm not going to use AI to engineer some new complex feature of my system but you can bet I'm going to use it to help with refactoring or test writing or a second opinion on possible problems with a module. > unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable. The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. Same as the productivity difference between a developer with a good LSP and one without or a good IDE or a good search engine. When I was a kid I had a text editor and a book and it worked. But now that better tools are around I'm certainly going to make use of them.
- satisfice 1y ago
  FFS stop it with the “it’s just the same as a human” BS. It’s not just like working with a junior engineer! Please spend 60 seconds genuinely reflecting on that argument before letting it escape like drool from the lips of your writing fingers. We work with junior engineers because we are investing in them. We will get a return on that investment. We also work with other humans because they are accountable for their actions. AI does not learn and grow anything like the satisfying way that our fellow humans do, and it cannot be held responsible for its actions. As the OP said, AI is not on the team. You have ignored the OP’s point, which is not that AI is a useless tool, but that merely being an AI jockey has no future. Of course we must learn to use tools effectively. No one is arguing with that. You fanboys drive me nuts.
  - sanswork 1y ago
    I'm not saying it's the same as working with a jr developer. I'm saying that not using something less skilled than yourself for less skilled tasks is stupid and self defeating. Yes, when someone builds a straw man you ignore it. There is a huge canyon between never use AI in engineer(op proposal) and only use AI for all your engineering(op complaint).
ebb_earl_co 1y ago
I’m in the same boat, and what tipped me there is the ethical non-starter that OpenAI and Anthropic represent. They strip-mined the Web, ripped off copyrighted works in neat space, admitting that going through the proper channels was a waste of business resources. They believe that the entirety of human ingenuity should be theirs at no cost, and then they have the audacity to SELL their ill-gotten collation of that knowledge back to you? All the while persuading world governments that their technology is the new operating system of the 21st century. Give me a dystopian break, honestly.
- tjr 1y ago
  On top of which, the most popular systems are proprietary applications running on someone else's machines. After everything GNU showed us for 40 years, I'm surprised programmers are so quick to hand off so much of their process to non-free SaaSS.
beached_whale 1y ago
Like any reference or other person, one needs to question whether those ideas fit into their mental models and verify things anyhow. One never could just trust that something is true without at least quick mental tests. AI is no different than other sources here. As was drilled into us in high school, use multiple sources and verify them.
OptionOfT 1y ago
This is absolutely spot on how I feel about all of it.
WhyOhWhyQ 1y ago
Would you mind sharing what career stage you are in? I don't feel empowered to take such a stance, though I'd like to.
- lrvick 1y ago
  I am 25 years into my career at this point, and co-leading two companies, however I expect the same from people I work with and mentor. Vibe coders have no chance keeping up with me in doing things that have never been done before. Maybe someone vibe codes their way through some webapp stuff and they review and clean it up, I will not stop them, but if someone turns in obvious AI slop they clearly do not understand they are dead to me. I do security auditing and engineering though, which is in very high demand and something LLMs are incredibly bad at right now.
DangitBobby 1y ago
Soc. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. Phaedr. Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country.
D-Machine 1y ago
It is increasingly incredibly important here to make a distinction between using an LLM with and without search. Without search, I agree with you. But e.g. ChatGPT with search enabled is often an invaluable research tool, and dramatically speeds up finding relevant sources. It basically automates the spidering of references and links, and also handles the basic checks for semantic relevance quite well, and this task requires little real intelligence or thought. Only once you hit a highly specific and niche technical domain will it start to fail you here (since it will match on common-language semantics that do not often align with technical usage). For a lot of topics, I now have the reverse feeling that a person who has NOT used an LLM to facilitate search—on basic or even intermediate questions—is increasingly more of a concern.
- lrvick 1y ago
