Comment by CGMthrowaway
2 days ago
Well said. Everyone agrees AI can't do their job, so it ends up doing everyone else's.
I'm not sure how to formulate it yet but it seems there is some Peter Principle/Gell-Mann Effect corollary that is AI-related we can say here.
Perhaps: "AI rises to the level of its users' incompetence."
Or: "Confidence in AI output is inversely proportional to one's ability to verify it"
> Confidence in AI output is inversely proportional to one's ability to verify it
I like this / generally agree. The only wrinkle is that - for some tasks - the verification _is_ "run the script, see if it worked, don't care how... just that it did" which is distinctly different from "not only did it do it correctly, it did so in the most direct and performant way possible".
For a _lot_ of what I use LLMs to build, the former is all I need.
And for as long that that runs on your computer, I don't care.
But the problem is that for many people they now believe it's ok to present a 10k line vibe-coded PR that only has been verified against external behavior, and some Senior Engineer needs to review it, in time, under pressure, without too much push-back, and lastly, it's the Senior Engineer that gets paged at 2am because something has fallen over.
Also, those scripts tend to start a life of their own, and because it looks good enough, people don't look at them again.
I recall a bug of someone vibe-coding a cleanup script for folders older than $x (on Windows).
Get the CreationDate, and sort. Delete older than $x. Except CreationDate can be null and null is always smaller than $x.
Oops.
>Well said. Everyone agrees AI can't do their job, so it ends up doing everyone else's.
Its like basic income, everyone will stop working except from you.
It is not at all like universal basic income, except that both of those are misleadingly simple quips.
But using AI itself is a job too. It takes effort to correctly prompt, to steer it, to verify it, and to improve the harness.
show me a prompt that is meaningfully expertly crafted beyond just providing Do's, Do not's, task context, and a goal.
> Correctly prompt, to steer it, to verify it, and to improve the harness.
I doubt this a lot. The average AI user is running claude code as the harness, or Codex etc. prompting has no secret incantations, and steer and verify is just knowing what the answer should roughly look like, which is a domain skill, not an AI skill.
> show me a prompt that is meaningfully expertly crafted beyond just providing Do's, Do not's, task context, and a goal.
The way that information is organised and formatted matters for compliance. It’s pretty similar to writing good procedural documentation for humans.
I feel like you don't have any friends who make software but don't know how to code.
Yes, they do make software now - whereas it was impossible before. You may be absolutely shocked at how bad LLM code can be when prompted from a noncoder. How buggy, and how absolutely rife with security problems it can have. I honestly don't know how they can get LLMs to write such bad software - but somehow they can. This is from people who have been vibe coding for 3 years straight btw (huge amount of time p/day).
> Everyone agrees AI can't do their job, so it ends up doing everyone else's.
In real life I haven't met a single programmer who doesn't think AI can do their job.
If someone would actually say that I would immediately think they have hubris and overestimate their skills.
We must live in different realities, because I have the direct opposite experience.
Perhaps we are defining "job" differently? AI can, with much coaching, _perhaps_[1], do some _aspects_ of a programmer's job. But not all of it, or even the most important parts of it.
[1] given that we have spent the past many decades pointing out that developer productivity is possibly impossible to measure, or at least very hard; given "done" vs "done done"; given the history of "rock star" developers creating messes behind them, the difference between short and long term thinking and the external imperceptability of that difference; given all of that, we haven't really had enough time to form a valid opinion on what AI can do, in the long run.
are you saying that all of the programmers you’ve met in real life have automated their work away and are coasting while waiting for their bosses to fire them…?
…if not, they’ve found developer work that ai can’t do yet, no?
That was not my point. Maybe we interpret "can't do their job" differently. That said, outside of HN I don't know anyone writing code by hand anymore except people that can't use it due to compliance or work on PLC stuff.
You mean theoretically in the future? Or right now?
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