6 ms·

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

• micromacrofoot 8d ago
  Turning my brain off actually works really well when I'm doing something more creative, and while I know this isn't exactly what he's talking about, I wonder if we are just offloading things we shouldn't have to think about to have more space to think about other things. Of course, this becomes a lot more difficult when you're unemployed.
• kixiQu 8d ago
  Even pre-LLM: I've found a lot of colleagues (mystifyingly to me, both seniors and juniors) who really want to be able to turn their brain off when doing investigations into complicated cross-system behavior (feedback loops abound), and they don't like hearing that it can't be collapsed into a runbook. If a drinking bird (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird) on an Enter key could do it, I could rig something up so I wouldn't need you!
  • AIiscoming 8d ago
    Or not trying to actually finding a root cause. Look i increased the storage for customer, problem solved. No? You solved the symptom not the issue?
    • emerongi 8d ago
      To be fair, that is often a reasonable tradeoff when there’s higher priority things the business needs to focus on. I sometimes suggest timeboxing investigations for this reason. Spend 4h on this - if root cause is not found, just throw more hardware at it. Although I expect a writeup of what was investigated and ruled out, so that it can be used when someone returns to it.
      • pixelready 8d ago
        Yes, one of the primary dysfunctions I see in business environments is a culture that doesn’t create space for timeboxed and clear discussion of tradeoffs. Everyone must have both the _appetite for_ and _implicit or explicit permission to have_ a reasonable discussion of option A vs option B and the long vs short term costs and benefits of each. There must be enough discipline to not rabbit hole or scope creep and decisions must be captured somewhere in a concise way so that everyone who is impacted is informed, and everyone who will inherit the downstream consequences can understand and articulate the decision chain that led to current state. This is rarely if ever done in a sensible way. Instead you find Managers, Engineers or PMs avoiding troublesome stakeholders, hallway convos or Slack DMs that are never properly written into public record in a searchable/readable way, last minute overrides from higher ups based on limited context of the problem space or their own unaligned career goals, poor recordkeeping, panic mode bandaid fixes when systems break, etc... IMO a lot of the “meat proxy” and “loop obsession” behavior we’re seeing is simply people using the sense of short term productivity gains as self-soothing against anxiety from corporate dysfunction that they have no control over.
        • bunderbunder 8d ago
          I've seen it too, and it seems to be getting worse as companies move more and more communication onto Slack, ticketing systems, Confluence, etc. Modern channels are a huge high velocity dumping ground. The only way anyone can even pretend to keep up with all the - frankly - spam is arbitrary sampling. Oldschool periodic reports and memoranda weren't perfect, but they did encourage taking time to curate one's message. And gave others somewhere to go for a properly curated message.
• spicyusername 8d ago
  All is possible with good blackbox testing.
• 01284a7e 8d ago
  "What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy?" Maybe some form of liability, accountability... New concept: the AI patsy
  • jbverschoor 8d ago
    It pays 16 craploads of money per year.
  • brap 8d ago
    Interesting thought. In a way this is already the case, to some extent. But wouldn’t it be way more economical to have some sort of AI-insurance service? i.e. protection against AI fucking things up?
    • cindyllm 8d ago
      [dead]
  • Terr_ 8d ago
    Like so: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/blame https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/blame
    • jodrellblank 8d ago
      Or a different way around, Asimov's The Machine That Won The War, 1961: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/machine-that-won-the-war/ https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/machine-that-won-the-w...
  • OrderlyTiamat 8d ago
    Moral Crumple Zones https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moral-crumple-zones.html https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moral-crumple-zones.html
  • perrygeo 8d ago
    More commonly known as an "accountability sink". These existed before but it is so much worse with AI.
• gjsman-1000 8d ago
  > Let's say that happens. What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee. If this is true, turning off the brain... is completely rational. Why burn out the brain for something happening either way? It's not like being fully engaged is going to result in anything that much better for the employee. In a world where code is this disposable, memorizing a codebase that won't recognizably exist in 3 years is also stupid.
