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Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

> AI is good enough now that you can't claim that you aren't using it because you're upholding some higher standard of quality. It is simply a matter of it offending your sensibilities.

AI is also great at the mechanics of writing. Should people stop writing? Obviously not.

Is there value to coding other than compiling without errors and producing a plausible program as output? Obviously yes.

LLMs can’t think and the decisions they make are stochastic. Ignoring this basic fact means you’re probably not cut out for engineering to begin with — much like content creators churning out LLM blogspam are not cut out for writing. It’s a dead version of the discipline.

Perhaps some form of the world will pass us by. I’m not sure I want to be part of that world.

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>AI is also great at the mechanics of writing. Should people stop writing? Obviously not.

The job of writing is to be read. The job of code is not to be read: it merely helps the humans who write the code. If the code is no longer read by humans, then it no longer needs to be well composed.

We want human writers because humans have a better grasp on the ideas and stories that can best move us, and are just better at crafting writing that engages with us. Machines will likely struggle with that for some time, though they can certainly augment and help human writers improve their prose.

I get the sadness. I was the one decades ago comparing beautiful code to poetry, and I think that's still true. But also, this type of beauty is craftsmanship that only the craftsman can actually see and appreciate. The reality is that the code just needs to work, and AI can (largely) make it work.

Also: the above is assuming that the models continue to improve to human performance, which is of course an open question. I'm not taking a stance here as to whether that will come to pass, merely arguing that it is fundamentally different from writing.

I fundamentally disagree with this take. With regard to higher-level languages, code is a way to create and compose abstractions around data flow, plus a means of communicating this to other developers (including yourself in the future). Every project brings something new to the table. Machines "solving" this is tantamount to machines developing full-on human intelligence and judgement. The best they can provide is a static facsimile without much hope for future innovation or progress: a snapshot of programming best-ish practices circa 2024 or so.

And remember: "just needs to work" includes technical debt, which LLMs are especially great at accruing. When your codebase is composed of 10,000-line, randomly-generated PRs that nobody reads or understands, it's going to be full of untraceable heisenbugs and egregious security holes. What's going to fix them? More 10,000-line PRs? Is it turtles all the way down?

Don't mistake my rage at the egregious state of the industry with sadness. In a year, we've thrown much of everything we've learned about solid engineering out the window.

> LLMs can’t think

What is your definition of thinking?

Well, for one thing, it has to have consciousness behind it.

And yes, I know that humans are conscious.

And yes, I know that LLMs are not.

You can throw out loads of BS philosophy to try to obfuscate these clear, obvious facts, but they both remain true.

Thinking and consciousness are not the same thing imo. At least in that something can show all the faculties of thought without necessarily being conscious. An LLM can still be useful and give you the useful results you want without being conscious.

Like lets say i gave a human and an LLM a tech spec and the LLM created a software product as good as the human, does it matter that there was consciousness behind the human thinking?

No, I agree; they're not the same thing. But that doesn't mean they aren't tightly interwoven.

And I don't see how usefulness comes into it.

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