4 ms·

I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties.

by nilirl 4mo ago

I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? Not sure. But yes, I can't physically get myself to write code without an AI anymore. It feels so much slower, almost painful.

isubkhankulov 4mo ago
We never learned how to use IBM punch cards. Writing functions by hand for modern languages is fast becoming anachronistic.
- orphea 4mo ago
  Absolutely not, not until LLMs stop being unreliable bullshit generators, and I believe that the current generation of AI is simply not capable of it. Even the best available (lol) model, Fable/Mythos, is still a bullshit generator, just one that's a bit more powerful.
tossandthrow 4mo ago
The question is what higher level skills there will be to focus on? I am not convinced that there are tasks, like project management or architecture, that the Ai is inherently worse at.
- ai_slop_hater 4mo ago
  Managing AI context.
- tychez 4mo ago
  I think the main aspect is that a human can be held responsible. A human can be fired. Then we are pretending agents have agency when that is also what the human has. It seems like the meaning of economy of scale should almost flip to mean the economy of very small, highly specialized companies. It seems hard to see that the person in charge of cybersecurity is going to also be in charge of marketing. I think there is also this aspect that if you told me in high school I was someday going to be a project manager, I would have thought you were insane. You mean like Oppenheimer? No one is ever going to put me in charge of the Manhattan Project. I think you can also see the vague outlines that someone is going to have to be in charge of token cost.
- therealdrag0 4mo ago
  Ai is decent at it but it still struggles to find and balance and choose the right context. This will of course improve but I’m starting to think it’ll be like the self-driving car history where the last 10% needed is a long slow road. 10-20 years ago we had such high hopes for data and IoT, but it’s still just banal and mildly useful, full of walled gardens and property formats. General purpose AI may end up similar. My company has like 10 different MCPs to enterprise software we use that has context, but AI still needs lots of guidance.
DrewADesign 4mo ago
I’m curious if someone coming into that fresh, without having had the mental exercise of, for example, grappling with data structures and (lower-level) algorithms in practical applications by hand, could achieve a mindset that useful and productive? When I was in design school, as much of our work was in physical media — graphite, cut paper, paint, vine charcoal — as was practicing great kerning and getting experience with the digital tools. Even though you still had to make the individual strokes and choose appropriate tools in the digital realm, there was still a perception of the process that was obviously lacking among those that came from strictly digital backgrounds. It’s similar to seeing someone who’s only worked with photo references try life drawing — there’s an entire part of the cognitive process not being used when you’re drawing something that’s already 2D. Sure, they can learn, but unless they’re forced to, they’ll probably just keep taking a picture and drawing that. But image generating, even with extremely granular inpainting and such, is so different it’s not even comparable. I’d hesitate to say that someone with a lot of experience doing very advanced image generation would be dramatically further along than a complete beginner if they learned to draw which is not true of the photo reference artist, and even less true of a purely digital artist that did life drawing on a tablet. Kind of like how millennials, many of whom always had access to technology, but also experienced dial-up-era computer use, are generally more technically savvy than the your stereotypical “iPad kid” that can’t even traverse a directory structure.
- nilirl 4mo ago
  Yes, and I struggle to give junior developers feedback because of this. The code they submit for review no longer represents their thinking or their skill. The feedback loop for beginners is a bit broken. What is their skill now? How is it displayed? How and where do we provide valuable feedback? I find myself just approving large PRs because I don't have the time to read it all. I feel like I've let down a lot of developers this year.
  - DrewADesign 4mo ago
    > I feel like I've let down a lot of developers this year. I think the industry has, and we don’t get much out of individualizing it. Let’s not forget that this progression is a series of deliberate choices made by a handful of very influential people that couldn’t give a teaspoon of shit about developers beyond what their subscriptions bring in. It’s not a super well-received opinion around here, but I think the economics of the large-scale services will mean on-device models are going to be where this all goes sooner or later. My gut says setting up a local LLM coding assistant will be more like choosing and setting up an ide. I don’t have a crystal ball though.
lbrito 4mo ago
>But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? That's not the way the economics behind this work. Supposing the AI priests are right (they aren't) and using AI creates a thought surplus on the user, freeing cognitive capacity to think of higher things. What do you think will said user's boss want to do with that surplus? Let the user develop higher-level cognitive abilities? I don't think so. The doctors in the article performed worse post-AI: suppose AI saved them so much time that they did 100 exams in the time they used to take doing 10 exams. What will their employers do with that freed up labour time? They'll of course have the doctors do more exams and perhaps fire some now-redundant doctors that are no longer needed. The surviving doctors are left deskilled, doing the same or more work, and society gets worse quality medical care. But hey, its not all bad - the employer gets to save on labour, and shareholders will be happy.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
eess 4mo ago
In the eyes of many ceo’s, you are slowly becoming useless.
deadbabe 4mo ago
You’re fucked once you have to start getting AI to produce code for languages you’ve never actually worked in. You will have to write code to understand deeply what goes on at the low level. Without a solid understanding of the low level, you won’t truly know what optimal solutions look like on a high level. You will be flying by the seat of your pants, churning out code that works but has bad low level quirks sprinkled through the code base. The AI will say it’s fine, but you’re just building up shitty software. Feels like shit, run likes shit. Once someone new comes along who has worked with the language manually and can get AI to produce effective high quality code, you’ve lost competitive advantage. They can build way better versions of whatever you do. You’re finished. You’re a low quality engineer.
- nilirl 4mo ago
  Your argument has many, many leaps but I infer your point. The lack of attention does reduce the overall correctness of the system. But, and unfortunately, in most situations the loss of correctness is more than made up for by the speed gains. Unless you're building software that could kill someone, it's hard to reject the improved speed. The cost of delay is usually more damaging than the cost of incorrectness.
  - deadbabe 4mo ago
    In real business, all important software is capable of killing someone or cause monetary loss through incorrectness or loss of functionality due to performance failures. If that doesn’t apply, you are just writing toy apps or front ends that are of no real significance, so yes you could carry on with incorrect code in those cases, but it’s not much of a career either.
    - nilirl 4mo ago
      Thank you for illuminating the realities of real business. It made me realize I've only had the misfortune of being employed at fake ones.
  - timmytokyo 4mo ago
LtWorf 4mo ago
> I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. I've seen many bad developers become awful architects whose plans are completely impossible to put in practice. How do you know your higher level skills are actually any good?
- nilirl 4mo ago
  I don't know but I'm less wrong than I used to be. More focused, better at reasoning about context. Maybe good architects learn by starting as awful architects? Consider giving them more time.
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    I think you aren't necessarily the best person to evaluate yourself. Unless you are some kind of superior human being. Is 6 years enough to think they won't improve?
    - nilirl 4mo ago
      What's your point? That it's not a skill? Having a system behave acceptably as it grows does not count? Getting paid for it does not count? Fine. Don't do it. Wait till you get a certification. No one's forcing you to think about these things.

