isn't the whole selling point of ML the idea that operators no longer need to be as skilled? it feels like the goal posts have been moving as of late.
That's the selling point to VCs. The selling point to consumers of the tech is that AI will make only them, with their special inherent qualities, outperform their peers even more (unspoken, but also implying that if they are an underperformer they might be able to catch up), but only if they act now! This limited time opportunity will soon be used by everyone!
Sort of. The super users will massively outcompete unskilled users. So while it does raise everyone’s abilities, it will be lopsided
I mean, all the research (to be fair there's very little) suggests that in CS (customer support) the major gains are for people who are worse than others, and there was little to no impact for the higher skilled cs people.
And that's kinda what one would expect, given that LLMs are basically a blurry JPEG of the web/github etc.
Like, I think reasoning can help here, but I rarely see good results when prompting an LLM with something complicated (technical statistical problems and good approaches) while they are fantastic at less edge case stuff (working with docker and well known frameworks).
So yeah, definite productivity gains but I'm not convinced that they're as transformational as they are being pitched.
That's clearly why the VCs are now pushing 996 and everyone has to work twice as hard. Lol
Isn't the whole point of <abstraction> that we don't need to worry about the inner details?
A friend currently has an AI workflow that pits two AIs against each other. They start with an issues database. AI 1 pulls issues, and fixes them, and commits them. AI 2 reviews the work and makes new issues. And the cycle repeats.
After a bunch of work is complete and issues are flagged as done, the tests run green, he grabs all of the commits, walks through them, cleans them up if necessary, and crunches them into one big commit to the main branch.
He loves waking up in the morning to a screen filled with completed things.
He has, essentially, self-promoted to management over some potentially untrustworthy junior developers with occasional flashes of brilliance.
And I was pondering that, and it just reminded me of something I've been feeling for sometime.
A lot of modern development is wiring together large, specialized libraries. Our job is to take these things (along with their cascade of dependencies) and put our own little bits of glue and logic around them.
And, heck, if I wanted to glue badly documented black boxes together, I would have gone into Electrical Engineering.
But here's the thing.
While the layers are getting thicker, the abstractions more opaque, in the end, much like a CEO is responsible for that ONE PERSON down in the factory behaving badly, we, as users of this stuff, are responsible for ALL OF IT. Down to bugs in the microprocessor.
When push comes to shove, it's all on us.
We can whine and complain and delegate. "I didn't write the compiler, not my fault." "Not my library..." "The Manager assured the VP who assured me that..."
But doesn't really matter when you have a smoking crater of a system, does it?
Because we're the ones delivering services and such, putting our names on it.
So, yea, no, you don't have to be "as skilled", perhaps, when using something.
But you're still responsible for it.
Absolutely! I kind of hate the term "vibe coding" because of its associations with brain off. It is so important for an engineer to take accountability for what they ship.
Now to your ponderoo about libraries, something I've found that's really fascinating is I've really stopped using open source libraries unless there's a network ecosystem effect for example like Tailwind. But for everything else, it's much easier to code generate it. And if there's something wrong with the implementation, I can take ownership and accountability for that implementation and I can just fix it with a couple more prompts. No more bullshit in open source. Some person might not even be maintaining the project anymore or having to deal with like getting a pull request fixed or open source supply chain attack vectors related to project takeovers and all that noise. It just doesn't exist anymore. It's really changed how I do software development.