6 ms·
> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts
by lqet 5mo ago
> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...].
> The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in.
There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste. I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems strangely out of character. A needlessly verbose text written by someone who was previously allergic to verbosity. An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago. The work itself is always completely immune to any rational criticism, as it checks all the boxes: extensive documentation, scalable, high test coverage, perfect code style, and for texts perfect grammar, non-offensive, seemingly objective. But, for lack of a better word, it simply lacks taste.
- Octoth0rpe 5mo ago> An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago. Importantly, I think AI companies are motivated towards the overengineered solutions as they increase the buyer's token spend. I'm not sure how we can create incentives that optimize for finding the 'right' solution, which may be the cheapest (the bash one-liner). Perhaps a widely recognized but not overly optimized for benchmark for this class of problems?
- whazor 5mo agoI think the model space is too competitive. People will switch if another model is significantly better.
- thfuran 5mo agoThere are only a few frontier models, and aren’t they all operating under the same incentives?
- jerojero 5mo agoOpen source models maybe not necessarily as they can (in theory) be self hosted. I think right now the incentives of open source chinese model developers is to provide good (comparable to SotA) and cheap models so the space is not captured by a few private american companies because they've seen how hard it is to compete in the space when that happens.
- maxsilver 5mo ago> Importantly, I think AI companies are motivated towards the overengineered solutions as they increase the buyer's token spend. Yes that, and also, the more complicated the solution, the more likely no one reads or reviews it too carefully, and will instead depend on an LLM to ‘read’ and ‘review it’ Even ignoring token costs, there’s a high incentive for LLMs to generate complex solutions, because those solutions generate demand for further LLM use. (You don’t really want to review that 30,000 line pull request by hand, do you?)
- khaledh 5mo agoThis reminds me off this famous quote by Tony Hoare: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
- munificent 5mo ago> Yes that, and also, the more complicated the solution, the more likely no one reads or reviews it too carefully, and will instead depend on an LLM to ‘read’ and ‘review it’ Exactly right. It's the other end of the bikeshed continuum[1]. If you send out a two-page design doc or a hundred like pull request, the recipient will actually review it. Let AI inflate that to ten pages or a thousand lines of code and they feel like they don't have enough mental capacity to tackle it so they let it slide. [1]: https://bikeshed.com/ https://bikeshed.com/
- NateEag 5mo ago> Perhaps a widely recognized but not overly optimized for benchmark for this class of problems? I don't see how this could be achieved. Any widely-recognized benchmark is going to be gamed by the genAI companies. They have a strong financial incentive to do so, and their products' nature shows that they are not influenced by ethical or societal-good incentives.
- overgard 5mo agoI dunno, on a subscription one would assume that minimizing token spend would actually be in their interest. Even for API calls I'm not entirely convinced they're profitable.
- stavros 5mo agoPerhaps the experts have decided that, for this specific instance, the thing we need to do is ad-hoc and throwaway, and is simply not worth paying the extra cost to make it tasteful.
- jurgenburgen 5mo agoHow can a bash one-liner be more expensive to build than a full-blown CLI tool with the maintenance burden that comes with it?
- stavros 5mo agoWhat expert would build a cli tool to avoid writing a bash one-liner?
- dgellow 5mo agoI cannot judge without more context. Depending on the one liner, the problem at hand, and overall situation that can be justified. A CLI is straightforward to create. A bash oneliner can be a chain of 5+ programs, each buffering the stdin/out, what if the CLI is doing the same operation via streams instead? Just a random example but that can easily be worth it
- stavros 5mo agoSure, then there's a point where the extra taste isn't worth its cost. I just don't like the fictional straw man where an expert has somehow been brainwashed by AI into forgetting everything they ever knew.
- daveguy 5mo agoWait... Did you just fictional strawman a fictional strawman? Because I don't think I've ever heard anyone say an expert gets brainwashed by AI into forgetting everything they ever knew. Maybe losing some skills that require regular exercise. Or get lazy about implementations when spawning dozens of super useful agents. But come on. Don't build your strawman out of a fictional strawman.
- jcarrano 5mo agoThat's honestly a fear of mine, that I might lose the taste for simplicity.
- epicide 5mo agoLike healthy food, simplicity doesn't taste good. At least not on the surface. It is an acquired taste and is easily lost. When your own instinctual heuristics are being weaponized against you for profit, you have to continually fight to maintain a discipline of nourishment. The sugar high is too addictive. AI is a fast food of the creative mind.
- watwut 5mo ago> The work itself is always completely immune to any rational criticism, as it checks all the boxes: extensive documentation, scalable, high test coverage, perfect code style, and for texts perfect grammar, non-offensive, seemingly objective. But, for lack of a better word, it simply lacks taste. "It is overly engineed" is a rational criticism. Likewise, "it is overly verbose, it could have been shorter" and "this could have been a one-liner" are rational criticisms.
- shermantanktop 5mo agoI’m watching out for that in my own work. I’m a pragmatic person but I have sweated over details that Claude will just blast out a solution to, and the temptation to say “tests pass, move on” is strong. It’s a little like riding a horse that knows the route.
- localhoster 5mo agoAlmost accurate It's not "the route" But "a route"
- jakubmazanec 5mo agoAlmost accurate, but it's »Almost accurate. It's not "the route", but "a route".«.
- shermantanktop 5mo agoThe untucked period really increases the meta.
