"Thinking (as a SWE) is still very much the most important skill in SWE, and relying on AI has limitations."
I'd go further and say the thinking is humanity's fur and claws and teeth. It's our strong muscles. It's the only thing that has kept us alive in a natural world that would have us extinct long, long ago.
But now we're building machine with the very purpose of thinking, or at least of producing the results of thinking. And we use it. Boy, do we use it. We use it to think of birthday presents (it's the thought that counts) and greeting card messages. We use it for education coursework (against the rules, but still). We use it, as programmers, to come up with solutions and to find bugs.
If AI (of any stripe, LLM or some later invention) represents an existential threat, it is not because it will rise up and destroy us. Its threat lies solely in the fact that it is in our nature to take the path of least resistance. AI is the ultimate such path, and it does weaken our minds.
My challenge to anyone who thinks it's harmless: use it for a while. Figure out what it's good at and lean on it. Then, after some months, or years, drop it and try working on your own like in the before times. I would bet that one will discover that significant amounts of fluency will be lost.
LLMs are not for me. My position is that the advantage we humans have over the
rest of the natural world, is our minds. Our ability to think, create and express ideas
is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Once we give that over to
"thinking" machines, we weaken ourselves, both individually and as a species.
That said, I've given it a go. I used zed, which I think is a pretty great tool. I
bought a pro subscription and used the built in agent with Claude Sonnet 4.x and Opus.
I'm a Rails developer in my day job, and, like MitchellH and many others, found out
fairly quickly that tasks for the LLM need to be quite specific and discrete. The agent
is great a renames and minor refactors, but my preferred use of the agent was to get it
to write RSpec tests once I'd written something like a controller or service object.
And generally, the LLM agent does a pretty great job of this.
But here's the rub: I found that I was losing the ability to write rspec.
I went to do it manually and found myself trying to remember API calls and approaches
required to write some specs. The feeling of skill leaving me was quite sobering and
marked my abandonment of LLMs and Zed, and my return to neovim, agent-free.
The thing is, this is a common experience generally. If you don't use it, you lose it.
It applies to all things: fitness, language (natural or otherwise), skills of all kinds.
Why should it not apply to thinking itself.
Now you may write me and my experience off as that of a lesser mind, and that you won't
have such a problem. You've been doing it so long that it's "hard-wired in" by now.
Perhaps.
It's in our nature to take the path of least resistance, to seek ease and convenience at
every turn. We've certainly given away our privacy and anonymity so that we can pay for
things with our phones and send email for "free".
LLMs are the ultimate convenience. A peer or slave mind that we can use to do our
thinking and our work for us. Some believe that the LLM represents a local maxima, that
the approach can't get much better. I dunno, but as AI improves, we will hand over more
and more thinking and work to it. To do otherwise would be to go against our very nature
and every other choice we've made so far.
But it's not for me. I'm no MitchellH, and I'm probably better off performing the
mundane activities of my work, as well as the creative ones, so as to preserve my
hard-won knowledge and skills.
YMMV
I'll leave off with the quote that resonates the most with me as I contemplate AI:-
"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you,
it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about."
-- Agent Smith "The Matrix"
I was using it the same way you just described but for C# and Angular and you're spot on. It feels amazing not having to memorize APIs and just let the AI even do code coverage near to 100%, however at some point I began noticing 2 things:
- When tests didn't work I had to check what was going on and the LLMs do cheat a lot with Volkswagen tests, so that began to make me skeptic even of what is being written by the agents
- When things were broken, spaghetti and awful code tends to be written in an obnoxius way it's beyond repairable and made me wish I had done it from scratch.
Thankfully I just tried using agents for tests and not for the actual code, but it makes me think a lot if "vibe coding" really produces quality work.
I don't understand why you were letting your code get into such a state just because an agent wrote it? I won't approve such code from a human, and will ask them to change it with suggestions on how. I do the same for code written by claude.
And then I raise the PR and other humans review it, and they won't let me merge crap code.
Is it that a lot of you are working with much lighter weight processes and you're not as strict about what gets merged to main?
AI adoption is being heavily pushed at my work and personally I do use it, but only for the really "boilerplate-y" kinds of code I've already written hundreds of times before. I see it as a way to offload the more "typing-intensive" parts of coding (where the bottleneck is literally just my WPM on the keyboard) so I have more time to spend on the trickier "thinking-intensive" parts.
This is backwards. He's still 50 cent, but to have the buying power he had in '94, he'd need to $1.09. But he's still 50 cent, so really, in today's money he's more like 23 cent.
The opening line:-
"The traditional wisdom says resting meat keeps it juicy. But when we put that idea to the test, we found a different reason to rest—one that has nothing to do with juice."
I don't rest meat to keep it juicy. I rest it to finish the cook. It's not quite ready when it comes off the heat.
That's true of everything we use as money, including precious metals. You can't eat them, live in them, use them as weapons, walk down the street in them. They have value bacause we all agree that they do and we all agree to use them as a means to exchange that value. Also, and this is important and I should have said it first, they have value because their supply is restricted.
The same is true for crypto. It's fungible, private, and limited in supply. It's also independent of governments although they are doing their level best to correct that.
> That's true of everything we use as money, including precious metals.
To exploit this chance for quote Terry Pratchett, on a book that does happen to be about currency and banking:
> ‘The world is full of things worth more than gold. But we dig the damn stuff up and then bury it in a different hole. Where’s the sense in that? What are we, magpies? Is it all about the gleam? Good heavens, potatoes are worth more than gold!’
> ‘Surely not!’
> ‘If you were shipwrecked on a desert island, what would you prefer, a bag of potatoes or a bag of gold?’
> ‘Yes, but a desert island isn’t [the city of] Ankh-Morpork!’
