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I’ve reached a similar conclusion, but there’s a part that worries me: the expertise that allows us to judge AI’s output was itself built by doing the work we’re now delegating. So there’s a risk that our judgement will decay over time. I’ve been thinking about the problem as choosing where we can afford to “borrow” comprehension, versus where we need to keep exercising it, and how to “claim back” the critical comprehension we lost.

by hypfer5 hours ago|

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A possible heuristic: Everywhere the LLM made a design decision is probably a place to revisit later. You can ship it now, but to stay in the game you need to stay in the loop.

If you need the LLM to explain to you the concept behind something - or even if you figure out yourself what it did - that's likely wrong and will lead to the undesirable outcomes you've mentioned.

As long as it just types and doesn't think otoh, you should be good. There is - I'd argue - little to no value in manually typing if (foo) {}. And it's also great for bouncing ideas around.

by danggggg2 hours ago|

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> So there’s a risk that our judgement will decay over time.

It's happening in real time and those of us who don't use AI code generators can tell.

by dullcrisp12 hours ago|

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That plus if you’ve ever stared at your code and then searched StackOverflow to see if you could find a better way of doing it, it’s like having that running continuously.

by slopinthebag9 hours ago|

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Yeah it’s great for prompting for improvements, granted you can actually judge the suggestions for yourself. They’re often slightly or majorly bad.

by danggggg2 hours ago|

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> Yeah it’s great for prompting for improvements, granted you can actually judge the suggestions for yourself. They’re often slightly or majorly bad.

I agree with this comment.

That being said, the major errors in some of the suggestions make me terrified of the people who say things like "AI is great for researching and strategizing".

I don't think these people are on the whole engaged or knowledgeable enough to understand the dead ends that AI research is leading them to or the concepts that it doesn't (or can't) discuss.

Really I just feel like AI has turned subpar engineers into dangerous, supercharged Dunning-Kruger cases. Everyone backing AI code generation online acts like a "10x developer", and I think the point of the AI coding tools are to make you feel that way.

I think most of you would be better off slowing down and writing the code by hand in a focused, methodical manner.