  • dbvn 8d ago
    Why do you assume that the fully engaged employee would be laid off at all?
    • gjsman-1000 8d ago
      You're telling me none of the 730,000 people laid off over the last four years were fully engaged employees?
  • layman51 8d ago
    I’m not allowed to enter legit chess tournaments where if I’m going be using my phone’s chess engine app to tell me the best move in every single position. Because that’s considered cheating by the chess players and tournament organizers and rightly so. But, there doesn’t seem to be an incentive to not do something similar in the world of work unless your LLM output is so bad or obviously inaccurate.
    • MattGaiser 8d ago
      The challenge here is that the business world doesn't really recognize the concept of cheating. In particular, tech is very open to people cheating and if billions of dollars could be had by somehow communicating the chess engine's work to a human at chess, the world of business would cheat at it. Tech has a number of large startups that basically started with the assumption of "what if we assumed the law had no teeth?"
    • 8d ago
• science4sail 8d ago
  Let's say that happens. What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee I would argue that there's still an important role for human employees as compliance ablative armor. The human's purpose is to keep an eye on the LLM, occasionally intervene/interfere with its work, and most importantly, incur social/legal liability for anything that the LLM does wrong. Kind of like the backup drivers used by self-driving cars.
  • kg 8d ago
    Is being compliance ablative armor uplifting, fulfilling work? Is there any way in which your personal competence and effort impacts whether the AI screws up or not? Do you have any way to build job security as ablative armor? That sounds miserable.
    • pixl97 8d ago
      >That sounds miserable. Welcome to our future that was already here years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs Fulfilling work disappeared a long time ago, the book bringing this up was from 2018 before chatbots were really a thing. We are just experiencing the acceleration to all jobs being bullshit jobs.
• general_reveal 8d ago
  Um, some data: ”Nowhere is this clearer than in entry-level software engineering—though the picture depends on whom you ask. Brynjolfsson discovered that employment among developers aged 22 to 25 has fallen nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak. The online job site Indeed also paints a stark picture: software development job postings have fallen 53% from the same starting point.” https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-real-job-destruction-from-ai-is-hitting-before-careers-can-start#:~:text=Nowhere%20is%20this%20clearer%20than%20in%20entry%2Dlevel,fallen%2053%25%20from%20the%20same%20starting%20point. https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-real-job-destruct... They aren’t firing the meat proxies to that degree yet, but they absolutely have stopped hiring the meat proxies. It’s going to be a very dirty year on Wallstreet when you’ll see massive sneaky layoffs of the existing meat proxies. You can turn your brain off with these models. It is what it is.
  • rconti 8d ago
    I think there's just too many confounding variables to say. ZIRP policy ended in 2022, with interest rates going up 5% between 2022 and mid-2023[1]. This both means that money was historically cheap when these early-career developers were being hired in the peak, and it was relatively (in terms of the past couple of decades; eg, the modern tech industry) expensive after. We've seen layoffs as a result of this, and nobody's hiring a cohort of juniors when they're trying to afford the employees they already have. On top of that, companies are firing the money cannon at AI initiatives and experiments (some of which will be successful and others which won't), leaving less money for humans. Anyway, it's just a single occurrence of a hiring drop in a single economic cycle. Unfortunately, it just happens to perfectly line up with the rise of GenAI. We may never be able to tease apart cause and effect in this period, and we certainly won't be able to do so until we have at least a handful more years of data to see how junior hiring does or does not rebound. [1]https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirp https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirp
    • general_reveal 8d ago
      Everything you said is true, I agree with you. ”Unfortunately, it just happens to perfectly line up with the rise of GenAI.” Right. That’s just something I think we should keep our pulse on and keep looking at this data every six months (seriously, this needs to be tracked by devs because this data may start forming into that proverbial “writing on the wall”). No one should be planning on being a software engineer in about 3-5 years, all need to plan for alternative income sources or early retirement. I think, at least.
