Don’t Outsource the Learning
addyosmani.com
addyosmani.com
> The bug gets fixed. Your mental model doesn’t move.
> The symptom vanishes. You ship.
> The tool didn’t determine the outcome. The posture did.
Here's a free prompt if you can't come up with one that avoids this awfulness yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100213
...is it that easy? I mean, wouldn't the AI providers just include this in their system prompts and/or harness?
I went to go find some of the stuff that he wrote pre-AI and found myself on his bio. Not only is it generated, it's incredibly clumsy and boastful.
In sum, Addy Osmani’s career is a testament to the impact one engineer can have by combining technical excellence with education and community leadership.
Osmani’s journey reflects the evolution of the web itself - ever faster, smarter, and more empowering for those who use it.
Few individuals have done as much to push the web forward while uplifting its developers, and that legacy will be felt for a long time to come.
I'd go a step further, this is hypocritical and insulting of him considering the content of the blog post.
The way to avoid creating slop is to read and write things yourself, regularly. Be more selective about what you're trying to solve with AI.
You cannot escape the fact that AI has no taste, period. The more creative the medium, the more apparent this is. There's nowhere to hide from even a moderately literate reader.
I'm starting to wonder if the thing to address is the anxiety itself rather than the "fuzziness about the code" that creates the anxiety - and more explicitly model myself as an engineering and/or product manager counterpart to these things. I wonder how non-IC EMs/PMs do it - it seems maybe fundamentally anxiety-inducing? – but they _do_ do this already (tolerate the fact that the underlying technical system is not fully within their grasp).
Unlike with an ai, a pm knows what it means to understand something. Just in general, they have had the part of the human condition which is gaining an understanding of something. Not memorizing a fact or learning how top perform some recipe steps, but understanding several dimensions of something.
They don't code, but there are other things they have learned and understand, and witnessed other people showing how they do or don't understand that thing. It could be about fishing or calligraphy or being careful what you say to kids or anything not just work stuff. From that they know how to recognize it in others on other topics. Modulo the effect of the exceptionally good and bad on both sides, a good bullshitter can fool a simple pm, but the exceptions to a generality are irrelevant.
And they know that some other people do understand the code. They haven't performed all the steps to reproduce someone else's reasoning and correct final result, but they don't have to do that every time to know that it's possible to do and would arrive at the same or equivalent result. It's not faith, or not blind faith like religion. It's just letting someone else do a job that you know if you wanted to you could do exactly the same and it would work exactly the same. You don't have to carry a load of grain from one pile to another to know for a fact that it's possible to do and roughly what it takes to do it.
They also know how to detect cues about consensus, or lack of it. When most people who understand a topic, you can tell, without relying on any simple rules about what words are spoken, you can tell when most of the people who have put in the time to understand something agree or disagree on some premis. And the people you are guaging that consensus from are again other humans who you share the human condition with. You have a power to understand and interpret them that you don't for anything else.
They may also understand some level of code. It will have been explained to them at some point to some degree. They will have some sort of simple example in their history where they were walked through something in some class or a meeting.
These things are all missing with an ai.
jk, agree with your point
"And oh, if you got affected by all of this, then it is cognitive surrender, meaning it is your fault."
Companies compete for your attention so they can show you ads. This leads to very few people actually doing any kind of deep thinking. I've added what I call Boredom Time to my daily schedule. I set aside some minutes to do nothing and just let my mind wander. I put away all devices, turn off any sounds, and just be. I am yet to have a single session where I haven't thought of something interesting and, in some cases, I've imagined some incredibly deep and profound things.
I encourage everyone to try this in order to save our most precious ability that truly differentiates us from other animals.
Also, try smaller time intervals. Maybe start with a couple of minutes every day and increase the time slowly every week.
The tool is undoubtedly useful, and it has been said that calculators also removed the need to do manual calculations.
I think the difference between LLMs and calculators is inherently small. Both are algorithms. And algorithms have already were making decisions for us before LLMs, so LLMs are a natural next step of the path we were already in. Deterministic or not, I think that's irrelevant.
So, in a sense outsourcing your learning is just the natural next step. If you look about it this way, you were already doing that. We don't need to learn how to play on tools to listen to music. We don't need to learn how to do complex calculations to do them. It's just not right to look at LLMs as different from other decision making, study decapitating, tech we already have.
[...] Software Engineer at Google working on Google Cloud and Gemini."
The things he must have seen.
This article has a satirical quality I'm quite enjoying. To write is to think. If you're not thinking, how are you learning.
One thing that seems fairly certain is that llms aren't going to get any worse. They'll probably keep getting better, but there is 0% chance they'll get worse.
If you can get away with not fixing the bug yourself today, the very idea of doing it yourself will be laughable tomorrow.
I try to learn the skills that the LLMs struggle with. Some of those skills will be made irrelevant too, probably when Mythos gets released to the public. But also some of them won't. Probably. The skills that Claude has a handle on today? Waste of space in my brain!
one could argue that thinking itself would be not needed in future. But we are not there. I would love that future though. thinking is suffering. if ai can think for us then it would eliminate suffering.
In fact, thinking is what makes humans interesting. What separates us from random bacteria if we don’t think anymore?
Thinking isn't Boolean either. A LLM let's you not think about, say, rust lifetimes, as an example. You'll still need to think about other things.
I'm not abandoning all thinking, I just change what things I think about. Some things I delegate thinking about(like rust lifetime syntax, to stick with my example), which frees up time to think about other, more interesting things, like application design, or architecture!
Moreover, most novel advancements seem like they come when society is ready for them - the nearly simultaneous discovery of calculus for example.
Pick any thought of yours you truly believe is novel and do a serious literature search on the topic and adjacent fields. Ask an AI to help you with the search if necessary :-)
There's so much I don't know though, and I'm certain we aren't the only two who think about it :-)
then thinking is also joy and happiness :)