Turning my brain off actually works really well when I'm doing something more creative, and while I know this isn't exactly what he's talking about, I wonder if we are just offloading things we shouldn't have to think about to have more space to think about other things.

Of course, this becomes a lot more difficult when you're unemployed.

Or not trying to actually finding a root cause. Look i increased the storage for customer, problem solved.

No? You solved the symptom not the issue?

All is possible with good blackbox testing.

It pays 16 craploads of money per year.

Interesting thought. In a way this is already the case, to some extent.

But wouldn’t it be way more economical to have some sort of AI-insurance service? i.e. protection against AI fucking things up?

Or a different way around, Asimov's The Machine That Won The War, 1961: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/machine-that-won-the-w...

Moral Crumple Zones https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moral-crumple-zones.html

More commonly known as an "accountability sink". These existed before but it is so much worse with AI.

You're telling me none of the 730,000 people laid off over the last four years were fully engaged employees?

The challenge here is that the business world doesn't really recognize the concept of cheating.

In particular, tech is very open to people cheating and if billions of dollars could be had by somehow communicating the chess engine's work to a human at chess, the world of business would cheat at it.

Tech has a number of large startups that basically started with the assumption of "what if we assumed the law had no teeth?"

In the world of business and money, you lose if you don't cheat because everyone else is cheating.

And if it's that's true... What reason is there for the company's clients to keep sending money?

Clients will cut the middle man and run the LLM themselves.

Is being compliance ablative armor uplifting, fulfilling work? Is there any way in which your personal competence and effort impacts whether the AI screws up or not? Do you have any way to build job security as ablative armor?

That sounds miserable.

Everything you said is true, I agree with you.

”Unfortunately, it just happens to perfectly line up with the rise of GenAI.”

Right. That’s just something I think we should keep our pulse on and keep looking at this data every six months (seriously, this needs to be tracked by devs because this data may start forming into that proverbial “writing on the wall”).

No one should be planning on being a software engineer in about 3-5 years, all need to plan for alternative income sources or early retirement. I think, at least.

I'm starting to thing AI is the baseline of cognition and it matches the worst parts of humanity. Its just, we trained on the better parts so it's not so obvious.

Combining your thoughts, one could almost think that being a meat proxy works for quite a long time, before institutional inertia catches up.

Sounds like a quiet few years and then effort once demanded. So I guess... being a meat proxy does work, after all?

I don't doubt using an LLM is deskilling. The question is whether it's the kind of deskilling where you can't farm if you don't know how crops work or the kind of deskilling where you can drive without knowing how to maintain your own internal combustion engine.

(In my lifetime, I've even watched mass cellular communication move "replacing your own tire" from skilled to deskilled, since AAA is always one phone call away for most drivers).

I think you missed the point entierly. The problem is not people turning their brains off, the problem is brains wony be needed anymore in the near future, not even meat proxy brains

One can still drive attentively but be on a route so familiar that unless something unusual happens, the brain does not bother recording any memory of it.

This ignores the reality that many people are, unfortunately, taking that one iPhone picture, sending it to everyone in their contacts list as if it’s art, and then moving on to the next slop shoot.

Fuji also sells an Instax printer so you can "print your smartphone images in seconds."

https://www.instax.com/printer/

Also the AI powered instax Up! app...

Have even more fun with the instax UP!™ app. With the introduction of AI, you can now scan an instax™ photo regardless of the background or angle, or even in your hand.

However, for writing software with AI the analogy still works. Just as the photographer needs to pick a shot worth capturing, you have to figure out software worth building. That often also involves some leg work: you need to understand the problem and user needs. Then you need discernment to figure out where the software works well, and which parts need improvements

Well yeah and then you can be liberated by the fact that maybe getting to the landscape and experiencing it and not taking the photo was the goal all along.

You can be creative and take the photo for your sake but at the same time accept that you can generate 1000s of them and many of the generated ones will be more liked by the general public than your creative one.