• jochem9 8d ago
  I think a lot of people are not able to reason to this point and then adjust behaviour accordingly. They probably reason to the point when pressed for it, but cannot resist the low effort and low resistance route of asking AI, and then probably make up reasons why in their case it's fine (typical behaviour to address cognitive dissonance). Then again, for many people their job security doesn't depend on what work they do, it depends on how well they are embedded in the organisation. Before AI you also already had plenty of people doing their job at a questionable level, yet never seem to get fired.
  • cyanydeez 8d ago
    I'm starting to thing AI is the baseline of cognition and it matches the worst parts of humanity. Its just, we trained on the better parts so it's not so obvious.
    • lirolero 8d ago
      [dead]
  • stephbook 8d ago
    Combining your thoughts, one could almost think that being a meat proxy works for quite a long time, before institutional inertia catches up. Sounds like a quiet few years and then effort once demanded. So I guess... being a meat proxy does work, after all?
    • pixl97 8d ago
      Work in support for most of your life and you come to the conclusion that there are a whole lot of meat proxies out there. In fact everyone does the meat proxy somewhere in their life. > I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs I mean, this was true for computers. "Computer says no"[0] was thing long, long before LLMs. I've had well educated, seemingly very intelligent people break when they couldn't log in steadfastly ignoring the [caps lock key is on] error message. This becomes even more "fun" and "interesting" when a person is being a meat proxy for some horrifically dangerous industrial process involving high pressures, excited chemicals, and enough rotational inertia to send god flying. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no
• thomas536 8d ago
  Turning your brain off is usually a defense mechanism to protect yourself against something bad. dissociate during trauma etc. lighter dissociation points to the interaction trending toward badness, not goodness. Seems like the mind and body is telling us something that we shouldn't ignore
  • Terr_ 8d ago
    No, it's usually an instinctive power-saving mechanism, and it happens incredibly frequently. For example, the average driving commuter is not "zoning out" because of some bad experience with roads or cars, but because the route is extremely familiar.
    • kg 8d ago
      I assume you're not saying it is but I just wanna call out that zoning out behind the wheel isn't a good thing. Drivers should be attentive at all times regardless of whether the route is familiar. So maybe something is going wrong there, even if it's not trauma?
      • SoftTalker 8d ago
        One can still drive attentively but be on a route so familiar that unless something unusual happens, the brain does not bother recording any specific memory of it. Even at work, I can spend a week on developing something, implement it, and once it's done will have almost no memory of it a month later because it was just one more feature in a long series of features that are all pretty much the same.
        • pixl97 8d ago
          The human brain is a filter that seeks novelty. All the repetitious junk gets compressed down to something like key frames. This is why things like alert fatigue are so dangerous. Any signal that only very occasionally means danger will eventually be ignored.
• dzink 8d ago
  You are a photographer from the olden age. Taking a photo back then took forever. You are standing on a hill trying to get the perfect picture of a sunset. You measure and sort and calculate angles and light. A tourist stands next to you with an high-speed iphone auto-settings camera. They spin around and get thousands of photos from different angles while you are thinking and measuring your one shot. That’s what AI does. It gives you many shots at the same problem. The thinking guy with the one approach will likely lose a photo competition to one of the accidentally better shots of the person who tried a lot more. Make and filter now may be a better approach than overthink and try only once.
  • willy_k 8d ago
    This ignores the reality that many people are, unfortunately, taking that one iPhone picture, sending it to everyone in their contacts list as if it’s art, and then moving on to the next slop shoot.
    • anon84873628 8d ago
      And like, that's transformed human interaction? I like following my friends' stories and receiving quotidian snaps of my nephews. That's the point of the analogy, not that people are passing it off "as if it's art."
  • Arodex 8d ago
    And how do you get a person able to nail "that one shot" when the moment is fleeting? Your "tourist" is unable to do it, because he never put any deliberate practice in photography. Incidentally, analog film photography is having a huge revival, and Instax is still Fujifilm's best seller. Maybe there is something missing from "I did an award-winning photo but I have have no clue how, lol". Is there anybody here who wants to have their portrait taken by the "tourist"? Is there anyone here who would prompt an AI to generate their portrait, apart from Ghibli-style remixes (which are funny five minutes, and stale a month later)?
