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Comment by nbzso | Hacker News Reader

I gave my friends the following advice.

Push yourselves away from AI trend tools and learn what is what before falling into this trap.

In the era of AI those who can think, draw, write, code and be the best in their craft without it will rule the rest. Simple and clear. Prompting is not a skill which will differentiate (except for AI devs, as a part of fine-tuning the model's output).

The real danger of AI is not getting agency ang killing us (yet).

The real danger, in my view, is normalization and trust into technology which "hallucinates" and obtains a formidable property with a name "The Black Box".

Don't get me starting on privacy.:)

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Nevermind that hailing this machine -- owned by some faceless profit-driven entity -- as an "expert" of all fields will eventually leave people open to mass manipulation on an even higher order than search engines already do.

Terrible advice. This is like telling people not to use an IDE because auto-complete isn't always right. Or not to use document templates because they aren't finished.

Github Copilot can - in some domains - make me 30% more productive. Once it becomes commonplace and the legal issues are sorted, luddites who refuse to use it will be left in the dust.

Good analogy - people that only know how to code using an ide are usually the worse. Those who thrive are those that know and understand things. If 30% of your job can be done by a procedural generator then your work is worthless. Probably because you do stuff you dont understand, and will be freed to focus on more important things - such as luddites or who killed biggie.

There are at least four issues with your comment:

1. The weird implication that people who use tools are doing so to make up for lack of skill. This is so obviously misguided I'm not sure where to start.

2. Dismissing AI as "a procedural generator". It's clearly much more than that.

3. Assuming that the 30% of my job that AI does is the valuable bit. It isn't. AI mainly relieves the tedious stuff at the moment (looking stuff up, typing semi-repetitive code, etc.).

4. Trying to make yourself feel better by asserting that people who use IDEs are worse than you, or that I don't understand my work. Rather pathetic.

I don't think autocomplete is comparable with generative code processes. Using AI as a helper in analytics and documentation, yes.

But how knowing to code without AI will leave me in the dust? I will know less? Or I will be so slow that the management will oust me?

After measuring my "performance" trough corporate timer for code per minute?

Discussing it here won't change whatever happens in a couple years.

Whatever happens in a couple of years will be 10-20 percent from projected marketing hype.

> I don't think autocomplete is comparable with generative code processes.

It absolutely is. That's the main way Github Copilot works.

> Or I will be so slow that the management will oust me?

They probably won't oust you but they will notice that your colleagues are much more productive than you and your salary will fall behind.

Focus on high value work that can't be automated is terrible advice?

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