> ‘And that proves gold is only valuable because we agree it is, right? It’s just a dream. But a potato is always worth a potato, anywhere. A knob of butter and a pinch of salt and you’ve got a meal, anywhere. Bury gold in the ground and you’ll be worrying about thieves for ever. Bury a potato and in due season you could be looking at a dividend of a thousand per cent.’
Government fiat currencies have fundamental value because their taxes are denominated in their fiat currency, while their fiat currency is used to compensate the public sector for their labor. If you, as a private citizen, want to avoid the consequences of not paying your taxes (e.g. prison), you best find a way to get your hands on some of the fiat currency that has entered the economy via the public sector workers.
For a cryptocoin to have fundamental value, someone must be willing to accept it as payment. The only entities willing to do so currently are criminal enterprises and perhaps the El Salvadoran government (to pay taxes). All the other uses (like cross-border payments) rely on speculators on both ends providing liquidity for the exchange to fiat currency.
It's mostly correct except it's just the governments that agree to take gold and silver to settle debts (no, going off "gold standard" did not change this, gold and silver are still accepted as bank reserves around the world). And governments have the power to take your property to settle your debts with them. So for anyone, who is a subject of a government assigned debt (via taxation usually), gold has very practical value as it allows to keep one's property.
The same is not generally true for crypto, perhaps in El Salvador they really take crypto to settle taxes but in any other country crypto only has value because of speculators.
> the governments that agree to take gold and silver to settle debts (no, going off "gold standard" did not change this, gold and silver are still accepted as bank reserves around the world)
Really? Can you point us, or perhaps just me, to something that explains that and which countries this applies to? I think that I'd have a hard time paying the Norwegian tax authorities with gold or silver. In fact even paying them in cash would be difficult.
What are you talking about? We can wear gold, make weapons out of iron, cups out of copper… coins have both a fiat face value and real tangible value (the “floor”).
Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It’s entirely belief.
That’s not a bad thing. MLMs can be very profitable, some turn into multi-generational institutions of faith.
I own bitcoin because it’s like buying a share of the Mormon church early on. Absolutely, do it! But comparing it with gold? Come on, be real.
Bitcoin physical value is that, one way or the other, billions of humans got atoms in their brains, arrange in such a way that they recognize bitcoins, and have a certain understanding of it's setup... this is a lot of atoms, and is no small fit.
I wonder a lot about this argument of private health care vs state funded health care. I have libertarian leanings and so would prefer a truly free market, because I would like to believe it would lead to affordable levels of health care for everyone.
But I don't know that it's true. My questions regarding the US system and health insurance: Is it a truly free market or does the state regulate in ways that make it difficult for competition?
In Australia we have heavily subsidized healthcare, but it's not great. If you've got something life threatening then you'll be OK. If it's not life threatening, but just really difficult to live with then you'll wait. Sometimes years. No choice of specialist or hospital either. So many of us get private health insurance of one level or another, in order to have more choice and better, more prompt care.
So, how free is the US system?
Also, here's an X post from a guy called Devon Eriksen on the topic of socialized healthcare and free markets.
PS: Devon wrote a great debut Sci Fi novel called "Theft Of Fire" (Orbital Space #1). It's a great read, with endorsements from John Carmack, "Uncle" Bob Martin and ESR, among others.
> I have libertarian leanings and so would prefer a truly free market, because I would like to believe it would lead to affordable levels of health care for everyone.
My father has had both hips replaced in the fast few years. Both surgeries were very successful and he has retained full hip joint function. He no longer has pain in his hips.
His surgeon used an approach that minimised damage to the muscles in the area. If I recall correctly, this meant he gain access to the hip joint via the posterior side of dad's upper leg, and went between muscle and tendon, rather than needing to cut muscle to get to the joint.
I don't know if I'm remembering correctly, but dad healed up pretty quickly.
I used to roll BJJ with a 50-ish year old man. As a teenager he suffered a debilitating car crash and hip replacement at the time, resulting in his having a cane until his second replacement circa 2020. This allowed him to walk cane free and practice marital arts.
The technology is there for hip replacements, it would seem.
as i said, hip replacement normally works very well. my 80+ mother had two after two bad falls, both worked really well physically, but she went off the rails mentally after the second. apparently there is a theory (sorry, can't find link) that doing surgery like replacements releases a lot of fat into the bloodstream that can drive you nuts. that seems to be what happened to my mum.
i don't suggest anyone should not get a replacement based on my non-medic and probably wrong information.
>Postoperative Delirium and Postoperative Cognitive Dysfunction in Patients with Elective Hip or Knee Arthroplasty: A Narrative Review of the Literature
Malthusian nonsense. As societies develop and become richer, birth rates drop.
Also, over time, our ability to produce more food has always risen to the challenge.
I'd go further and say the thinking is humanity's fur and claws and teeth. It's our strong muscles. It's the only thing that has kept us alive in a natural world that would have us extinct long, long ago.
But now we're building machine with the very purpose of thinking, or at least of producing the results of thinking. And we use it. Boy, do we use it. We use it to think of birthday presents (it's the thought that counts) and greeting card messages. We use it for education coursework (against the rules, but still). We use it, as programmers, to come up with solutions and to find bugs.
If AI (of any stripe, LLM or some later invention) represents an existential threat, it is not because it will rise up and destroy us. Its threat lies solely in the fact that it is in our nature to take the path of least resistance. AI is the ultimate such path, and it does weaken our minds.
My challenge to anyone who thinks it's harmless: use it for a while. Figure out what it's good at and lean on it. Then, after some months, or years, drop it and try working on your own like in the before times. I would bet that one will discover that significant amounts of fluency will be lost.
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