    • ourmandave 8d ago
• SPascareli13 8d ago
  That's the smallest dan luu post I've seen.
  • deleted 8d ago
    [deleted]
• LZ_Khan 8d ago
  Airline pilots and train conductors are basically meat proxies 95% of the time and they are still employed. Still necessary for when things really go wrong.
  • middleclick 8d ago
    [dead]
  • daedrdev 8d ago
    Train conductors should be automated, we have better things to spend government money on than make work jobs. LIRR pays conductors 200k. It’s theft at that point
    • bluGill 8d ago
      Train conductors are valuable IF they have first aid and CPR training; maybe riot training. There are probably a few other things along those lines as well - but none of them have anything to do with running a train: all the train related tasks can be better done automated. There are still some things in an airplane that an autopilot cannot do. There is nothing on a train in normal operation (as opposed to maintenance) that a computer cannot do - as evidenced by multiple trains around the world running without humans operators since the 1990s!
    • kg 8d ago
      If screwing up gets me killed I want the person doing that job to be paid well and I want them to be held up to a high performance standard. I don't see how cutting pay for conductors is going to make anyone's lives better. Or if we replace that well-compensated train conductor with automation I sure hope it's high quality stuff and not lowest-bidder slop.
      • sssilver 8d ago
        > I don't see how cutting pay for conductors is going to make anyone's lives better It's going to make passengers' lives better by making their train rides more affordable, allowing them to improve their lives by leveraging those funds. Or, it's going to make shareholders' lives better by increasing their profits. Either way, some people will benefit from it. The question is -- what is the real, practical tradeoff, and is the tradeoff worth it to the participants in the system.
• esafak 8d ago
  When throughput is an issue, you have to think judiciously. I'm definitely not saying you shouldn't think but you have to apply human oversight effectively. For me that means front-loading through dialectic planning, and maximizing guardrails.
• shadowgovt 8d ago
  It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree. Here's the thing I'm finding - LLMs allow me to do more coding when my brain isn't firing on all six cylinders. It means I get more code written because I don't have to be "in the zone" to exhaustively hunt down every piece of API and dependency and have my flow continuously broken up by missing information. The code written in that state is lower quality, but I can patch up five-cylinder-brain code faster than I can synthesize code from a blank page outside of my flow state.
• georgemcbay 8d ago
  > What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee. Company is pleased! Cost savings! Alas, the joy doesn't last long as pretty soon after the company realizes that after an LLM replaces almost all their employees, the much easier task of replacing the entire company begins, because the company itself has just become a much thinner meat proxy for getting an LLM to do whatever it is the customer relies on the company for. Customer is pleased! Cost savings! Alas, the joy doesn't last long as whatever savings they have from replacing the company with their own LLM loop is offset by whatever it is they do to earn income being similarly impacted. All of the moats degrade together though they may fully give out at slightly different speeds.
• Arainach 8d ago
  It doesn't help that this is being forced from above. I agree you can't turn off your brain, but any time I argue that AI isn't the right tool for something management gets angry. There is a constant push to fully automate things, regardless of what those things are. Even if I agree that you have to use your brain, when my boss is literally telling me to stop questioning whether AI automation is the right answer in team meetings/chats I'm just going to shut up and give them what they want.
  • CaptainTaboo 8d ago
    My company is doing this, too. It’s the reason I’m submitting my resignation notice next week.
    • drchickensalad 8d ago
      I just did. Good luck my brother/sister.
      • winrid 8d ago
        Good on you. I absolutely hate reading the output from Opus. It's disrespectful to make people read it, and to share AI output without reading and understanding it first.
        • eli_gottlieb 8d ago
          Opus in particular seems to somehow combine pretentious intellectualism with sheer idiocy.