by nilirl 4mo ago

isubkhankulov 4mo ago

We never learned how to use IBM punch cards. Writing functions by hand for modern languages is fast becoming anachronistic.

orphea 4mo ago
Absolutely not, not until LLMs stop being unreliable bullshit generators, and I believe that the current generation of AI is simply not capable of it. Even the best available (lol) model, Fable/Mythos, is still a bullshit generator, just one that's a bit more powerful.

tossandthrow 4mo ago

The question is what higher level skills there will be to focus on? I am not convinced that there are tasks, like project management or architecture, that the Ai is inherently worse at.

ai_slop_hater 4mo ago
Managing AI context.
tychez 4mo ago
I think the main aspect is that a human can be held responsible. A human can be fired. Then we are pretending agents have agency when that is also what the human has. It seems like the meaning of economy of scale should almost flip to mean the economy of very small, highly specialized companies. It seems hard to see that the person in charge of cybersecurity is going to also be in charge of marketing. I think there is also this aspect that if you told me in high school I was someday going to be a project manager, I would have thought you were insane. You mean like Oppenheimer? No one is ever going to put me in charge of the Manhattan Project. I think you can also see the vague outlines that someone is going to have to be in charge of token cost.
therealdrag0 4mo ago
Ai is decent at it but it still struggles to find and balance and choose the right context. This will of course improve but I’m starting to think it’ll be like the self-driving car history where the last 10% needed is a long slow road. 10-20 years ago we had such high hopes for data and IoT, but it’s still just banal and mildly useful, full of walled gardens and property formats. General purpose AI may end up similar. My company has like 10 different MCPs to enterprise software we use that has context, but AI still needs lots of guidance.