They don't think of those terms. However they generally are looking at their photos and so get a sense of what "looks nice" - which is what those terms are all getting at.

Now if you know and analyze your photos in those terms you can get good faster. There is no shortcut to the value of quantity.

What we have never done here is define how much effort the "professional" has put into getting better. I've known a lot over the years that know the terms and have the "best" equipment, but they just take a measurement and put it into the tools without understanding the whole and so take really bad pictures. They consider composition as a checklist - which works okay (only okay) in a studio when it means put the chair here - but they can't handle a sunset where they can't control the scene.

Award winning photography means get those details perfect. If you have the details right a phone is often more than good enough to take the right shot - and if it can take more photos faster than is worth a lot more than the best equipment limited to one shot (or a few) and hope that you get hit the shutter at the right moment. If you can get the right moment the better equipment is better, but that is one of the least important parts of the shot.

I am sure the tourist can take hundreds or thousands of photos, and have every single one of them turn out wrong.

It's not as if he was covering every combination possible of exposition, composition, depth of field, shutter speed etc. The tourist doesn't even know the existence of those settings.

Even in the late 19th century "bracketing" was already a photographic technique where a photographer would take several shots of the same subject from various angles and with various settings. Digital cameras may make this faster and cheaper, but the one who employs thoughtful practices in their photography is far more likely to win that competition than the one who just (to paraphrase your example) spins to win.

Once upon a time, in Switzerland, there was a "chronometry contest" putting the best watchmakers of Switzerland against each other to make the most accurate mechanical watch and have it certified by the observatory of Neuchâtel (observatories were at the time the entities in charge of giving the most accurate time, based on reference star observations).

It worked for a time, and manufactures employed experienced, legendary even, watchmakers and specialized "watch setters" to create and tune to the best possible extent a few experimental watch movements. They would be sold as collection pieces, the firm would gain boasting rights in its advertising, and the experience informed the design and tuning of more mainline movements.

By the end of the history of (the revival* of) this concours, the winner was always Tissot, a second-rate company. Behind Tissot was ETA, the main watch movement manufacturer.

What they were doing to win was just to pick the best watch movements out of the millions they were producing each year. Just by chance, there was always one combination of the hundreds of components, each with their manufacturing tolerances and variations, that would fit all together to make an exceptionally accurate movement.

In the end, yes, Tissot won repeatedly. But the concours is dead. And Tissot is still a second-rate brand making second rate watches. Nobody is interested by their watch movements, no collector, no historian, no customer.

The thinking guy with the one approach will likely lose a photo competition to one of the accidentally better shots of the person who tried a lot more.

If that were the case then photo competitions would have been upended by now by tourists who accidentally took masterpieces with their phones.

I can take as many thousands of pictures as I want but, without taking the time to critically review them to see what works and what doesn't, I will rarely produce a prize-worthy picture. And then there's the risk that I'll discard it anyway because I don't have the eye to separate the prize-winning picture from the Instagram shot all my contacts are publishing.

Maybe so, but for the good shots by the thinking guy, I suspect he would derive longer term emotional gratification from how well they came out. Effort and investment adds to the experience.

Making things easy is good as long as it is not too easy, then it's Spotify muzak.

That’s what AI does.

Except it sometimes shows you a photo of something completely different than what you're looking at for or alters the landscape to "improve" it. Maybe that's not a good analogy.

That's the smallest dan luu post I've seen.

Train conductors are valuable IF they have first aid and CPR training; maybe riot training. There are probably a few other things along those lines as well - but none of them have anything to do with running a train: all the train related tasks can be better done automated.

There are still some things in an airplane that an autopilot cannot do. There is nothing on a train in normal operation (as opposed to maintenance) that a computer cannot do - as evidenced by multiple trains around the world running without humans operators since the 1990s!

I don't see how cutting pay for conductors is going to make anyone's lives better

It's going to make passengers' lives better by making their train rides more affordable, allowing them to improve their lives by leveraging those funds.

Or, it's going to make shareholders' lives better by increasing their profits.