  When someone is able to demonstrate they are more efficient than me in my areas of research and expertise by utilizing an LLM, I will at least pay attention to their workflow and investigate ways to replicate it with FOSS tools I can host, improve, debug, and control for myself. Until then, LLMs are of no interest to me. I am pretty good at using grep on local data caches.
  - D-Machine 1y ago
    Yup, reasonable enough. In areas where you are a true expert (i.e. where there are only handfuls at most of people like you, or where all expert knowledge is not online and accessible by LLMs), you essentially already know where to look, and how to most effectively phrase searches, so a generic LLM that automatically crawls common databases and sites is going to be useless, almost by definition / necessity. Training is just fitting a manifold to training data (interpolating and extrapolating), but truly expert domains (as defined earlier) don't generally have enough data for these things to learn helpful semantics. Perhaps a model fine-tuned or specifically built for the niche domains might help non-experts and people learning to better do semantic / common-language searches, and this might accelerate learning. But, it might not. Not all domains have their core knowledge encoded in documents and/or language, and summarization is sometimes only harmful (especially for highly technical writing). It also seems to me almost definitional though that LLMs aren't going to beat true expertise, because LLMs aren't true intelligence or GAI, they really do just estimate token path densities / curve-fit. And real understanding is clearly more than that.
deaux 1y ago
> I do not use AI for engineering work and never will > Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evolving from that point It doesn't piss me off, it makes me feel sorry for you. Sorry that you're incapable of imagining those with curiosity who use AI to do exactly what you're claiming they don't - learning. The uncurious were uncurious before AI and remain so. They never asked why, they still don't. Similarly, the curious still ask why as much as ever. Rather than Google though, they now have a more reliable source to ask things to, that explains things much better and more quickly. I hear you grunt! Reliable? Hah! It's a stochastic parrot hallucinating half the time! Note that I said more reliable than Google, which was the status quo. Google is unreliable. Yes, even when consulting three separate sources. Not that one has the time for that, not in reality. You've got it the wrong way around. LLMs do the exact opposite - they increase the gap between the curious and the nots. It accelerates the learning rate gap between them. The nots.. they're in for a tough time. LLMs are so convenient, they'll cruise through life copypasting their answers, until they are asked to demonstrate competence in a setting where none are available and everything falls apart. If you still find this hard to imagine, here's how it goes. In your mind LLM usage by definition goes like this - and for the uncurious, this is indeed how it would go. User: Question. LLM: Answer. End of conversation. By the curious, it's used like this. User: Question. LLM: Answer. User: Why A? Why B? LLM: Answer. User: But C. What's the tradeoff? LLM: Answer. User: Couldn't also X? LLM: Answer. User: I'm not familiar with Y, explain.
- kalleboo 1y ago
  The problem with current LLMs is that they are so sycophantic that they don't tell you when you're asking the wrong questions. I've been down the path of researching something with an LLM, and I came to a conclusion. I later revisited the subject and this time I instead read a longer-form authoritative source and it was clear that "interrogating" the matter meant I missed important information.
  - deaux 1y ago
    Which have you been using and through which interface? Try using GPT-5 through the API, without a harness. Whatever model you use, the key phrase is "Why or why not? If so, explain why. If not, explain why not.". Telling when you're asking the wrong questions is also a skill that the curious such as yourself will develop in no time through experience. Are you saying this didn't give a shred of intuition how to do so in the future?
amazingman 1y ago
>I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I [...] This is a framing issue that's keeping you from doing clearer thinking, faster. LLMs, especially in agentic configurations, are a cognitive tool. Just because many people use a tool unskillfully doesn't mean that tool is useless. >If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Hmmm... > Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evolving Agreed. But there are many ways in which people can "outsource their brains". LLMs are one way. Dogmas are another. >If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. It would definitely piss me off to see an engineering leader fail to grasp the obvious due to some poorly reasoned beliefs.

