Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

To me, it is not the right advice. "Stop using that tool, that tool will make you lazy" means we would be digging holes by hand instead of using shovels, then excavators.

The "lazy answer box" is a tool, learn to use the tool, understand its limitations, as act accordingly. If you prefer not to use it because you like coming up with answers yourself, because it is against your principles, or because you can do better without it, that's fine. Hand tools still have a place in the workshop after all, and craftsmen know to use them. But if AI is helpful to you and lets you spare some cognitive load for other tasks, by all means use it, it would be stupid not to.

View on HN

Can we explore the digging holes analogy a bit more?

Digging by hand with a shovel involves

1. Assessing the terrain and checking any documented or obvious obstacles (subsurface water, gas, electricity etc)

2. Planning the approach to digging the hole, most efficient angle, and ensuring that collapse doesn't occur

3. Organising disposal

4. Digging the hole

5. Dealing with any unforeseen issues (old tree roots, old foundations etc)

This is exactly the same whether digging by hand or using an excavator. The excavator isn't automating stages 1, 2, 3, or 5. It's just speeding up the 4th stage and only if there aren't stage 5 issues present.

LLMs when employed in a manner on the extreme end of the vibe coding spectrum are automating every stage of the process. If the excavator was hooked up to an LLM and left to run all stages of digging (extreme vibe digging?), I'd argue that yes, the operator is becoming lazy, and is running a very dangerous operation.

I think most people try the "extreme end" of vibe coding -- "Claude, write me an app to do X" once or twice and realize that doesn't really work -- to get it to work reliably you basically have to write a ROADMAP.md that details each step in a fair amount of detail -- pretty much the same work you'd have to do to hand a project off to a human intern.

And if trying to knock out a whole app like that, you might rediscover why waterfall was abandoned a while ago for many sorts of endeavors along the way... :)

or that waterfall works if you get the app done in less time than the initial waterfall meeting. Because now you have time to iterate after examining the output and testing it out to see if there's shortfalls.

Check out this guy one-shotting a game engine (ala unity-esque) app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_uf5OfMGio

>you basically have to write a ROADMAP.md that details each step

I agree that a ROADMAP.md is needed, but I just ask the LLM to write that. Doesn't everyone do that?

Does that work? I'd think if it could plan things out itself it wouldn't need a roadmap, but maybe it is like how LLMs "reason" by arguing with themselves.

I use something similar (openspec change specifications rather than a literal ROADMAP.md file) and I will sometimes spend hours iterating on the details of a change file, before letting my agent actually implement it. Yes, the agent is generally dealing with doing the actual editing, but I will read it and use dictation to direct modifications to the file.

> LLMs when employed in a manner on the extreme end of the vibe coding spectrum are automating every stage of the process

And when you have a backhoe, you can skip a lot of those things, too. It's bad, sure.. but so is skipping a lot of the important parts when using AI.

The backhoe is one of the best labor-saving inventions we see in regular life. It can do the work of 30 or more men with ease. It's a very good tool.

(It's also a fantastic for finding the buried fiber optic cable that nobody was looking for, but that's a different kind of discussion.)

With current LLMs, the excavator in your example would be the one to spend 90% of the time sitting there and doing steps 1-3, and possibly asking for permission to call for an inspection or a team of professionals should these steps reveal 4 cannot be done safely.

Most people don't even know to call before they dig, that's why there are public awareness campaigns about it. Most people don't consider any of the things you mentioned when digging a hole. Organizing disposal, really? Most people don't think that far ahead and dump the dirt right next to the hole.

In theory, you take the same amount of time, and because step 4 is so fast you can spend more time on the steps before and after, and finish with a better result.

Over in the "AI is not a tool" post there's this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063732

Which says that it's a tool for querying and summarization, but not a tool for reading or writing, because it helps you to do something different from those.

(Yes I know, don't cross the streams. I just thought it was a shame for this nice distinction to languish over there when you need it over here.)

Is lint a tool? If so, what's wrong with treating Claude as an ungodly-effective lint? You don't have to one-shot everything, or anything at all. You can ask for as much help or as little help as you need.

Another way to look at it: when I'm using Claude to write application code, I'm engaging with the machine and the work product in a different way. I'm not "programming" anymore, so OK, maybe it's reasonable to say Claude isn't a programming tool. Instead, I'm doing something new, something that perhaps we don't have a verb for yet. Whatever that verb is, Claude is a tool for it.

The problem is that while it is entirely possible in principle to use AI as a tool, not a surrogate, the actual interfaces to widely available AI models constantly push their users towards delegating their thinking to AI, rather than assisting their thinking. I constantly have to stop Claude from just doing the thing for me instead of presenting me with options or evidence and letting me choose how to proceed.

