Fuck AI

Oooh buddy, is isn't even young engineers using these to destroy their designs. I was at a building construction conference recently where one of the presentations was about how AI is going to "give us so much time back" as designers. He then told us about how the AIs hallucinate math still, and that the AI companies are not liable for their output. After the presentation, I and another person asked him a question about who exactly the liability will lie with and how someone could protect themselves from the liability without spending all the time we "save" meticulously checking the outputs. His response was to generate thousands of outputs for the same task and then only check "the best versions." Okay, so how will we know which are the "best" without meticulously checking thousands of them?

Anyway, afterwards, I asked my colleagues from all around the country who were at the conference for their opinion on AI and the presentation, and most of these 50-60 year old men told me they regularly use it in their work already. So be prepare for things constructed in the past few years to be incredibly dangerous facilities to be in or near.

A previous job forced us to use them, I spent more time getting the damn thing to work than actually doing work

holy fucking shit man. this community has a clear astroturfing problem.

An idiot intern is better.

Well, 100% because the intern WILL eventually learn. That's the entire difference. It won't be about adjusting the prompt, or add yet another layer of "reasoning", or wait for the next "version" with a different code name an .1% larger dataset. No, you'll point to the intern they did a mistake, try not calling them an idiot, explain WHY it's wrong, optionally explain how to do it right, THEN the next time they'll avoid it or fix it after.

That's the entire point of having an intern : initially they suck BUT as you train them, they don't! Meanwhile an LLM, despite technical jargon hijacked by the marketing department, they don't "learn" (from machine learning) or train (from "training dataset") or have "neurons" (from "artificial neural networks") rather it's just statistics on the next most probable world, sounding right with 0 "reasoning".

I know this community is all about fuck AI, but this is just straight echo chambering.

But honestly your post sounds like you're just not using it right? You can get pretty good results with it with enough guardrails. Just because you can't get the results you want doesn't mean that no one can.

That said, fuck AI. It's all a bunch of bullshit, but denying real results just means you're sticking your head in the sand and that's not how you fix this problem.

I think the intern comparison fits. The root of the problem is that AI can very good at the thing is is good at. That leads humans to believe that it is good at other things. This is often untrue.

Often the things it is good at are in the set of 'problems machines are good at'. Most professionals, people who are trained/experienced in their field face problem's that are NOT in that set. They are skilled, experienced problem solvers, who are solving difficult, real world problems. Not generic workers, or human resources.

The belief at the top is often that this machine which is 'so impressive', must therefore be good at everything. And this gets pushed down. Where people experience that same truth. The machine is incredibly good at the things it's good at, but it sucks doing what they do.

paraphrasing my grandpa - "To a suit with hammer, everything looks like a nail"

I think it really depends on the task.

There are folks who manage to have their whole careers be basically put stuff from documentation and stack overflow to implement very basic stuff over and over again, and pray it works and doesn't need debugging. They hate coding, but it was heralded as a doctor/lawyer level pay but way easier to get into. LLMs can largely replace the work for those. These are humans I would never have trusted with anything significant, and only have them low stakes low risk stuff to keep them busy because management wants them utilized. Sure they spend a month to fall at delivering something basic, but management is happy enough.

Then there are folks who mostly live in code that is needed because it truly doesn't already exist. Those folks will find LLM relatively less useful. Now those folks do end up with braindead chores on occasion. Change from library x to y because whole they both do the same thing, x got discontinued. LLM can be useful at accelerating that because it's just so obvious but not quite as simple as search and replace. Or if you want to define some argv parsing you can let a codegen do that because it's easy but tedious.

To go back to the days of car analogies. Imagine some tech people got the world excited because they created tools to automate engineering in motor sports. People even come out saying how it helped them engineer their own vehicle and stories saying the most prolific motor racing is being taken over. You as an F1 engineer see it as mostly useless, but everyone keeps talking about it's going to replace engineers. Turns out everyone is actually taking about go karts and it is true that it works ok for that and that go karts are way more common than F1.

The problem is that to the world, programming is programming without distinction, and even the people in charge of the F1 type work don't know the difference because they were never technical either.

For programming, at least it's a good way to speed up things that you know how to do but take some time to type, or you don't remember the syntax of. But relying on AI any more than that usually means you'll be adding free technical debt and debugging time or becoming dependent on it.

Generally I equate positivity about LLMs with people’s technical ability. I find the more they say AI is good the worse programmer they are.

There are right tools and wrong tools depending on the application.

There are right ways to use said tools and wrong ways...like you wouldn't use a phillips head screwdriver on a flat head.

I guarantee your company's provided tool is Copilot or OpenAI based, which is already bottom of the barrel for usefulness.

every time I use it, i waste hours

Yes, exactly this. It looks good, I ask for it to tweak something. It tweaks, but now something else needs adjustment. Then it comes back unusable.

It ends up taking the same time as doing it myself. There’s some value perhaps in either the novelty or engagement that keeps me focused but it’s not more efficient.

When it does work, I’m always worried it is an illusion I’ve missed something. Like how you send an email and immediately see the typo.

People who love it, love it because they don’t need to or care about having accuracy and precision in their work. Sales and marketing, management, etc. Business idiots.

I cut my LLM usage to almost zero because of environmental and political reasons, but it was helpful enough to wish it could be sustainable and not another tool in the dystopian take on the world.

Yeah, don’t generate code with it. Treat it like StackOverflow. It does pretty good at that.

you're obviously prompting it wrong, and/or not using the latest models ~/s~