          • disgruntledphd2 7d ago
            Yeah, it's funny. Both of the recent models from the big us labs require you to ask what does this mean before they'll rewrite in simpler language. Provenance this, gated that. It almost sounds like smart stuff, but then you dig deeper and it's vacuous.
• vintermann 8d ago
  The version of "meat proxy" I've heard is the person who forwards a machine-answer to someone else who didn't ask for a machine answer, and could just as easily made one themselves. Calling someone a "meat proxy" for being the human in the loop is wild.
  • teaearlgraycold 8d ago
    I think it might be appropriate if what we're talking about is a human connecting an LLM to something it can't natively access. Like something in the physical world - a piece of hardware, a different human, software the LLM can't access. As the human in the loop your role might be to mostly just shuffle information back and forth from this external resource. But depending on the situation there could still be quite a lot of interpretation and analysis performed by the human in the loop.
  • jadar 8d ago
    I don't think that's quite the problem the OP is pointing out. A corollary of "meat proxy" is "cognitive surrender." [1] In both cases, blindly pasting AI output and being an "Enter key presser", you have surrendered your cognition. In the latter case, you're in the loop but there's not a lot of reason for you to be. Your underlying supposition is right, though. If you are truly thinking and in the loop, you are by definition not a meat proxy. I think those are the people who are successful with AI coding tools, but it takes discipline and it's still hard to find the joy and reward when you're not the one solving the problems. [1] https://swiftrocks.com/using-ai-without-losing-critical-thinking https://swiftrocks.com/using-ai-without-losing-critical-thin...
• throe844949 8d ago
  I would like to argue opposite. Developers like to "turn their brain off" during "super hard debuging" sessions. Mental flow state is a well documented as pleasurable experience. It is like a drug! Auditing and reviewing autogenerated commits, is hard gruelling mental labour, compared to that. You do not even get a credit as an author! You can not get into groove to get your fix!
• paimapi 8d ago
  trends like these remind me very much of how true some of the predictions in Douglas Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" were: https://ia802903.us.archive.org/6/items/richard-hofstadter-anti-intellectualism-in-american-life-vintage-1966/Richard%20Hofstadter%20-%20Anti-Intellectualism%20in%20American%20Life-Vintage%20%281966%29.pdf https://ia802903.us.archive.org/6/items/richard-hofstadter-a... he was writing in reaction to the McCarthy era which, arguably, is very similar to kind of bombastic nativism we're seeing now from our political elites. his argument essentially being that there are cultural and institutionalized forces that are driving people to, well, turn their brains off - specifically to no longer be skeptical of what they consume, to not want to refine and improve their toolbox of analysis, to not want to understand how things work for the sake of knowing and that these acts were deliberate - a populace is so much easier to control when it's complacent and unknowing, who believes, unskeptically, that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, unquestioning about who was writing the PR missives that feed the news cycle (see also: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/what-is-copaganda https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/what-is-copaganda), how verbatim they are, and what the real intent of the authors were like, I get that you don't want to put in effort for a job you don't like. but that effort also makes you better at your work. it makes it easier on you, it lets you create less incidents, it empowers you to be more agent in your own life, to, who knows, have the guts to start a consulting gig because your skill-sets actually are better than the average there's so many benefits from just being more diligent, longterm, proactive benefits. but that's not everybody's extrinsic motivator and it's so much easier to just be Skinner-boxed by social media companies into doomscrolling, I suppose
• AIiscoming 8d ago
  Thats not the problem of LLM/AI. The problem is, that digital work, the new frontier of employment for a lot of epeople, got and will continue to get A LOT cheaper, faster and more accessable. The PO who always complains about someone? They will just vibe stuff. It might even be shit but it will work good enough until LLMs/AI/AGI/ASI is good enough or better anyway than an avg developer. Man i have seen so so much shitty code even in software companies. You know when your HR software takes seconds to load? Yeah an LLM can do that today too
  • iwontberude 8d ago
    [dead]
• Arubis 8d ago
  Yes, and: the most important time to use your brain isn't in the loop. That _is_ valuable, and will remain so, but the temptation to turn it off is there because the loop is good and getting better at what it does. Once you're in the loop, with the rare high-value exception of catching total mistakes nad redirecting, you're mostly choosing between similar-yet-reasonable options. This isn't so much right-vs-wrong as relativistic optimization. Letting the loop do the work will get you a mediocre result quickly, and that's usually fine. The most important time to use your brain is _before the prompt_. Once you engage with your LLM and agent, you start biasing yourself, and its reasonable suggestions constrain your visibility into other options, other worlds. First, use your brain. Then write the prompt.