One thing I am trying to do is "Discovery" session in the start, where I try to give my AI all context it needs to achieve the task, ask it questions for other things I might have missed, and for what they expected then go for it. Seeing outstanding results (Not plan mode but actual discovery)

I guess my counterpoint is bluntly - no-one will not be using the tool at their day-job.

It requires so much extra discipline to think for yourself and not use it, you will be forced to use it in your job or be seen as a Luddite and your ability to think for yourself in the domain will diminish over time - your domain thinking muscle will gradually atrophy from lack of use.

Why would any of us bother thinking hard, when there is no financial incentive to doing so ?

Your analogy fails with shovels and excavators .. because General synthetic intelligence is not a single purpose narrow 'tool'. near-future AI is equivalent to an alien intelligent species competing for resources, or equivalent to a cheaper smarter non-human 'outsource worker'.

I am actively trying not to use it at my day-job, and I am a (mainly) computational physicist. My mother tongue is not English, I live in a country where the language is neither my mother tongue nor English, and I still don't use AI for writing emails or other documents. It is going OK so far. However, if significantly more powerful AI is developed, I think that we'll have much more serious problems than using or not-using AI in our job.

I'm not sure why you say the analogy fails just because general AI has more applications than excavators. A tool is still a tool, regardless of how much human effort it replaces.

"Calculator" used to be a job title. Now it's a machine. In the same way, "construction worker" may one day be a machine. "Software engineer" may one day be a machine. "Engineer" in general may one day be a machine. This forum seems to think that if humans are not required to think hard about existing problem domains, something terrible will happen.

At the end of the AI revolution, thinking may become something like physical exercise -- something we do because it's fun, and keeps us healthy and attractive, not because it's required.

To be clear, I do think that AI poses a potential risk to humanity. But imo "we won't have to think as hard" is not a risk; it's a benefit.

People already do a lot of thinking for fun. They read novels, they write software, they do crossword puzzles, they play chess.

My experience at home and work is the more “thinking” these tools do, the more it frees me up to think about something else, usually something harder.

The mention of exercise brought this to mind:

https://youtu.be/O6SEXp3-lo8?is=jJ55WL3ZvFoG6G8u

If people don’t use muscle power for work, and people don’t think for work, what are people going to fi?

Maybe the new scarce resource will be meaning, and we’ll kill each other for that

yes ... I do think that if humans stop thinking hard about existing problem domains .. they will lose that ability.

From which it then follows that _all_ technology and science become magical incantations dictated by a black-box oracle, whom everyone trusts and no one understands.

That could happen in a couple of decades.

"technology and science become magical incantations dictated by a black-box oracle, whom everyone trusts and no one understands"

I don't see why this would be a terrible thing.

This is what humanity has done for thousands of years. We do things manually for a long time, then invent an efficient way to automate it, and the skills to do things manually are gradually lost.

A car is a magic black box that we trust to move us around. A smartphone is a magic black box that we trust to connect to the rest of the world. AI is just the latest invention in a long line of magic black boxes that we trust. If you'd prefer to live your life without a car or smartphone or AI, it is perfectly acceptable to do so, and there are communities of people who do that.

I think I'm detecting a concern that "if we don't understand how it works, it could start doing dangerous things". To that I would say: even if something is a magic black box, we can still improve it and make it safer. To invent an airbag, you don't need to understand how a car works.

'Why would any of us bother thinking hard, when there is no financial incentive to doing so ?'.

Do you really think so? What a depressing view and simply, for many people I'll bet, totally wrong. But that's just my view. I'm working hard on something at the moment and, sure there's a financial incentive but it's the thought of a successful resolution of the project that is the deeper incentive.

A wheelchair is also a tool! A very efficient one too! People claim they've 2x'd their energy efficiency by not ever walking or standing, and they are much more happy now that they don't need to suffer the pain of walking! I'm thinking of amputating my feet just to make footoids seethe more!

A car is exactly what you describe, and even the fitness nuts use them.

It is actually a great example. Slobs use them just to avoid a 5 minute walk, even though walking is cheaper and faster. Reasonable people will take their into account their time, money, health and circumstances to choose whether to walk or to drive. And some crazies think cars are evil and will walk for hours and put themselves in danger instead of driving.

Same idea with AI. One one side, some people will turn off their brain and let the AI take control, on the other side, others will spend hours searching what a simple prompt can get them in seconds. Reasonable people are in the middle.

The only greater evil in this world than mass adoption of AI will have been the normalization of hour long commutes.

The obligatory Deus Ex Machina: Mechanical Apartheid cinematic trailer:

https://youtu.be/D7XCAgj0TtI

In the context of education, your analogy doesn't work. We still have physical education in schools because, even though people can now use automated tools for physical work rather than doing it by hand, it is still useful for people to be physically fit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com