Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

Summary

Re: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts#There was a post recently that was dissing AI Skeptics. While the post is funny at times, I feel like it’s absolutely and completely missing the point of the skepticism. Or at least I feel that it is glossing over some massive pain points of said skepticism.Let’s go over some of the points and the things that stuck out to me as problematic.Now, mind you, I don’t necessarily disagree here. An AI review helper on an open source project where maintainers are swamped with tickets would be a godsend (assuming its review is actually valuable and can be fine-tuned on the ever-changing codebase).But we humans shouldn’t outsource our critical thinking completely. It will deteriorate so fast—you blink and suddenly, you have no idea how to do a simple lookup without firing up your LLM agent.I can feel my blood pressure rising thinking of all the bookkeeping and Googling and dependency drama of a new project. An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code.My dopamine comes not from tweaking someone (something) else’s code to make something barely work. My dopamine comes from the fact that I solved some intricate, non-trivial problem. Sure, write me unit tests—that’s awesome. Or write that fifth table join + query code, go for it. But nevertheless, the part where it can be instructed to just figure all that shit out is extremely dangerous. I cannot stress this enough.You might not like it, because you are an advanced user, but a young person just coming into the craft absolutely needs to figure all that shit out—otherwise all their experience will be something akin to oh I’ll just ask my agent to do that for me. That’s not going to cut it.And try to see if in an interview you can say, “Oh, I have no idea, I’ll just ask my LLM.” The problem ...