this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
313 points (97.6% liked)
Greentext
4979 readers
1001 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers
Relevant quote
Every time we let AI solve a problem we could’ve solved ourselves, we’re trading long-term understanding for short-term productivity. We’re optimizing for today’s commit at the cost of tomorrow’s ability.
"Every time we use a lever to lift a stone, we're trading long term strength for short term productivity. We're optimizing for today's pyramid at the cost of tomorrow's ability."
Precisely. If you train by lifting stones you can still use the lever later, but you'll be able to lift even heavier things by using both your new strength AND the leaver's mechanical advantage.
By analogy, if you're using LLMs to do the easy bits in order to spend more time with harder problems fuckin a. But the idea you can just replace actual coding work with copy paste is a shitty one. Again by analogy with rock lifting: now you have noodle arms and can't lift shit if your lever breaks or doesn't fit under a particular rock or whatever.
"If my grandma had wheels she would be a bicycle. We are optimizing today's grandmas at the sacrifice of tomorrow's eco friendly transportation."
If you don't understand how a lever works, then it's a problem. Should we let any person with an AI design and operate a nuclear power plant?
I like the sentiment of the article; however this quote really rubs me the wrong way:
Why would that ship have sailed? No one is forcing you to use an LLM. If, as the article supposes, using an LLM is detrimental, and it's possible to start having days where you don't use an LLM, then what's stopping you from increasing the frequency of those days until you're not using an LLM at all?
I personally don't interact with any LLMs, neither at work or at home, and I don't have any issue getting work done. Yeah there was a decently long ramp-up period — maybe about 6 months — when I started on ny current project at work where it was more learning than doing; but now I feel like I know the codebase well enough to approach any problem I come up against. I've even debugged USB driver stuff, and, while it took a lot of research and reading USB specs, I was able to figure it out without any input from an LLM.
Maybe it's just because I've never bought into the hype; I just don't see how people have such a high respect for LLMs. I'm of the opinion that using an LLM has potential only as a truly last resort — and even then will likely not be useful.
Because the tools are here and not going anyway
The actually useful shit LLMs can do. Their point is that using only majorly an LLM hurts you, this does not make it an invalid tool in moderation
You seem to think of an LLM only as something you can ask questions to, this is one of their worst capabilities and far from the only thing they do
Not even. Every time someone lets AI run wild on a problem, they're trading all trust I ever had in them for complete garbage that they're not even personally invested enough in to defend it when I criticize their absolute shit code. Don't submit it for review if you haven't reviewed it yourself, Darren.
Hey that sounds exactly like what the last company I worked at did for every single project 🙃
This guy's solution to becoming crappier over time is "I'll drink every day, but abstain one day a week".
I'm not convinced that "that ship has sailed" as he puts it.
Capitalism is inherently short-sighted.
Nahhh, I never would have solved that problem myself, I'd have just googled the shit out of it til I found someone else that had solved it themselves