Comment by victorbjorklund
3 months ago
There are lots of different things people can find interesting. Some people love the typing of loops. Some people love the design of the architecture etc. That’s like saying ”how can you enjoy woodworking if you use a CNC machine to automate parts of it”
I take satisfaction in the end product of something. A product where I have created it myself, with my own skills and learnings. If I haven't created it myself and yet still have an end product, how have I accomplished anything?
It's nice for a robot to create it for you but you've really not gained; other than a product you're unknown to.
Although, how long until we have AI in CnC machines?
"Lathe this plank of wood in to a chair leg x by x."
I take satisfaction living in a house I did not build using tools I could not use or even enumerate, tools likewise acting on materials I can neither work with nor name precisely enough to be unambiguous, in a community I played no part in before moving here, kept safe by laws I can't even read because I've not yet reached that level of mastery of my second tongue.
It has a garden.
I've been coding essentially since I learned to read, I have designed boolean logic circuits from first principles to perform addition and multiplication, I know enouhg of the basics of CPU behaviours such that if you gave me time I might get as far as a buggy equivalent of a 4004 or something, and yet everything from there to C is a bunch of here-be-dragons and half-remembered uni modules from 20 years ago, then some more exothermic flying lizards about the specifics of "modern" (relative to 2003) OSes, then apps which I actually got paid to make.
LLMs lets everything you don't already know be as fun as learning new stuff in uni or as buying new computers from a store, whichever you ask it for.
> It has a garden
In this scenario your starting out as an gardener, would you rather having LLM "plant me five bulbs and two tulips in ideal soil conditions" or would you rather grow them yourself? If the latter you wouldn't gain skills as if you had the previous year made the compost, double dug the soil and sowed the seeds. All this knowledge learnt, skills gained and achievement that lost in the process. You may be novice and it may not bring all your flowers to bloom but if you succeed in one, that's the accomplishment, the feel good energy.
LLM may bring you the flowers, but you've not attempted. You've palmed the work to something else and just busking in the result. I wouldn't count that being a achievement; I just couldn't take pride in that. I was brought up in a strict form of "cheating: your only cheating yourself" ideology which may be what triggering this.
I would accept that on terms of teaching that there is a net plus for LLM's. A glorified Liberian. A traditional teacher may teach you one method - one for the whole class, LLM can adjust it's explanation until it clicks with yourself. "Explain it using Teddy Bears" -- a 24/365 resource allowing you to learn.
As such a LLM explaining that "your switch case statement is checking if the variable is populated and not that if the file is empty" on your existing written the code is relaying back a fault that would be no different of if you had asked a professional to review.
I just can't grip the feel of having LLM code for you. When you do it spreads like regex; you become dependent on it. "Now display a base64 image retrieved from an internal hash table while checking that the rendered image is actually 800x600" and that it does but the knowledge how-to becomes lost. You have to put double time in to learn what it did, question it's efficiency and assume it hasn't introduced further issues. It may take yourself few hours, days to get the logic right but at least you can take a step back and look at it knowing it's my code, my skills that made that single flower bloom.
The cat is out of the bag, reality is forcing you to embrace. It's not for me and that's fine; I'm not going to grudge over folk enjoying the ability to experience a specialist subject. I do become concerned when I see dystopian dangers ahead and see a future generation degraded in knowledge because we got vibe and over-hyped the current.
Knowledge and history is in real danger.
1 reply →
>If I haven't created it myself and yet still have an end product, how have I accomplished anything?
Maybe what you wanted to accomplish wasn't the dimensioning of lumber?
Achievements you can make by using CNC:
The CnC machine is aiding in teach, it's not doing it for you. It's being used a tool to increase your efficiency, learning. If you were asking the CnC machine what is the best frequency and to set the speed of the spindle you're still putting in your own work. Your learning the skills of the machine via another method and no different as if you worked with a master carpenter were asking questions.
An electric wheel for clay making is going to result in an quicker process in making a bowl than using a foot spindle. You've still need to put the effort in to get the results you want to achieve but it shows in time.
Using LLMs for let me do this for you is where it gets out of hand and you've not really accomplished anything other an elementary "I made this".
I love building different types of apps, But I don't usually build any of the low level building blocks like graphics, graphics, engines, or even web frameworks in themselves. and I guess for some people they would say that is not really your product if you're just building an app in React, but you're not the one building the framework. If you just wipe coding then yeah, sure, you are not building anything. but if you're just using AI to build out the boilerplate and then you're doing the rest of the work I would say you're building. You're not building all the details, but neither are you if you are using React or any kind of abstraction over, I guess, assembly.