Comment by jryio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jryio | Hacker News Reader

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I completely agree with the thesis here. I also have not seen a massive productivity boost with the use of AI.

I think that there will be neurological fatigue occurring whereby if software engineers are not actively practicing problem-solving, discernment, and translation into computer code - those skills will atrophy...

Yee, AI is not the 2x or 10x technology of the future ™ is was promised to be. It may the case that any productivity boost is happening within existing private code bases. Even still, there should be a modest uptick in noticeably improved offer deployment in the market, which does not appear to be there.

In my consulting practice I am seeing this phenomenon regularly, wereby new founders or stir crazy CTOs push the use of AI and ultimately find that they're spending more time wrangling a spastic code base than they are building shared understanding and working together.

I have recently taken on advisory roles and retainers just to reinstill engineering best practices..

> I think that there will be neurological fatigue occurring whereby if software engineers are not actively practicing problem-solving, discernment, and translation into computer code - those skills will atrophy...

I've found this to be the case with most (if not all) skills, even riding a bike. Sure, you don't forget how to ride it, but your ability to expertly articulate with the bike in a synergistic and tool-like way atrophies.

If that's the case with engineering, and I believe it to be, it should serve as a real warning.

Yes and this is the placid version where lazy programmers elect to lighten their cognitive load by farming out to AI.

An insidious version is AGI replacing human cognition.

To replace human thought is to replace a biological ability which progresses on evolutionary timescales - not a Moore's law approximate curve. The issue in your skull will quite literally be as useful as a cow's for solving problems... think about that.

Automating labor in the 20th century disrupts society and we've see its consequences. Replacing cognition entirely: driving, writing, decision making, and communication; yields far worse outcomes than transitioning the population from food production to knowledge work.

If not our bodies and not our minds, then what do we have? (Note: Altman's universal basic income ought to trip every dystopian alarm bell).

Whether adopted passivity or foisted actively - cognition is what makes us human. Let's not let Claude Code be the nexus for something worse.

There's no connection between AI and AGI, apart from hopes. Besides which, if you're talking about AGI, you're talking about artificial people. That means:

• They don't really want to be servants.

• They have biases and preferences.

• Some of them are stupid.

• If you'd like to own an AGI that thinks for you, the AGI would also like one.

• They are people with cognition, even if we stop being.

AGI just means what it says it is: Artificial General Intelligence. AGIs don't have to have selfish traits like we do, they don't have to follow the rules of natural selection, they just need to solve general problems.

Think of them like worker bees. Bees can solve general problems, though not on level as humans do, they are like some primitive kind of AGI. They also live and die to be servants to the queen and they don't want to be queens themselves, the reason why is interesting btw, it involves genetics and game theory.

This is highly theoretical anyways, we have no idea how to make an AGI yet, and LLMs are probably a dead end as they can't interact with the physical world.

You’re anthropomorphizing too much.

These postulated entities are by definition people. Not humans, because they lack the biology, but that's a detail.

If you think they're going to be trained on all the world's data, that's still supposing them to be an extension of AI. No, they'll have to pick up their knowledge culturally, the same way everybody else does, by watching cartoons - I mean by interactions with mentors. They might have their own culture, but only the same way that existing groups of people with a shared characteristic do, and they can't weave it out of air; it has to derive from existing culture. There's a potential for an AGI to "think faster", but I'm skeptical about what that amounts to in practice or how much use it would be to them.

> These postulated entities are by definition people.

Why? Does your definition postulate that people are the only thing in the universe that can measure up to us? Or the inverse, that every entity as sentient and intelligent as us must be called a person?

My opinion is that a lot of what makes us like this is physiological. Unless the developers go out of their way to simulate these things, a hypothetical AGI won't be similar to us no matter how much human-made content it ingests. And why would they do that? Why would you want to implement physical pain, or fear, or human needs, or biases and fallacies driven from our primal instincts? Would implementing all these things even be possible at the point where we find an inroad towards AGI? All of that might require creating a comprehensive human brain simulation, not just a self-learning machine.

I think it's almost certain that, while there would be some mutual understanding, an AGI would almost certainly feel like a completely different species to us.

The latter, that intelligence is one thing, and that to imagine that an artificial intelligence would be some kind of beyond-intelligence, and would be a beyond-person, is to needlessly multiply entities. The assumption should be there's only (potential to create) people like us, because to imagine beyond-people is to get mystical about it. "Beyond-rats" is what I say to that.

I have sympathy with the point about physiology, though, I think being non-biological has to feel very different. You're released from a lot of the human condition, you're not driven by hormones or genes, your plans aren't hijacked to get you to reproduce or eat more or whatever animal thing, you don't have the same needs. That's all liable to alienate you from the meat-based folk. However, you're still a person.

AGI isn't going to come from Transformer LLMs. They are Statistical Turks.

The author of the article had an interesting solution to this. Flip a coin to see who implements the feature.

Heads you code. Tails you review.

Same - I use it at work at a big tech company and the real world efficiency gains on net are probably nonexistent. We have multiple large and not so large codebases. In a super trivial script or creating a struct from documentation it does the thing - great. For unit tests it’s about 50-50 if it’s useful or if I waste a few hours and delete the change set. In any moderately complex codebase Claude Sonnet or GPT in agent mode builds unneeded complexity, gets lost in a spiraling amount of nonsense steps, builds things that already exist in the codebase constantly. The best outcome I have to edit and review so heavily it’s like I’m jumping in on someone else’s PR halfway and have to grok what the heck did they misunderstand.

The only actually net positive is the Claude.md that some people maintain - it’s actually a good context dump for new engineers!

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