  • xendo 8d ago
    I don't agree. I'm recently a huge believer in Programming as Theory Building. The software creation itself is the part that makes you understand what you are building. It's impossible to understand things before you start building them, initial prompt can help you explore, but the idea that after that you can lean back is ridiculous. Most or maybe even all successful software projects are still heavily relying on the best software engineers. That's why anthropic and others are still hiring SDEs.
    • CamperBob2 8d ago
      That's great, but you and your family will go hungry as a result. If not this year, next year. Your stance isn't new, if it's any comfort. I heard (and probably said) exactly the same thing when C compilers started getting good enough to eliminate the need for most assembly coding.
      • xendo 8d ago
        I will take my chances. Software is part of my identity and I won't abandon it that quickly.
        • CamperBob2 7d ago
• brcmthrowaway 8d ago
  I still don't get who is this guy and why anyone should care.
• projektfu 8d ago
  The obligatory XKCD, panel 2: https://xkcd.com/568/ https://xkcd.com/568/
• markstos 8d ago
  Agents are still a bit to eager to please, so they are still missing cases when the better answer is to push back, change course or refactor. But when the human suggests changing the course, the LLMs will often agree the new direction is better and start heading there...
  • pixl97 8d ago
    Heh, do you see how mad some people here on HN get when Claude tells them no. They must all be in management. It's a very delicate dance.
• jadar 8d ago
  I think this is the dissonance that has been making me feel insecure / depressed around the state of AI coding. On the one hand I am way more productive. But on the other hand it is almost requiring more of my brain than before, because I am having to determine what is good output and what is slop. But that's not the part of my brain that I particularly like engaging — I like understanding something deeply. But in this case, that is just not possible. I like to think that as the human-in-the-loop, I am supplying the requisite _taste_ to the design and overall structure of the program. But at what point does my taste get taken over by the LLM as models improve? Another problem is that when something breaks then I am very limited in my ability to reason through the breakage. It's necessary to go back to the LLM and ask it why it broke. At which point, I'm able to follow the reasoning — but not in any durable manner where I'll be able to remember it. To me, it's sort of like the difference between memorizing a passage and having a ready reference at hand at all time. We had this same problem with information before — now it's come for our reasoning.
• jongjong 8d ago
  Maybe, but the parts of my brain I'm still using are a lot easier to use. I was dreaming to be promoted to a cushy management role where I could talk bs for a living. I managed to attain 'hands-on team lead' and later an ill-fated 'bootstrapped cryptocurrency CTO' role... Nobody wanted to pay me to talk as a career. Now they do! So I'm very happy about that. I feel contempt for all the people who had it easy and 'chose' to be engineers voluntarily.
• petesergeant 8d ago
  There's some software that really doesn't require my brain. I gave Astra an ssh key for root on a little Pi Zero with a microphone attached and asked it to make recordings of a siren going off in our neighbourhood, based on a couple of sirens. This would have been a great deal of work a couple of years ago, now it's a few tokens, and honestly, it doesn't really matter if it's shitty code, I just want the timestamps. Then there's the software that I write for a living, and almost my entire day is now spent making hard decisions. /grilling gives me difficult technical design decisions endlessly and I am forever doing product management on features from agents. My brain is back in CTO mode, which isn't what I'd planned for myself after I'd left that particular cursed path, but fine. I am doing the opposite of turning my brain off, because I no longer can just chill out and mindlessly write code. Both these states can exist simultaneously. But my brain work has shifted into something different, while getting no less intense.