Either way, some people will benefit from it. The question is -- what is the real, practical tradeoff, and is the tradeoff worth it to the participants in the system.

When throughput is an issue, you have to think judiciously. I'm definitely not saying you shouldn't think but we have to think about how to apply human oversight effectively. For me that means front-loading oversight through dialectic planning, and maximizing automation of constraints.

It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree.

Here's the thing I'm finding - LLMs allow me to do more coding when my brain isn't firing on all six cylinders. It means I get more code written because I don't have to be "in the zone" to exhaustively hunt down every piece of API and dependency and have my flow continuously broken up by missing information. The code written in that state is lower quality, but I can patch up five-cylinder-brain code faster than I can synthesize code from a blank page outside of my flow state.

What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee.

Company is pleased! Cost savings!

Alas, the joy doesn't last long as pretty soon after the company realizes that after an LLM replaces almost all their employees, the much easier task of replacing the entire company begins, because the company itself has just become a much thinner meat proxy for getting an LLM to do whatever it is the customer relies on the company for.

Customer is pleased! Cost savings!

Alas, the joy doesn't last long as whatever savings they have from replacing the company with their own LLM loop is offset by whatever it is they do to earn income being similarly impacted.

All of the moats degrade together though they may fully give out at slightly different speeds.

Good on you. I absolutely hate reading the output from Opus. It's disrespectful to make people read it, and to share AI output without reading and understanding it first.

This is BONKERS.

I spend a lot of time encouraging my manager and coworkers to ... write some actual english. To not just point an AI at a PR and call it a day. To actually collaborate before we jump into something - leaning on the knowledge we've built instead of being a cowboy and assuming you know it all (you don't, not yet).

In many ways it feels like we're back in some awful version of 90's based software dev. All these amazing tools have got us stuck deep in the shit swamp again.

Also: I would hate working with your team lead.

Even if I agree that you have to use your brain, when my boss is literally telling me to stop questioning whether AI automation is the right answer in team meetings/chats I'm just going to shut up and give them what they want.

Some would tell you that you need to find a different job with a better boss, but I'd say that this is quickly becoming something very hard to escape from. Investors want line to go up, and they all talk to each other about this "AI" thing that lets them cut staff and keep productivity, so naturally we're all getting it crammed down our throats.

I think it might be appropriate if what we're talking about is a human connecting an LLM to something it can't natively access. Like something in the physical world - a piece of hardware, a different human, software the LLM can't access. As the human in the loop your role might be to mostly just shuffle information back and forth from this external resource. But depending on the situation there could still be quite a lot of interpretation and analysis performed by the human in the loop.

I would like to argue opposite.

Developers like to "turn their brain off" during "super hard debuging" sessions. Mental flow state is a well documented as pleasurable experience. It is like a drug!

Auditing and reviewing autogenerated commits, is hard gruelling mental labour, compared to that. You do not even get a credit as an author! You can not get into groove to get your fix!

trends like these remind me very much of how true some of the predictions in Douglas Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" were: https://ia802903.us.archive.org/6/items/richard-hofstadter-a...

he was writing in reaction to the McCarthy era which, arguably, is very similar to kind of bombastic nativism we're seeing now from our political elites. his argument essentially being that there are cultural and institutionalized forces that are driving people to, well, turn their brains off - specifically to no longer be skeptical of what they consume, to not want to refine and improve their toolbox of analysis, to not want to understand how things work for the sake of knowing

and that these acts were deliberate - a populace is so much easier to control when it's complacent and unknowing, who believes, unskeptically, that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, unquestioning about who was writing the PR missives that feed the news cycle (see also: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/what-is-copaganda), how verbatim they are, and what the real intent of the authors were

like, I get that you don't want to put in effort for a job you don't like. but that effort also makes you better at your work. it makes it easier on you, it lets you create less incidents, it empowers you to be more agent in your own life, to, who knows, have the guts to start a consulting gig because your skill-sets actually are better than the average

there's so many benefits from just being more diligent, longterm, proactive benefits. but that's not everybody's extrinsic motivator and it's so much easier to just be Skinner-boxed by social media companies into doomscrolling, I suppose

Thats not the problem of LLM/AI.

