Comment by polalavik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by polalavik | Hacker News Reader

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I just finished up some freelance (hardware/embedded software) where I had to talk to a “software” engineer who was sort of the “lead”. Every time we hit an interface problem he would say “if you don’t understand the error feel free to use ChatGPT”. Dude it’s bare metal embedded software I WROTE the error. Also, telling someone that was hired because of their expertise to chatgpt something is crazy insulting.

It was such a strange interaction - like this guy who thought he knew everything because he could leverage AI and anyone not doing that instantly was wasting their time. People are already offloading having a single thought to AI and then turning around and acting like they know everything because they have access to this tool.

Also weird to watch someone in the web-sphere act like AIs knowledge and understanding is the same for all fields because their field was so heavily trained on. No, AI will not know the answer for this one register in this microcontroller correctly or understand a hardware errata for this device or fully understand the pin choices I made on the device and the system consequences of those choices.

I had this experience at a recent job, where I'm working with, theoretically at least, the people who literally wrote all the software I'm trying to learn about, and half the responses I got were "just ask chatgpt". Like, you wrote this stuff, why am I supposed to ask an LLM??

I've noticed this lately too, I think everyone is like posing as an AI-influencer or something and copying the "Just use AI" slogan that everyone is repeating right now. What if I don't want to use AI for this problem, and instead want to learn a re-usable and more deterministic skill for debugging?

Oh boy does this ring true to me. Worked briefly with a contractor who wanted to do something with some internal tooling and couldn't figure out how. Said he asked ChatGPT and it doesn't know either. Terrifying how little supposedly qualified people understand what they're even doing.

I think the terrifying part is just how fast software practitioners completely gave up trying to understand anything. As if these oracles actually know anything about our bespoke systems. It was almost overnight that SMEs were lost.

The content of your post made me think you’re a real one and I wanted to reach out as I’m thinking of hiring a freelancer to help me build some stuff I am working on, but the site in your profile is not responding.

Would be interested in learning more - feel free to reach out hardwareteams at gmail (and thanks for the heads up about the site!)

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