- aejm 5mo agoI agree completely with your sentiment. The word I use to describe it is “quality”! Most people don’t produce quality work or take pride in it, even beyond the tech industry. I believe the tool of AI is exasperating an underlying problem
- causal 5mo agoI find LLMs make me doubt my own ability to produce quality now. I used to jump in and just write code so eagerly, letting it get messy but discovering the shape of the problem in the process. But AI can produce beautiful, complete, syntactically perfect code on the first pass that makes my code look juvenile. I mean, it might be wrong for other reasons, but it makes me feel like I'm programming with crayons next to it.
- NewsaHackO 5mo agoI find that I have this problem too. I hate to admit it, but I feel as though it’s the natural progression of the “tab pause” problem, where after writing a stem you wait to see what the autocomplete will say, even though you know exactly what you want to type. It’s like even using AI for confirmation rewires how you think anyway.
- nbulka 5mo agoI posted a comment very similar in spirit - we’ve adopted “perfect is the enemy of good” as the operative maxim instead of maximizing accountability and now we may need to flip as AI does that first part quickly enough.
- pjc50 5mo ago>> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. This phrasing made me think of Baudrillard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation , in particular "Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original". The AI produces something that is statistically similar to what it was asked for. A copy, through the weights, of some text selected from all the text it was trained on. A simulacra of good work.
- rng-concern 5mo agoI bought this book a year ago but have not read it. It's one of those books that requires effort from the reader, which these days seems in low supply for me. :) I'll have to give it another try. Recently I commented that: Artificial intelligence produces artificial results. I liked the double-artificial but I wasn't happy with the meaning. Perhaps Simulacra is more accurate? I will see :)
- QuercusMax 5mo agoResults are results, though. By "artificial results" do you mean those that merely appear to be results, or do you mean results achieved via nonhuman means? If I write the exact same code as the AI, our results will be indistinguishable.
- rng-concern 5mo agoLate reply so not sure if you'll see this. But I mean: they appear to be results. They look real, but are not. There are subtle errors hidden that the casual observer will not, or even cannot detect. Obviously there are exceptions to this. Many exceptions. AI right now can probably write most if not all algorithms on par or better than I could. It can put together working prototypes for many ideas I've had and not had time to implement. But the danger is in assuming that because it can do A, it can do B, because a human that does A can do B.
- callamdelaney 5mo agoDevelopers have been lacking taste for decades anyway, like all of those kubernetes clusters built out for companies that could run on a 50 euro a month dedicated server at hetzner.
- glouwbug 5mo agoSometimes entire businesses collapse to a python dict and a backup UPS power supply
- tardedmeme 5mo agoSoftware-wise maybe, but if their customers could replace them with a Python dict they would. Such businesses usually have value due to their social network consisting of suppliers, knowledgeable employees, and other customers.
- isityettime 5mo ago> An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago. “There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.” https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.h...
- mehdix 5mo agoReminded me of The Tao of Programming [1]. Fantastic little read that brightened my morning (during a boring meeting). [1]: https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
- ozozozd 5mo agoLove this! > The Master was explaining the nature of Tao to one of his novices. > > "The Tao is embodied in all software -- regardless of how insignificant," said the Master. > > "Is the Tao in a hand-held calculator?" asked the novice. > > "It is," came the reply. > > "Is the Tao in a video game?" asked the novice. > > "It is even in a video game," said the Master. > > "Is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?" asked the novice. > > The Master coughed and shifted his position slightly. "The lesson is over for today," he said.
- mehdix 5mo agohaha, yes, that was a good laugh :)
- _yy01 5mo agoI have thought about it. Present iteration of LLMs are, despite what normies would believe, aren't optimised to provide correct solutions. They are optimized to __sound smart__. This may be just an undesirable artifact of the RLHF process. But the end result is same. They try (?) too hard to sound smart. Last generation LLM writing was too obvious in its soulless journalistic nature. But the current generation LLMs do all the following things to appear smart; From the lowest levels to highest level - use clever writing styles and punchlines. Not X, it's a Y'ed Z. (Though it's not funny and makes no sense). - Overstuff the technical terms, most often using a +. "Add a shim + iptables rule + signal handler". - Over engineer the low level design. (Eg rather write a function to do some complex parsing when a way exists to avoid it altogether. Write tricky bash script and parse the output for what could be achieved by stdlib in few more lines). - over engineer the code flow: this is rather because they're clueless and can't step back. But I have fun seeing the LLM come up with 4 5 levels of branching and then extract it into a function, whereas a human would step back and try to avoid the branching. - over engineer the high level design: well your mistake is letting the word soup machine lead the design. It will add all and kitchen sink with need bullet points and + marks. Only a pleb not sufficiently educated in the matters of computer science will be impressed with such Markdown kitchen sink designs. It's fine to rely on LLM for brainstorming and discovering how to do A, B and C. But if you outsource the job of design, it's instincts (!) to sound maximally smart using bullet lists and + marks will kick in.
- haarts 5mo agoTaste. I believe we (software engineers) have tried hard to eliminate taste in programming: linters, git message styles, you name it. And I think that's a good thing. Taste is not transferable. Consistent code is.
- aftbit 5mo agoAll shell, no ghost.
- a34729t 5mo agoOne of the top 4 ICS in my (major, public) company just posed a 100 lines of AI slop (which I and others read, and found to be meaningless) in a conversation about a major pain point where they are supposed to be the expert. It's like people have totally turned off their brains.
- mmsimanga 5mo agoI wonder if the issue is that the use of AI has generated so much work, a substantial amount none essential and incorrect as per the article and for one to cope with the volume of work you have to use AI. The irony. More pull requests to check, more pages or documentation to review, more new apps or features to get acquainted with all at a rapid pace.
- sevenseacat 5mo agoI've seen pure LLM output used in performance reviews. It's wild.