Everyone knows internet points make someone more of an expert. Especially on websites that have the most inane political discussions frequently and has tanked in quality to only marginally better than Reddit
They are objectively similar in that both are a big multi-decade commitment to a living being that you chose for yourself (yes, you did choose to have the kid unless you live in a country with no birth control access) but saying something is similar is still not making a value comparison
Counterpoint: my handwriting is way harder to read and my hand tired faster than when I was in high school. And I am worse at spelling and my vocabulary has stopped expanding much since I started typing more and reading less
People who want to be childless usually champion the importance of building strong community through friends and neighbors, just because they don’t want kids doesn’t mean they don’t want to contribute to others’ happiness lol. People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids
Getting the girl as a reward is more about misogyny than a the bullying lesson. I haven’t seen grease so I can’t talk about that but I really can’t think of any media examples of where the geeks become jocks and that’s seen as morally correct, which would be the actual antithesis to the lesson above. Also I meant that parents taught that, not adult media… which is for adults
We used to teach kids to be themselves and stand up for what they believe in and their own authenticity and uniqueness even in the face of bullying. That having less or other doesn’t mean your value is lesser or that you should be left out. Now we teach them… conform at all costs so you never have to risk being bullied or lonely?
It’s weird that you equate time spent thinking with intelligence and egotism. Plenty of “normal people” jobs require lots of time spent thinking like art, writing, product and ad design. The only one implying taking time to think equals big brain master race is you
The author thinks that it’s fine to do this for code, which I find strange. I have big time ai:dr; when a commit comes in for me to review and it’s 300 lines for something that is already built into a single function of the framework we use, or I see a (important) comment they forgot to delete. I should not be expected to become more familiar with the authors code than he is himself, and I certainly shouldn’t be the first one verifying that even works.
by ‘I don’t read code,’ I mean: I don’t do line-by-line review as my primary verification method for most product code. I do read specs, tests, diffs selectively, and production signals - and I would advocate escalating to code-reading for specific classes of risk.
Is not at all what people consider “not reading the code” to be
You claim you don’t read the code. People believe you. Later you reveal that actually you do read the code, as well as metrics about the code. You just don’t read line by line and scrutinize them individually. Then you want to say their opinions weren’t grounded, but all that happened is you misrepresented your own argument
Anecdotally, I never feel more awake when having coffee. I can drink coffee at night and sleep great. On the other hand, if I try to sleep too soon after tea I feel very mentally awake and can’t sleep for restlessness. Maybe Qi is real!
If you don't want to, and you don't have to... why do it? If it becomes a necessary thing to keep your job you can learn it then. It will take like a week max. And you will save yourself relearning the newest "correct way to use AI" every 2 weeks.
I didn't learn phonics in school, while my only 2-year younger sibling did (not sure why, maybe related to the school being super low income?) yet I always had a much higher grade reading level. Obviously that's just one point of anecdata, but I don't think phonics is a very big influence on literacy, and why would it be? pronunciation is one tiny part of reading. I think the sheer amount of time spent online is probably the biggest culprit.
Your perspective is quite thoughtful, thank you. I do agree that if you are just fixing a bug or updating function internals, +20/-20 is certainty good enough and I wouldn’t oppose AI used there.
I am going to have to agree to disagree overall though, because the second there is something the AI can’t do the maintenance time for a human to learn the context and solve the problem skyrockets (in practice, for me) in a way I find unacceptable. And I may be wrong, but I don’t see LLMs being able to improve to close that gap soon because that would require a fundamental shift away from what the LLMs are under the hood.
It may also have to do with the domain and language to some extent.
Yes, the code archaeology is the time consuming part. I could use an LLM to do that for me in my co-workers generated code, but I don’t want to because when I have worked with AI I have found it to typically create overly-complex and uncreative solutions. I think there may be some confirmation bias with LLM coders where they look at the code and think it’s pretty good, so they think it’s basically the same way they would have written it themselves. But you miss a lot of experiences compared to when you’re actually in the code trenches reading, designing, and tinkering with code on your own. Like moving around functions to different modules and it suddenly hits you that there’s actually a conceptual shift you can make that allows you to code it all much simpler, or recalling that shareholder feedback from last week that — if worked with —could allow you a solution pathway that wasn’t viable with the current API design. I have also found that LLMs make assumptions about what parts of the code base can and can’t be changed, and they’re often inaccurate.
Here’s the thing, they say all the same things you just said in this comment. Yet, the code I end up having to work in is still bad. It’s 5x longer than it needs to be and the naming is usually bad so it takes way longer to read than human code. To top it off, very often it doesn’t integrate completely with the other systems and I have to rewrite a portion which takes longer because the code was designed to solve for a different problem.
If you are really truly reviewing every single line in a way that it is the same as if you hand wrote it… just hand write it. There’s no way you’re actually saving time if this is the case. I don’t buy that people are looking at it as deeply as they claim to be.
Ah yes, slightly abstracted mathematical concepts compiling down to mathematical logic is totally the same as trying to unpredictably guess which mathematical concepts your massive, complex, non-mathematical natural language might possibly be referring to
I am one of the ones who reviews code and pushes projects to the finish line for people who use AI like you. I hate it. The code is slop. You don’t realize because you aren’t looking close enough, but we do and it’s annoying
IME it’s actually really terrible at discussing architecture. It’s incredibly unimaginative and will just confirmation-bias whichever way you are leaning slightly more towards
No, there can’t be. Code keywords are tied to concrete mathematical concepts. Human languages are not. and even if you tried, the more languages you add to the LLM’s pool, misinterpretation chances increase exponentially. You can’t just choose English to be the programming language either, because then you would be asking every non-English speaking developer in the world to first learn the entirety of the English language which is way harder than just learning a programming language. Why are programmers so scared of code and math??
I wish this was true. My experience is co-workers who do lip service as to treating LLM like a baby junior dev, only to near-vibe every feature and entire projects, without spending so much as 10 mins to think on their own first.
Hopefully this does not count as being uncivil, I just want to cut through what feels like insanity to put my (and at least a few others’) feelings plainly:
If you are one of those devs who heavily uses LLMs at work and you are in a position of relative authority, either as senior+ or something else, and you hand off your LLM code to others to review or “build off of”… we hate you. We don’t want to be your voluntold slop jannies. LLM over use and vibe coding is taking a fairly enjoyable job and making it insufferable. Now I have to sift through 3-10x more lines of code that are written in a non-human thought process using terrible naming schemes and try to find the bug… just to realize that the code isn’t even solving for the correct or underlying problem. Every time I have to interact with a co-workers LLM code, my tasks take weeks longer than they would have. This is including the ones who claim to be exerts in prompting and harnessing and whatever skibidi buzzword is out this week.
You are not saving time, you only think you are because you don’t look closely at the output and send it off to your lowley janitors to deal with. And the people who claim to be running 20 or 30 AI tasks at once what are you even building? If you aren’t literally shipping the next Amazon that’s just embarrassing.
I can not wait for people to wake from this bizarre mass psychosis. I already see co-workers context window getting smaller than free version ChatGPT in an incognito window.