DrewADesign 4mo ago

I’m curious if someone coming into that fresh, without having had the mental exercise of, for example, grappling with data structures and (lower-level) algorithms in practical applications by hand, could achieve a mindset that useful and productive? When I was in design school, as much of our work was in physical media — graphite, cut paper, paint, vine charcoal — as was practicing great kerning and getting experience with the digital tools. Even though you still had to make the individual strokes and choose appropriate tools in the digital realm, there was still a perception of the process that was obviously lacking among those that came from strictly digital backgrounds. It’s similar to seeing someone who’s only worked with photo references try life drawing — there’s an entire part of the cognitive process not being used when you’re drawing something that’s already 2D. Sure, they can learn, but unless they’re forced to, they’ll probably just keep taking a picture and drawing that. But image generating, even with extremely granular inpainting and such, is so different it’s not even comparable. I’d hesitate to say that someone with a lot of experience doing very advanced image generation would be dramatically further along than a complete beginner if they learned to draw which is not true of the photo reference artist, and even less true of a purely digital artist that did life drawing on a tablet. Kind of like how millennials, many of whom always had access to technology, but also experienced dial-up-era computer use, are generally more technically savvy than the your stereotypical “iPad kid” that can’t even traverse a directory structure.

nilirl 4mo ago
Yes, and I struggle to give junior developers feedback because of this. The code they submit for review no longer represents their thinking or their skill. The feedback loop for beginners is a bit broken. What is their skill now? How is it displayed? How and where do we provide valuable feedback? I find myself just approving large PRs because I don't have the time to read it all. I feel like I've let down a lot of developers this year.
- DrewADesign 4mo ago
  > I feel like I've let down a lot of developers this year. I think the industry has, and we don’t get much out of individualizing it. Let’s not forget that this progression is a series of deliberate choices made by a handful of very influential people that couldn’t give a teaspoon of shit about developers beyond what their subscriptions bring in. It’s not a super well-received opinion around here, but I think the economics of the large-scale services will mean on-device models are going to be where this all goes sooner or later. My gut says setting up a local LLM coding assistant will be more like choosing and setting up an ide. I don’t have a crystal ball though.

lbrito 4mo ago

>But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context? That's not the way the economics behind this work. Supposing the AI priests are right (they aren't) and using AI creates a thought surplus on the user, freeing cognitive capacity to think of higher things. What do you think will said user's boss want to do with that surplus? Let the user develop higher-level cognitive abilities? I don't think so. The doctors in the article performed worse post-AI: suppose AI saved them so much time that they did 100 exams in the time they used to take doing 10 exams. What will their employers do with that freed up labour time? They'll of course have the doctors do more exams and perhaps fire some now-redundant doctors that are no longer needed. The surviving doctors are left deskilled, doing the same or more work, and society gets worse quality medical care. But hey, its not all bad - the employer gets to save on labour, and shareholders will be happy.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

eess 4mo ago

In the eyes of many ceo’s, you are slowly becoming useless.

deadbabe 4mo ago

You’re fucked once you have to start getting AI to produce code for languages you’ve never actually worked in. You will have to write code to understand deeply what goes on at the low level. Without a solid understanding of the low level, you won’t truly know what optimal solutions look like on a high level. You will be flying by the seat of your pants, churning out code that works but has bad low level quirks sprinkled through the code base. The AI will say it’s fine, but you’re just building up shitty software. Feels like shit, run likes shit. Once someone new comes along who has worked with the language manually and can get AI to produce effective high quality code, you’ve lost competitive advantage. They can build way better versions of whatever you do. You’re finished. You’re a low quality engineer.

nilirl 4mo ago
Your argument has many, many leaps but I infer your point. The lack of attention does reduce the overall correctness of the system. But, and unfortunately, in most situations the loss of correctness is more than made up for by the speed gains. Unless you're building software that could kill someone, it's hard to reject the improved speed. The cost of delay is usually more damaging than the cost of incorrectness.
- deadbabe 4mo ago
  In real business, all important software is capable of killing someone or cause monetary loss through incorrectness or loss of functionality due to performance failures. If that doesn’t apply, you are just writing toy apps or front ends that are of no real significance, so yes you could carry on with incorrect code in those cases, but it’s not much of a career either.
  - nilirl 4mo ago
    Thank you for illuminating the realities of real business. It made me realize I've only had the misfortune of being employed at fake ones.
- timmytokyo 4mo ago

LtWorf 4mo ago

> I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties. I've seen many bad developers become awful architects whose plans are completely impossible to put in practice. How do you know your higher level skills are actually any good?

nilirl 4mo ago
I don't know but I'm less wrong than I used to be. More focused, better at reasoning about context. Maybe good architects learn by starting as awful architects? Consider giving them more time.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  I think you aren't necessarily the best person to evaluate yourself. Unless you are some kind of superior human being. Is 6 years enough to think they won't improve?
  - nilirl 4mo ago
    What's your point? That it's not a skill? Having a system behave acceptably as it grows does not count? Getting paid for it does not count? Fine. Don't do it. Wait till you get a certification. No one's forcing you to think about these things.