it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
There’s a lot clearly unemployed/in industry that doesn’t spin around AI in here.
In dev, AI saves fuck tons of time. But there’s no nuance on the Internet so everyone assumes I’m advocating for vibe coding. I’m not.
What the “fall behind” is referring to is the simplest fact, if you’re in a team and you’re not using AI? You are very likely outputting at a much slower speed.
Now more caveats, you’re not a lead dev or principle architect, your code isn’t second coming of Jesus, you need to get a task done. Like it or not, the pace rest of the team sets? Is the new floor.
I manage a team and while I give them a lot of time to get work done well, the world around us is shrinking in resources. Business cares not that a job takes 4 weeks, they need it done in 2, ideally in 1 week.
Hopefully this sheds some light on this. I’m getting downvoted regardless. I’d probably have more popular opinion praising trump than daring say anything positive about AI here.
As a manager. This is an illusion. The bottleneck isn’t in writing the code. In fact, what I see over and over is overproduction leads to bottlenecks in the review queues and a complete breakdown in intentionality, planning, collaboration.
You get pressure to do because it’s easy on the surface to show output, but creating a good product is a systems problem that requires coordination and thought.
We’re seeing multiplication in output, not outcome.
If it’s so good, where are all these killer apps? It’s been years!
I can understand this viewpoint (and it’s similar to the first point), and I do agree that there is a push to defer things to AI. But from my limited experience, it’s like a crutch for other issues that force it to be used by very talented people who otherwise want to get things done properly to save headaches later.
My experience was in the kind of place you would really not want AI to screw you over in, but there was also a very tight timeline to get things done, so I think they ended up just trusting AI to a pretty frightening extent with (iirc) some buildroot stuff that got some people a bit vocal. I think even I used an AI overview once because I just really wanted to be done with a demo.
It was over a year ago though so I don’t really remember what ultimately came of the AI use, but there are 100% situations where this becomes the only option, although I personally will avoid AI unless I’m realistically out of any other option not to. And for that reason I’ve fallen more out of favour with CS since I enjoy the journey and all the little judgements you make more than the outcome.