AI was great until it was not
thetheorygirlie.substack.com
thetheorygirlie.substack.com
It sucks. I don’t care about being efficient (that’s something the executives care about). I care about how I live my life, and at work that means learning from others (and offer the little knowledge I have to others)… if it takes 2 engineers 2h to solve a bug (vs 20 min for 1 engineer and an agent) then thats great for me. I get the chance to exercise my brain, solve a bug, learn from other engineer and have a bond with that individual. If I solve the bug in 20min with an agent, well, that’s something my boss would love, but I personally would have gained nothing… and would have to jump to solve more bugs alone in the remaining 100 minutes (which feels like running a marathon)
There is no formula to determine the right level of it, but it's one of those things that's obvious when you see it... like not eating.
At the same time, there's a type of person who loves to explain things. They give presentations and are extra helpful when engaged. I'm pretty sure you can still ask them questions.
That said, hardly anyone asks for explanations now. In my team people default to a chatbot for work questions almost exclusively, and in private life for hobbies I share with other people, they increasingly go for chatbots too.
Turns out, not everyone seems to want a human connection.
I like to explain things, and put them in an e-mail or Slack thread, so that I don't have to be bothered a second time about it.
Just yesterday I fixed an OpenLDAP issue we were having as a syadmin team: it was close enough to previous issues I had that I was able to circle to correct area, and was able to fix it, but I explained the context to everyone so I didn't have to be the one to deal with it if it ever rose again.
There may be reasons other than self promotion
And for programmers that aren't hackers, they just appreciate the practical upsides of having mature humans that can take accountability for decisions that affect your work as coworkers.
It is, but it is largely also single-player.
Even those that have less bandwidth for human interaction value being in the loop.
People are people, all different, some hackers enjoy the solitude of doing their project by themselves with no human interaction whatsoever, others enjoy and thrive with a collaborative setting, spitting ideas, showing code, and getting feedback to iterate on and improve them.
I've belonged to the latter camp most of my life even though I acted like the first when I was learning how to program (and on my first job); I'm not a stereotypical extrovert but love nerding about stuff together with someone: coding an idea, making music, working on wood, for me those are all more enjoyable with another human sharing the same passion.
This exists on a spectrum for both interactor and interactee: some folks are more introverted than others, some folks don't mind talking shop with fellow hackers but don't want to get into business-y stuff with PMs.
You can try convincing them that doing the same job in 2hrs is better for the company but they may not listen.
Like in outsourcing when they say the Indian worker does the same job for a much smaller salary and they don't care about the quality of the code they produce only about hitting the milestones. If the code is bad then they hire some other cheap outsourced workers to fix it, etc.
The market does not reward good code, the market rewards low price and speed of delivery.
For instance, package managers didn’t always exist. Would you prefer it if we got rid of them? Instead of 30 seconds running `uv add whatever` collaborating with your package manager, you could spend 30 days collaborating with other human beings to build the functionality yourself.
And when that workday is done, everybody goes home by themselves to scroll some more.
I can move across the repos fixing whatever god damn bothers me, without ever talking to anyone.
Code and commit/review messages have always been all the communication needed.
The thing is, most humans don’t communicate in order to exchange information, but in order to regulate their emotions.
The biggest difference in experience with seniors is that we already know the standard patterns, I dont have to ask what the inside of a microservice looks like, or the inside of a react app. Or how event driven systems work.
Engineers should learn that stuff by doing. And reading the massive amount of (non-LLM) written documentation on the subject. Written by real people.
To be fair, I never did. No one wants to be bothered and I don't want to bother anyone, too.
Her comment about the Mathematica notebook really hits home. As a scientist, not a software engineer, who uses code as a tool to speed up more critical parts of my work, I was thrilled to have the chance to learn programming skills on the job. I could justify it because the time saved by the fruits of it outran the time I spent learning it. I can't do that anymore. I'm not building software, just scripting, so even the cheapest models today can give me suitable code quicker than I could write it myself. So I can no longer justify learning new programming skills, at least on work time. I'm glad I had a few years to pick up the basics before these tools became available.
But at the same time, I am happy with my current use of LLMs. I get to do things I only dreamed about before. I would have so many ideas I could never realise. Now I can fire up Claude Code and get cracking. And because of my experience, I can keep up with it, correcting it, suggesting better ways of doing things…
And yes, so glad I have my PhD already. But I am looking forward to all the articles I will be writing based on my collaborations with both humans and LLMs.
Looking at people who are happiest leveraging it, it’s people who want to build something.
The people who are maximizing its utility are those with (deep) pre existing expertise.
For people who want to understand and think deeply about things, it’s … less useful. It can be used to create prototypes, or explain terms.
This is the path that is most precarious. Its utility is entirely dependent on being self motivated learners.
As the article showed, at some point people who want to just build, and don’t care about the learning, will just use ChatGPT to build their homework.
The situation seems like we are consuming the seed stock of expertise.
If evidence turns up of students and new entrants to the labour market finding ways to grow, learn skills or just find employment, the picture would clear up.
I find it fantastically useful for discoverability of sources. I can briefly state something that I find interesting - I do have some jargon and some reasoning that I offer - and ask specifically for academic papers and books.
It does a great job of getting me reading lists that I would take quite a while to arrive at by myself. It's like having a great librarian available to me at all times.