by lrvick 1y ago

GaryBluto 1y ago

Is copy-pasting from Wikipedia an "opinion" from Wikipedia?

lrvick 1y ago
Even that annoys me because who knows how accurate that is at any moment. Wikipedia is great for getting a general intro to a thing, but it is not a source. I would rather people go find the actual whitepaper or source in the footnotes and give me that, and/or give me their own opinion on it.
XorNot 1y ago
No, but it's also equally not a useful contribution. If wikipedia says something then I'm going to link the article, then give a quick summary of what in the article relates to whatever my point is. Not write "Wikipedia says..." and paste the entire article verbatim.

paulcole 1y ago

> If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. Why would it piss me off that you’re so closed minded about an incredible technology?

lrvick 1y ago
Using an AI to think for me would be like going to a gym and paying a robot to lift weights for me. Like sure that is cool that is possible, but if I do not do the work myself I will not get stronger. Our brains are the same way. I also do not use a GPS because there are literally studies with MRI scans proving it makes an entire section of our brain go dark compared to London taxi drivers required by law to navigate with their brains. I also navigate life without a smartphone at all, and it has given me what feels like focus super powers compared to those around me, when in reality probably most people had that level of focus before smartphones were a thing. All said AI is super interesting when doing specialized work at scale no human has time for, like identifying cancer by training on massive datasets. All tools have uses and abuses.
- paulcole 1y ago
  Sounds fun!
- lostmsu 1y ago
  > Our brains are the same way. How many IQ points do you gain per year of subjecting yourself to this?
  - lrvick 1y ago
    No idea if it actually makes me smarter, but I have noticed I have an atypically high level of mental pain tolerance to pursue things many told me were impossible and quickly gave up on.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
  > Using an AI to think for me People are using LLMs to generate code without doing this.

markfeathers 1y ago

I do not use books for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no writer has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from a book, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evolving from that point, and are unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable. If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. (You can replace AI with any resource and it sounds just as silly :P)

bgwalter 1y ago
What is this new breed of interactive books that give you half baked opinions and incorrect facts in response to a prompt?
- tensility 1y ago
  It's called a "scam". You're welcome.
theamk 1y ago
Yes, if you find a book that is as bad as AI advice, you should definitely throw it away and never read it. If someone is quoting a known-bad book, you should ignore their advice (and as a courtesy, tell them their book is bad) It's so strange that pro-AI people don't see this obvious fact and keep trying to compare AI with things that are actually correct.
- simonw 1y ago
  It's so strange that anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book.
  - saulpw 1y ago
    That "a good model (if you know how to operate it well)" is doing a lot of lifting. To be sure, there are a lot of bad books, and you can get negative advice from them, but a book has fixed content that can gain and lose a reputation, whereas a model (even a good one!) has highly variable content dependent on "if you know how to operate it well". So when someone or some group that I respect recommends a book, I can read the words with some amount of trust that the content is valuable. When someone quotes a model's response without any commentary or affirmation, it does not inspire any trust that the content is valuable. It just indicates that the person has abdicated their thought process.

ninkendo 1y ago

Eh… your complaint describes every single piece of information available on the internet. Let’s try it with other stuff: “Looking at solutions on stack overflow outsources your brain” “Searching arxiv for literature on a subject outsources your brain” “Reading a tutorial on something outsources your brain” There’s nothing that makes ChatGPT et al appreciably different from the above, other than the tendency to hallucinate. ChatGPT is a better search engine than search engines for me, since it gives links to cite what it’s talking about and I can check those, but it pays attention to precisely what I asked about and generally doesn’t include unrelated crap. The only complaint I have is the hallucinations, but it just means I have to check its sources, which is exactly the case already for something as mundane as Wikipedia. Ho hum. Maybe take some time to reevaluate your conclusions here.

tensility 1y ago
That tendency to hallucinate that you so conveniently downplay is a major problem. I'll take reading the reference manual myself all day rather than sifting through the output of a bullshit generator.
- ninkendo 1y ago
  I'm not trying to downplay it, it absolutely is a major problem. But it's a very different problem from "outsourcing your brain". In fact, the tendency to hallucinate is the very reason you still need to use your brain when using an LLM. As I said, it's not any different from a web search or a wikipedia read: It's one input, and you still have to think for yourself.

rileymat2 1y ago

For me, I am not sure it has eliminated thinking. I have recently started to use codex on the command line. Before I put the prompt in, I get an idea in my head of what should happen. Then I give it the instructions, sometimes clarifying my own thoughts while doing it. These are high level instructions, not "change this file". Then it bumps away for minutes at a time, after which I diff the results and consider if it matches up to what I would expect. At that point lower level instructions if appropriate. Consider whether it was a better solution or not, then ask questions around the edges that I thought were wrong. It turns my work from typing code in to pretty much code design and review. These are the hard tasks.

brookst 1y ago

Is it OK to outsource to engineers who are either more senior or more junior, or must one do every aspect of every project entirely oneself?

theamk 1y ago
Sure it is, as long as those engineers apply and honest effort and learn from their mistakes. Even if they don't do things faster then you initially, at least they learned something. Unfortunately that logic does not apply to models.
- brookst 1y ago
  Then I’m lost. I thought this was about the laziness of outsourcing thinking. Why would the outsourcee’s ability to learn impact whether it’s lazy or not?
  - cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
  - skylurk 1y ago
    LLM are plenty useful, don't get me wrong, but: If your interaction with the junior dev is not much different than interacting with an LLM, something is off. Training a junior dev will make you a better dev. Teaching is learning. And a junior dev will ask questions that challenge your assumptions. It's the opposite of "outsourcing."

jasonlotito 1y ago

> I do not use AI for engineering work and never will So, working with CLAUDE doesn't count. Gotcha. > If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. It doesn't piss me off, but your comment is disingenuous at best.

