Comment by ookblah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ookblah | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

at risk of sounding like a grandpa this is nothing like SO. AI is just a tool for sure, one that "can" behave like an super enhanced SO and Google, but for the first time ever it can actually write for you and not just piddly lines but entire codebases.

i think that represents a huge paradigm shift that we need to contend with. it isn't just "better" research. and i say this as someone who welcomes all of this that has come.

IMO the skill gap just widens exponentially now. you will either have the competent developers who use these tools accelerate their learning and/or output some X factor, and on the other hand you will have literally garbage being created or people who just figure out they can now expend 1/10 the effort and time to do something and just coast, never bother to even understand what they wrote.

just encountered that with some interviews where people can now scaffold something up in record time but can't be bothered to refine it because they don't know how. (ex. you have someone prompting to create some component and it does it in a minute. if you request a tweak, because they don't understand it they just keep trying re-prompt and micromanage the LLM to get the right output when it should only take another minute for someone experienced.)

> this is nothing like SO

Strong agree. There have been people who blindly copied answers from Stack Overflow without understanding the code, but most of us took the time to read the explanations that accompanied the answers.

While you can ask the AI to give you additional explanations, these explanations might be hallucinations and no one will tell you. On SO other people can point out that an answer or a comment is wrong.

> Strong agree. There have been people who blindly copied answers from Stack Overflow without understanding the code, but most of us took the time to read the explanations that accompanied the answers.

Are you sure? Because chatbots are used exactly like SO, with the exception of usecases like a) using as glorified template and refactoring engines, b) explain existing codebases, c) automatically add unit tests and context-based documentation. Just open SO and check any random question: how to get a framework to do something, how to configure something, why something worked like this or like that, why did a code block had a bug, etc.

> this is nothing like SO

Agree. Ai answers actually work and are less out of date

> Agree. Ai answers actually work and are less out of date

Jokes aside, I feel this is really the case. Chatbots have the exact same usecases, but as their response time is measured in seconds instead of days and the responses reflects the context from that moment, this opens the door for more interactive experience and more iterations over the same output.

I feel this anger towards LLMs comes from gatekeepers who felt slighted by having to spend so much effort to reach positions where people with chatbots take instances, and as they can no longer close gates or pull ladders they start to bitch and whine against LLMs. It's as simple as that.

> ex. you have someone prompting to create some component and it does it in a minute. if you request a tweak, because they don't understand it they just keep trying re-prompt and micromanage the LLM to get the right output when it should only take another minute for someone experienced.

This is it. You will have real developers, as you do today, and developers who are only capable of creating what the latest AI model is capable of creating. They’re just a meat interface for the AI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com