Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

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> "As far as I know there's a sizeable number of devs who don't intend to ever rely on copilot"

I'm one of those. I've been programming for a while now and there's no way i'm gonna trust a neural network with my code. Debugging is painful enough without having to deal with subtle bugs hallucinated by ML.

Some machines are really useful to reduce human suffering and augment our collective capabilities. Some machines are just useless, polluting gadgets. I think ML sits in the middleground: if your job is pissing meaningless code all day that's very repetitive it can probably do it for you... but if you have to actually do R&D to develop new tools i don't think ML will be any use.

So yes AI can reduce work, but arguably work that was never required nor beneficial to humanity to begin with. I would be way more interested in society reflecting on "bullshit jobs" and how to actually share the workload so that we can have 1-day work-weeks planet-wide, just as the scientists from the 19th/20th century envisioned. Instead of continuing to destroy the planet so we can run bullshitting neural nets in the cloud that produce arguably little value.

But sure, ML is fun. Let's just pretend we don't see the whole world burning outside the window.

"So yes AI can reduce work, but arguably work that was never required nor beneficial to humanity to begin with"

Hm, just a suggestion, I would be careful with such statements, if you don't want to insult peoples work you know nothing about.

Because LLMs enable a very broad spectrum of work. I don't use them in my current workflow(nor am I that easily insulted), but the times I did use them, they were useful. My problem with them was mainly ChatGPT4 was out of date, but it did produce very useful results for me for WebGPU and Pixijs, which I had not used before and the solutions it gave me, I could not find on the internet. So for my novel work, they don't help me in general, but they do help me if I need a new custom part, without having to reinvent the wheel.

And then of course there are people who greatly benefit from them, who did not study CS, like a friend who is ecologist and all he wants are some custom python scripts, to modify his GIS tool. I think he is doing useful work and with LLMs he is indeed spending less time on his (freelance) work and has more time for his children. Isn't that, what you are also hoping for?

I think to a large extent this is correct but, being the devils advocate, perhaps if the GIS tool were better then your friend wouldn’t have had quite as big a gain in free time?

Answering my own question somewhat, I think that LLMs are becoming a kind UI layer over many applications/tools for many users. Which is interesting. And in some ways they show signs of fulfilling the promise of AI.

I think even with the best GUI (and I seldom have seen worse GUIs than with GIS tools), scripting is way more powerful, if you have advanced tasks.

Definitely more powerful but well crafted GUIs can enforce constraints on inputs and preview what changes would look like.

Agree that I have never seen a GIS tool where I thought the GUI was top notch.

It seems like you tried used copilot did you? To me the best thing about it is not the full function generation, which doesn't work very reliably, it's to finish the end of the line, when you already know what you will type, and it just types it for you faster. It feels like magic and checking the code is extrême fast as it's just one line, much faster than writing it.

So it’s "just" providing the vim advantage to typing speed? As a vim user myself, I’d like to point to the tired argument that typing takes up the least amount of time yadda yadda

I found copilot most useful as an code editing assistant. A smart `sed` of sort.

Moving code around a loop, extracting a series of variables etc.

Like a sibling comment I also find it useful to complete the end of the line.

As for writing code, it mostly produces very convincing looking code at a glance, but full of shit on a second look.

But as a smart completion and local refactoring tool, I really find it useful.

We don't have 1 day a week workweeks not because it isn't possible but because we don't live late 19th / early 20th century lifestyles anymore. We have modern cities, infrastructure, transportation, manufacturing, power generation, diets, and recreation. I don't think many would want to go back to an agrarian lifestyle where you live in a one or two room brick cottage, walk everywhere, till a field with a very simple, small tractor, eat only what you grow seasonally, have two changes of clothes, and own basically nothing but the bare essentials to clean and feed yourself. If you did that then sure you could share the work between a little commune and maybe get by on a rotation of duties if you had enough up front capital to buy all the labor saving devices and could manage to keep everyone happy enough to share it all equally but I have a feeling it would still wind up being a hard life of poverty. There's also the question of how you keep all of the manufacturing and professional services going with so little demand for their outputs. There are very good reasons why the vast majority of the populace used to be stuck in subsistence farming for life and why that only changed with the advent of mass production and market economies.

> I don't think many would want to go back to an agrarian lifestyle where you live in a one or two room brick cottage, walk everywhere, till a field with a very simple, small tractor, eat only what you grow seasonally, have two changes of clothes, and own basically nothing but the bare essentials to clean and feed yourself.

You could not possibly have made it sound more attractive and compelling.

I suppose for some people but if you've ever done any farm work then you'd know the reality is very different from the fantasy.

Also, there's nothing really stopping you from giving up all your worldly goods and doing this now.

You should really try it. I’ve been coding professionally since 2000, and some 10+ years before that as a kid with a hobby. The AI takes away quite a bit of tedious stuff. When you think “I’ll just have to code out that annoying little dumb piece”, where it is obvious what you need, but boring to write it, the AI typically knows what you want. Sometimes it is really mind-warping, like wow, that’s pretty heavy context you dragged in there! And sometimes it comes with a little left field that you hadn’t thought of, and even if it didn’t nail it, you got a new idea.

It’s like having an over-eager coworker to pair-program with - and can kinda boss around as you please, it never tiring or needing a break. Not senior-level (outside of knowing “deep” small pieces and snippets), but not fresh out of school either.

And it is great for fleshing out comments (if you’re into that, as I am), picking up your style and notation as you go.

I dont use them out of principle, but because I am still learning, so it just takes away from that.

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