it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
And they say AI doesn’t cause brainrot… “Sorry you can’t get AI to work for you. Keep trying!” sounds like the kind of thing you would expect from someone who only outputs the highest quality of work, doesn’t it?
I’m not saying all AI users are like this, and there are many smart developers that do use it effectively (like Torvalds), but there is definitely a loud group of AI cheerleaders that extremely careless and overconfident, while lacking any sense of self-criticism or oversight of what they say or do.
And by the way, you definitely can build simple web-apps in a day without AI. I was doing that in 2015 by just following the Django tutorial. It took me longer than a day because I tried to read the documentation and understand it. But if I put the same amount of effort that these low-effort AI users do, I could have easily just copy-pasted shit from the finished tutorial and been done in an hour with the same level of understanding (or lack thereof) that AI users have.
That’s the difference between good and bad engineers - you have the tools in front of you, but can you make yourself a better engineer while you use them?
Speaking of which, you know what these AI tools do? They just go to github and copy off some project that already does what you want it to do. Anyone could do that before AI existed. Sure, it’s definitely impressive that they can understand what you want to do and find the right result (usually), but you could do that ever since search engines were invented. AI is just the “I’m feeling lucky” button from Google from back when people had enough sense to be a little critical of the results they were looking at before they clicked it.