OptionOfT 1y ago
I really dislike how the companies try to antromorphisize their software offerings. At my previous company they called it 'sparring with <name of the software>'. You don't 'work' with Claude. You use the software, you instruct it what to do. And it gives you an output that you can then (hopefully) utilize. It's not human.
lrvick 1y ago
I actually do not use any proprietary software of any kind in my work. Any tools I can not alter to my liking are not -my- tools and could be taken away from me or changed at any time.
tensility 1y ago
Why do you believe it's disingenuous when a capable person tells you that they don't need the crutches that you are advertising? We've accomplished millennia of engineering without the need for a bullshit generator, but you somehow assume everyone needs such a tool just because you are such a fanboy for it? Talk about disingenuous...

conartist6 1y ago

sanswork 1y ago

I will not use Jr developers for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of a Jr..... You don't have to outsource your thinking to find value in AI tools you just have to find the right tasks for them. The same as you would with any developer jr to you. I'm not going to use AI to engineer some new complex feature of my system but you can bet I'm going to use it to help with refactoring or test writing or a second opinion on possible problems with a module. > unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable. The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. Same as the productivity difference between a developer with a good LSP and one without or a good IDE or a good search engine. When I was a kid I had a text editor and a book and it worked. But now that better tools are around I'm certainly going to make use of them.

satisfice 1y ago
FFS stop it with the “it’s just the same as a human” BS. It’s not just like working with a junior engineer! Please spend 60 seconds genuinely reflecting on that argument before letting it escape like drool from the lips of your writing fingers. We work with junior engineers because we are investing in them. We will get a return on that investment. We also work with other humans because they are accountable for their actions. AI does not learn and grow anything like the satisfying way that our fellow humans do, and it cannot be held responsible for its actions. As the OP said, AI is not on the team. You have ignored the OP’s point, which is not that AI is a useless tool, but that merely being an AI jockey has no future. Of course we must learn to use tools effectively. No one is arguing with that. You fanboys drive me nuts.
- sanswork 1y ago
  I'm not saying it's the same as working with a jr developer. I'm saying that not using something less skilled than yourself for less skilled tasks is stupid and self defeating. Yes, when someone builds a straw man you ignore it. There is a huge canyon between never use AI in engineer(op proposal) and only use AI for all your engineering(op complaint).

ebb_earl_co 1y ago

I’m in the same boat, and what tipped me there is the ethical non-starter that OpenAI and Anthropic represent. They strip-mined the Web, ripped off copyrighted works in neat space, admitting that going through the proper channels was a waste of business resources. They believe that the entirety of human ingenuity should be theirs at no cost, and then they have the audacity to SELL their ill-gotten collation of that knowledge back to you? All the while persuading world governments that their technology is the new operating system of the 21st century. Give me a dystopian break, honestly.

tjr 1y ago
On top of which, the most popular systems are proprietary applications running on someone else's machines. After everything GNU showed us for 40 years, I'm surprised programmers are so quick to hand off so much of their process to non-free SaaSS.

beached_whale 1y ago

Like any reference or other person, one needs to question whether those ideas fit into their mental models and verify things anyhow. One never could just trust that something is true without at least quick mental tests. AI is no different than other sources here. As was drilled into us in high school, use multiple sources and verify them.

OptionOfT 1y ago

This is absolutely spot on how I feel about all of it.

WhyOhWhyQ 1y ago

Would you mind sharing what career stage you are in? I don't feel empowered to take such a stance, though I'd like to.

lrvick 1y ago
I am 25 years into my career at this point, and co-leading two companies, however I expect the same from people I work with and mentor. Vibe coders have no chance keeping up with me in doing things that have never been done before. Maybe someone vibe codes their way through some webapp stuff and they review and clean it up, I will not stop them, but if someone turns in obvious AI slop they clearly do not understand they are dead to me. I do security auditing and engineering though, which is in very high demand and something LLMs are incredibly bad at right now.

DangitBobby 1y ago

Soc. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. Phaedr. Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country.

