Jare
Joined 15 years ago
Joined 15 years ago
I think this trope is greatly exaggerated. I'm sure a lot of people try that (and then quickly move on to whatever meme is next), but why is it often presented as the only thing people do with AI?
AI has changed the baselines, but building stuff is still going to be driven by a effort -> outcomes function. And effort leads to learning. I wrote machine code bytes by hand in the 80s, and in the 90s I already lamented that kids these days lo longer knew how things really work... but kids with interest and curiosity were actually just as fine as always.
Ideally, how you create something and what tools you use should be nobody's business, and all it matters would be if they like it or not. But inherent value / merit is a thing, and concern for the provenance of what you buy is also a valid position for the public to take. It's gonna be a while before the balance settles on either AI = bad or AI = who cares.
If they fail you can stop using their library. If you fail your company can stop using you.
It all came back every time I went back to the trenches. The question in my mind is, what do "AI-native" engineers have that they can come back to?
- During these decades, I have relinquished control several times in favor of productivity. From knowing exactly where every byte is placed in RAM and where each cycle goes, to only knowing that for the inner loops, to just knowing the machine code that the C compiler will generate, to dynamic memory and classes and indirections and cache misses, to wasteful but oh so very expressive javascript and python. I stopped writing my own engines and used Unity, Unreal Engine, Phaser, Godot...
Relinquishing control is easy if you are still truly in control of the new layer, and know where the pitfalls are. Where are new engineers going to gain that expertise?
- Regarding addiction, I've also quit smoking. After 25 years of daily cigarettes, one day 16 years ago I just stopped and never touched another one.
I won't pretend that applies to everyone, or even that I'm impervious to other addictions just because that one was so easy to shed. But harder or easier, everyone can stop problematic habits if they are clearly problematic.
- I don't know where we're going with all this AI. I would prefer it had not happened the way it is happening (IP theft, job destruction, race to the bottom, power concentration, etc). I love progress but I don't think the most important aspect of progress is how fast it happens. Speed only helps the greedy and the terminally ill.
But I'm not going to pretend it hasn't, or risk whatever is left of my professional future boycotting it in favor of a different reality, or (who knows) reject a medical treatment just because it was proposed by Opus 7. The world will live or die regardless what I do, but MY world relies on me.
I will continue trying to have enough expertise, passion and attention to detail in what I do and how I do it, that whatever level of control I have over it is as optimal as I can. From typing z80 bytes, to asking Claude to change a 5 for a 6, the above traits are what has always mattered in my experience.
I struggle with this argument when the subject ("the folks") turns out to be "many people", perhaps even a majority of people. If one teacher is an outlier that uses it badly then sure, the teacher is to blame and be judged. But if a collective is using it badly, then perhaps the capability of the collective should have been evaluated before handing the tool to them.
I don't have an answer - it is bad to withhold a tool from the hands of people who will use it badly. But the overall outcome has to also count.
AIs are stochastic/probabilistic machines. Their big potential is in how they take malformed, incomplete, ambiguous inputs and come up with valuable and usable solutions.
The Commandos series also parallels a bit of the history, fizzling out very quickly after Commandos 2, when it might have seemed that the sky was the limit for the series.