• doctorpangloss 8d ago
  There are a lot of programmers who are working with chatbots and watching YouTube simultaneously for the first time, simply matching the rest of the economy for the nature of work. If you can do your job while watching TV your brain is turned off.
• TheStuHub 8d ago
  [dead]
• gwbas1c 8d ago
  The more I see posts like this, the more I realize that the problems people have with AI are no different than the problems we had with outsourcing (development to low-cost countries) 20 years ago. The results and challenges are the same; except now the feedback loop is within minutes instead of overnight.
• 0c3ca83 8d ago
  > Let's say that happens. What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. Why do you think management is so gung-ho about LLMs? Employees are expensive, and laying them off is therefore extremely appealing. The entire, explicitly stated goal of the AI movement is to produce an ASI, which is better across every metric than a human. Even if you refuse to turn off your brain, the economics of paying you to keep the lights on upstairs aren't going to work out. This was never going to work out well for the human. I'm not sure what else to say. You listened to these people speak, what the heck did you expect?
• agentultra 8d ago
  An AI system cannot replace professional people. It doesn’t replicate or do the work that they do. That’s not what it is for and it is incapable of performing these tasks. If you are using these systems you still need to know what you want and how to specify it. You can use agents to automate much of the work but it can’t tell you that your ideas are bad, that there’s a better way to accomplish your goals; it can’t tell you what you want. And if you can’t understand what it is outputting you’re failing in your primary task as a developer: understanding the problem. I agree with the title. I just don’t think these systems will ever be capable of replacing humans. As much as product managers and executives would love it and not have to deal with us; they’ll just be shooting themselves in the foot if they try to replace professional developers with AI harnesses and fire all the people with the institutional knowledge and skill.
  • krapp 8d ago
    I think you may need to update your priors a bit. AI is already replacing professionals. Developers are already losing jobs. LLMs and agents are already running in the hot loops of our technological civilization, unsupervised, with root. Institutional knowledge and skills are already being lost.
    • agentultra 8d ago
      AI isn’t replacing people. Managers and executives have been sold a product that they believe they can use to replace people. Some of them probably still hold some enthusiasm for these products. But there seem to be some that are getting wise to the fact that they’ve been duped.
• dr_dshiv 8d ago
  Yeah, I experience this a lot. I call it “zombie mode.” It’s like pulling a slot machine, though. Sometimes AI can go a few turns just with encouragement. But when I don’t maintain conceptual engagement, drift is inevitable. My solution is saying “gnite” and coming back in a new terminal window with a clear restatement of my purpose. Or “what are you working on and why” can help. Terminal windows are not great for keeping context; waiting for better design. It is possible.
• supermdguy 8d ago
  I've noticed some tasks (80-90%) can be accomplished by quickly typing out a feature/bug fix, accepting plans with ~10% brain power, and moving on. But there are other tasks where the LLMs struggle, and it requires significantly more time and mental effort to think through the architecture and requirements before it's to a point where the LLMs can process it. What's difficult, is I now spend most of my time on these high-throughput tasks, where my brain isn't exactly off, but focused on quantity over quality. It's often difficult to identify when a task requires "real" brain-power, and when it does, it adds a lot of friction to dig into the code and orient myself. So it's hard to know when it's the right time to do that.
• VCFundedGenYer 8d ago
  Turning off your brain with LLMs is how you get fired. Even with small things, you need to be at the wheel. The other day I had to stop copilot from literally deleting the file I was working on. Why did it choose to go down that route? I don't know, but I nixed and reported the chat once it did that. LLMs are dangerous and if for some reason you are stuck with using them, do NOT ever turn your brain off. Ideally, you should not be using LLMs at all.
• octoberfranklin 8d ago
  This guy footnotes.
• hosamsh 8d ago
  I feel that AI's biggest threat is making us lose the intuition and judgment we need to correct it.