Comment by enlyth
16 hours ago
A software engineer with an LLM is still infinitely more powerful than a commoner with an LLM. The engineer can debug, guide, change approaches, and give very specific instructions if they know what needs to be done.
The commoner can only hammer the prompt repeatedly with "this doesn't work can you fix it".
So yes, our jobs are changing rapidly, but this doesn't strike me as being obsolete any time soon.
I listened to an segment on the radio where a College Teacher told their class that it was okay to use AI assist you during test provided:
1. Declare in advance that AI is being used.
2. Provided verbatim the questions and answer session.
3. Explain why the answer given by the AI is good answer.
Part of the grade will include grading 1, 2, 3
Fair enough.
It’s better than nothing but the problem is students will figure out feeding step 2 right back to the AI logged in via another session to get 3.
This is actually a great way to foster the learning spirit in the age of AI. Even if the student uses AI to arrive at an answer, they will still need to, at the very least, ask the AI to give it an explanation that will teach them how it arrived to the solution.
No this is not the way we want learning to be - just like how students are banned from using calculators until they have mastered the foundational thinking.
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Props to the teacher for putting in the work to thoughtfully grade an AI transcript! As I typed that I wondered if a lazy teacher might then use AI to grade the students AI transcript?
That's roughly what we did as well. Use anything you want, but in the end you have to be able to explain the process and the projects are harder than before.
If we can do more now in a shorter time then let's teach people to get proficient at it, not arbitrarily limit them in ways they won't be when doing their job later.
I think it's a bit like the Dunning-Kruger effect. You need to know what you're even asking for and how to ask for it. And you need to know how to evaluate if you've got it.
This actually reminds me so strongly of the Pakleds from Star Trek TNG. They knew they wanted to be strong and fast, but the best they could do is say, "make us strong." They had no ability to evaluate that their AI (sorry, Geordi) was giving them something that looked strong, but simply wasn't.
Oh wow this is a great reference/image/metaphor for "software engineers" who misuse these tools - "the great pakledification" of software
Yep, I've seen a couple of folks pretending to be junior PMs, thinking they can replace developers entirely. The problem is, they can't write a spec. They can define a feature at a very high level, on a good day. They resort to asking one AI to write them a spec that they feed to another.
It's slop all the way down.
People have tried that with everything from COBOL to low code. Its even succeeded in some problem domains (e.g. thing people code with spreadsheet formula) but there is no general solution that replaces programmers entirely.
Agree totally.