D-Machine 1y ago

It is increasingly incredibly important here to make a distinction between using an LLM with and without search. Without search, I agree with you. But e.g. ChatGPT with search enabled is often an invaluable research tool, and dramatically speeds up finding relevant sources. It basically automates the spidering of references and links, and also handles the basic checks for semantic relevance quite well, and this task requires little real intelligence or thought. Only once you hit a highly specific and niche technical domain will it start to fail you here (since it will match on common-language semantics that do not often align with technical usage). For a lot of topics, I now have the reverse feeling that a person who has NOT used an LLM to facilitate search—on basic or even intermediate questions—is increasingly more of a concern.

lrvick 1y ago
When someone is able to demonstrate they are more efficient than me in my areas of research and expertise by utilizing an LLM, I will at least pay attention to their workflow and investigate ways to replicate it with FOSS tools I can host, improve, debug, and control for myself. Until then, LLMs are of no interest to me. I am pretty good at using grep on local data caches.
- D-Machine 1y ago
  Yup, reasonable enough. In areas where you are a true expert (i.e. where there are only handfuls at most of people like you, or where all expert knowledge is not online and accessible by LLMs), you essentially already know where to look, and how to most effectively phrase searches, so a generic LLM that automatically crawls common databases and sites is going to be useless, almost by definition / necessity. Training is just fitting a manifold to training data (interpolating and extrapolating), but truly expert domains (as defined earlier) don't generally have enough data for these things to learn helpful semantics. Perhaps a model fine-tuned or specifically built for the niche domains might help non-experts and people learning to better do semantic / common-language searches, and this might accelerate learning. But, it might not. Not all domains have their core knowledge encoded in documents and/or language, and summarization is sometimes only harmful (especially for highly technical writing). It also seems to me almost definitional though that LLMs aren't going to beat true expertise, because LLMs aren't true intelligence or GAI, they really do just estimate token path densities / curve-fit. And real understanding is clearly more than that.

deaux 1y ago

> I do not use AI for engineering work and never will > Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evolving from that point It doesn't piss me off, it makes me feel sorry for you. Sorry that you're incapable of imagining those with curiosity who use AI to do exactly what you're claiming they don't - learning. The uncurious were uncurious before AI and remain so. They never asked why, they still don't. Similarly, the curious still ask why as much as ever. Rather than Google though, they now have a more reliable source to ask things to, that explains things much better and more quickly. I hear you grunt! Reliable? Hah! It's a stochastic parrot hallucinating half the time! Note that I said more reliable than Google, which was the status quo. Google is unreliable. Yes, even when consulting three separate sources. Not that one has the time for that, not in reality. You've got it the wrong way around. LLMs do the exact opposite - they increase the gap between the curious and the nots. It accelerates the learning rate gap between them. The nots.. they're in for a tough time. LLMs are so convenient, they'll cruise through life copypasting their answers, until they are asked to demonstrate competence in a setting where none are available and everything falls apart. If you still find this hard to imagine, here's how it goes. In your mind LLM usage by definition goes like this - and for the uncurious, this is indeed how it would go. User: Question. LLM: Answer. End of conversation. By the curious, it's used like this. User: Question. LLM: Answer. User: Why A? Why B? LLM: Answer. User: But C. What's the tradeoff? LLM: Answer. User: Couldn't also X? LLM: Answer. User: I'm not familiar with Y, explain.

kalleboo 1y ago
The problem with current LLMs is that they are so sycophantic that they don't tell you when you're asking the wrong questions. I've been down the path of researching something with an LLM, and I came to a conclusion. I later revisited the subject and this time I instead read a longer-form authoritative source and it was clear that "interrogating" the matter meant I missed important information.
- deaux 1y ago
  Which have you been using and through which interface? Try using GPT-5 through the API, without a harness. Whatever model you use, the key phrase is "Why or why not? If so, explain why. If not, explain why not.". Telling when you're asking the wrong questions is also a skill that the curious such as yourself will develop in no time through experience. Are you saying this didn't give a shred of intuition how to do so in the future?

amazingman 1y ago

>I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I [...] This is a framing issue that's keeping you from doing clearer thinking, faster. LLMs, especially in agentic configurations, are a cognitive tool. Just because many people use a tool unskillfully doesn't mean that tool is useless. >If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Hmmm... > Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evolving Agreed. But there are many ways in which people can "outsource their brains". LLMs are one way. Dogmas are another. >If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. It would definitely piss me off to see an engineering leader fail to grasp the obvious due to some poorly reasoned beliefs.