Comment by cpursley
3 days ago
Another perspective: AI reduces brain effort in some domains which actually frees up brain juice that can be applied elsewhere.
3 days ago
Another perspective: AI reduces brain effort in some domains which actually frees up brain juice that can be applied elsewhere.
For me AI mostly reduces time effort. AI types code faster than I do, looks up stuff on the internet faster than I do, debugs faster than I do, but doing those never required much "brain effort" from me.
What does require "brain effort" from me is making educated decisions. Mostly during planning to figure out which pros/cons of each possible approach are actually relevant for our situation - AI does this poorly, makes lots of wrong assumptions if you don't steer it correctly, and noticing these + correcting AI on them requires "brain effort" too. Then the part of code review where you think about what can go wrong. AI still sucks at figuring out edge cases. It doesn't "know" the entire codebase like I do, its context only has "the parts of codebase deemed relevant".
Before AI I could jump from 30 minutes of hard thinking into an hour of coding during which my brain essentially rested, before returning to hard thinking again. Nowadays those hour-long coding sessions turn into 5-10 minutes of watching AI do something.
So for me using AI doesn't "free up brain juice", it instead makes me use my "brain effort" more, and in a workplace environment gives me less time to rest and makes me more tired, cause nowadays bosses expect us to work faster + colleagues working faster means more review requests.
Show us effects.
What amazing breakthroughs were achieved thanks to brain juice freed by AI usage? What great works of art were created?
I've got one. I'm working on a cryptographic identity system in rust. One of the stricter iterations of it demanded creating a public version and private version of each type. The best way to accomplish this is a procedural macro. I don't know if you've written proc macros by hand in rust. I have, years ago, and it was somewhat torturous. I didn't want to relearn to do it all over again and spend what would have taken weeks (this is a side project) to gain a skill I will easily forget in a month or so. So I had an LLM code it for me. This is a really great use for it: it's not building any strong logic or doing any IO, it's simply writing code that generates other code, and is entirely verifiable and testable. It built it for me so I could spend those weeks working on higher level logic and p2p syncing protocol stuff that actually matters for the project.
I want to make it clear that I'm an LLM luddite. I mostly find the things distasteful and obnoxious. But there are definitely use-cases where they can do what's essentially bitch work and save a lot of time that would otherwise be a waste. It's a tool that can be used for specific things. I don't use them for everything.
Did it became noticeably better because you used LLM to make a proc macro, therefore freed up you creative and cognitive powers to deliver something much better than you would by writing this macro yourself?
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I'll bite. I've been writing music for decades but I can't sing. With ai I can write lyrics and generate ai vocals, then separate the stems and extract the vocals throwing away the rest. Add the vocals to my daw and create the rest the way I want. Saying its a great work of art is subjective, but for me I can make music I couldn't before now.
You didn't bite anything.
Parent suggests the perspective where using AI allows to free up the "brain juice", and utilize it elsewhere. What you describe is AI allowing you to mitigate some limitations that prevented you trying something. So not the same.
Sidebar: learn to sing. Singing well and “finding your voice” are in my mind equivalent. Every time I become a more confident person I get better at singing. Every time my singing gets better through practice I feel more confident. “Speak with your chest” didn’t make sense until a few years ago. Now it’s obvious to me when someone is incapable of it.
Exactly. What service got better and/or cheaper?
Most software, other than Windows and macOS, seems to have gotten better more quickly lately.
Hard to quantify though, as most, other than the AI companies don't usually advertise their AI usage.
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So this is the classic tension between the "coding for the love of code" vs the "coding to solve problems" mindset. This cultural concept has been around since before AI was on the scene, heck well before software existed (craftsman vs builder).
I'm curious why this is a vs and you have to pick both? I've found coding for the love of code always helped me accelerate my speed and ability so that I could also deliver solidly on time and solve the problems too.
Ya this has been my sentiment. If i need to one-off a quick script that does some processing on data, it’s nice to offload that so i can focus on pieces of my code that are more important and interesting to me. The context switching cost is still there tho…