The problem is, that digital work, the new frontier of employment for a lot of epeople, got and will continue to get A LOT cheaper, faster and more accessable.

The PO who always complains about someone? They will just vibe stuff. It might even be shit but it will work good enough until LLMs/AI/AGI/ASI is good enough or better anyway than an avg developer.

Man i have seen so so much shitty code even in software companies.

You know when your HR software takes seconds to load? Yeah an LLM can do that today too

That's great, but you and your family will go hungry as a result. If not this year, next year.

Your stance isn't new, if it's any comfort. I heard (and probably said) exactly the same thing when C compilers started getting good enough to eliminate the need for most assembly coding.

That temptation is akin to giving in to maladaptive (day)dreaming. The problem is the dreaming, the noticing, the getting annoyed, and the feeling drained - all of these are happening at one place - being done by one entity - your brain. So how to train it to not to do that? Well, again, that same brain has to do it. What I am saying here is - our brains are extremely good at getting "used to". Because it "feels good" to the brain - at least in that instant. So any work that's happening on its own, feels good for most people. More the time passed in that "got/getting used to" state unchecked, more difficult it is to try and bring it back to not getting used to. Or control it, in an attempt to strike a fine balance.

I still don't get who is this guy and why anyone should care.

The obligatory XKCD, panel 2: https://xkcd.com/568/

Agents are still a bit to eager to please, so they are still missing cases when the better answer is to push back, change course or refactor.

But when the human suggests changing the course, the LLMs will often agree the new direction is better and start heading there...

I think this is the dissonance that has been making me feel insecure / depressed around the state of AI coding. On the one hand I am way more productive. But on the other hand it is almost requiring more of my brain than before, because I am having to determine what is good output and what is slop. But that's not the part of my brain that I particularly like engaging — I like understanding something deeply. But in this case, that is just not possible. I like to think that as the human-in-the-loop, I am supplying the requisite _taste_ to the design and overall structure of the program. But at what point does my taste get taken over by the LLM as models improve?

Another problem is that when something breaks then I am very limited in my ability to reason through the breakage. It's necessary to go back to the LLM and ask it why it broke. At which point, I'm able to follow the reasoning — but not in any durable manner where I'll be able to remember it. To me, it's sort of like the difference between memorizing a passage and having a ready reference at hand at all time. We had this same problem with information before — now it's come for our reasoning.

Maybe, but the parts of my brain I'm still using are a lot easier to use.

I was dreaming to be promoted to a cushy management role where I could talk bs for a living.

I managed to attain 'hands-on team lead' and later an ill-fated 'bootstrapped cryptocurrency CTO' role... Nobody wanted to pay me to talk as a career. Now they do!

So I'm very happy about that.

I feel contempt for all the people who had it easy and 'chose' to be engineers voluntarily.

There's some software that really doesn't require my brain. I gave Astra an ssh key for root on a little Pi Zero with a microphone attached and asked it to make recordings of a siren going off in our neighbourhood, based on a couple of sirens. This would have been a great deal of work a couple of years ago, now it's a few tokens, and honestly, it doesn't really matter if it's shitty code, I just want the timestamps.

Then there's the software that I write for a living, and almost my entire day is now spent making hard decisions. /grilling gives me difficult technical design decisions endlessly and I am forever doing product management on features from agents. My brain is back in CTO mode, which isn't what I'd planned for myself after I'd left that particular cursed path, but fine. I am doing the opposite of turning my brain off, because I no longer can just chill out and mindlessly write code.

Both these states can exist simultaneously. But my brain work has shifted into something different, while getting no less intense.

There are a lot of programmers who are working with chatbots and watching YouTube simultaneously for the first time, simply matching the rest of the economy for the nature of work.

If you can do your job while watching TV your brain is turned off.