Comment by itsalwaysgood
1 day ago
I'd say it's more about learning how to organize your work more efficiently.
If you think about a product like marble: it's something that most be chiseled out of time.
Some people can chisel better products: the AI is just a better chisel.
Sometime still has to guide the chisel and judge the art/product.
In our cases, the market judges products.
I think my point is that its sometimes (!) easier to use the manual chisel rather than go for the automatic chisel and then fix its mistakes.
They say writing engages more of the brain and helps us to remember what's written more than if we just read it, or copy and paste.
When you say it's easier to go manual, it seems you're talking about learning retention. And you're right.
But seniors have learned enough that they're able to iterate quickly with AI.
They know how to organize their work, manage change, tasks. They know how to break a problem down into smaller pieces. They're aware of context windows, token cost, estimated task lengths, etc. And most importantly, and to your point about ease: they have less to learn so retention isn't an issue.
I have no opinion about whether we're in a good or bad situation, just making arguments from the toilet really.
It's not just learning is it, why do people buy hand ground coffee when there quite literally isn't any difference? Or audiophile snake oil? As long as humans are still the consumers, some part of consumption will be emotional. Could be to support local artisans, could be gullibility, could be love, whatever.
Maybe one day artisanal code will be a thing lol. Hand written like calligraphy. Those with refined tastes will have their favorite code artisans. And the plebs can continue with mass produced industrial junk.
1 reply →
> In our cases, the market judges products.
It happens, but it's rare. When last did a product take over a market without 100s of millions, sometimes even billions, of VC dollars?
There is no motivation to build a better mousetrap today, because the drooling idiot with a Claude account will look at how quick you signup users, clone it in a week (hey, it only needs to be superficially the same), and get VC money to dump until you go out of business.
This seems to misunderstand the parent comment. The sibling comment plays along with the analogy and mentions having to fix the mistakes of an automatic chisel, but the original comment is alluding to the fact that it is definitely not an automatic chisel. There is no uncanny valley in an automatic chisel.
Programming up until this point was done by using deterministic tools to build products. LLMs appear to be nondeterministic tools in their current incarnation, at least to humans.
If an automatic chisel had a feature that could switch from chiseling from sedimentary rock to chiseling marble but would randomly and nondeterministically switch to the other mode during its use it would be considered defective. But with LLMs the industry has collectively decided that the nondeterministic automatic chisel builds so fast that the current defect rate from the nondeterminism is acceptable.
It would make sense to isolate the last line of defense from LLMs, ie the tests, but this rarely seems to happen any more. Once the tests are contaminated with LLMs all bets are off.
And people forget that along with atrophying skills and reasoning due to less coding, the skill degradation is hastened because the programmer is faced with the reality that they would have to constantly figure out, review or edit someone else's code (ie, the LLM's) if they truly wanted to maintain a last line of defense. But as this type of task is literally the least liked task in programming, the programmer passes it off to the LLM as well to avoid burnout...
this is my daily life now and its miserable
its an overload spiral that gets worse at each iteration (even while 'gardening' our agents/skills)
the worst part is using the llm to generate the specs/features; its shit from the start and tumbles downhill from there...
I had a huge post written up to address your points, but I have to get moving, my ass is literally falling asleep.
It's easier just to say: It's all about time, my man. Nobody wants to waste it.
This. Time is money, and if you're not using an LLM you're wasting your employer's.