Those who can leverage these tools to increase the effectiveness of ones' own reasoning will be, I suspect, the greatest beneficiaries. I recently even found a 1983 (!) paper "The Ironies of Automation" by Bainbridge alerting to the pitfalls we see today.
Since now the former potential collaborators are feeding on more or less the same generated content, it's hard to see how AI will replace that.
And that's not the mention the further alienation it causes, as heavily alluded to in the article.
They don't trust their peers to use it properly and externalise the concerns to the technology itself.
> The problem is that the little chatbot in our pockets is making us more isolated and in so, it’s making us stray further from this humble goal: to learn
I don't understand the author here, ChatGPT (as admitted by herself) does help people learn. Far more than what was possible before. Her only complaint is that society is not able to leverage ChatGPT to further the spirit of physics, but that's on her on peers and not on the technology.
As usual, society adapts given enough time.
It's because the ideal person is put in a disadvantage against the lazy person.
Someone who actually wants to learn can use it to learn, or to improve quality, or do other beneficial things. Although it's certainly not infallible and the output can't just be trusted.
People are lazy though, and in a lot of places you'll find that for every 1 person who cares about their craft and wants to learn, there are 10 that just want to get the work done with minimal effort. So now it looks like the lazy ones are more productive than the conscientious people.
Exactly. The problem is a weird one though, because there are at least independent forces that are working together here:
(1) The people that are inventing AI or those that are pro-AI are typically those that have been conditioned to enjoy the "information rush" and place personal superificial enjoyment over human interaction. Lots of nerds/geeks simply love the idea of having a playground devoid of the necessity to actual interact outside their microcosm and so they think AI is the best thing since sliced bread. They're often people who were taunted in school or at least partially ostracized early in life because of their intelligence and take emotional comfort in tech.
(2) The perverted incentives of academia reward publishing and in general the incentives of capitalism create an arms race to be as efficient as possible at the cost of goods like "community" that only accrue vague benefits often outside the capitalistic system. So people tend to use AI.
(3) Very advanced technology itself weakens and even destroys smaller communities whose members then seek out technology as a superificial salve to ease what they consciously or subconsciously feel as something missing.
AI was never great. Knowledge as an end in itself is not a good thing and we should seek knowledge to better ourselves in a myriad of ways. But today it's just sought out for material and capitalistic advancement, which prevents our using it to actually become wiser and enjoy the basics of life.
The only people who defend it are those who are already addicted to it, or those who don't want to experience the cognitive dissonance of the truth of its harmful nature.
Lately, my thoughts on our LLM future darkened a tad, too.
I find the parallel between LLMs and Sophons from the 3-Body Problem novels increasingly accurate. That is, specifically, in terms of their effect of stalling human progress. Sure, anybody can opt out of using LLMs (unlike with Sophons), so the restriction on progress seems kind of "soft" in this sense, but the chances of someone choosing to do so aren't too high, IMO. It is so much easier to avoid forcing yourself to learn or explore hard stuff and just ask the model instead.
While I tend to support this in a field such as SW Engineering (if only the Standards and Quality Control aspects advanced as fast as raw code generation...), I share the same fears as Tao and others regarding Mathematics (and not just Mathematics; Computer Science, which ultimately underlies SWE, is on the spotlight as well).
What exactly is hard stuff though? The concept, the implementation, the grokking? For a person with the right mindset now is easier to get to the Eureka moment, because it is fairly cheap to try all the stuff that doesn't work.
I’m sorry you had that experience. It sounds like your supervisors don’t take their job seriously.
Potential bright side is that those people that will put in actual work and learn how to use AI as a complement and not replacement should have sizeable competitive advantage. LLMs are still dumb af in many ways.
It's almost as if the nature of rote or grunt work has a hidden beauty that provides negative space for creativity to flourish. And being forced to do those things without a choice is a great simplifier in life to maintain that contrast.
(to be clear, there is good reason there is no call to action: a big part of the horror of all this is that there is no clear thing anyone can do)
> "so I asked the chatbot like my friends recommended, and, again, it said some bullshit"
And I'd give this a pass without the self aggrandising, since ChatGPT is a bot, but IMO downplaying something that was said without the original wording being available it is a very bad sign in a person. It pays to be specific when complaining about something someone else said. In a bot, I mean OK but I predict the author does this with humans too.
EDIT
> ...to which she accused me of trying to plagiarize her work and started ignoring me completely, and telling other people I was trying to copy her. Our friendship was never the same after that.
Yeah, like what she does here. I'd like to know what this friend said. I suspect there is a missing chunk to the story.
And that perspective isn't entirely wrong--for some people that's all they will ever be. It's just that they do more than that.
Universities exist to provide the resources academic researchers need to work. Whether they are studying physics, sociology, or creative writing. The buildings, the meeting spaces, the people they gather who share interests, they people with cross-cutting or even opposing interests are also a resource.
Universities exist to provide the resources students need to learn skills that are difficult to obtain otherwise. It's not practical for most people to be self taught operators of gas chromatography systems, confocal microscopes, or research reactors. The physical stuff isn't the only thing. Having a collection of experts on different topics clustered together means that as a student you have access to a massive resource if you are smart enough to engage with it. These are all people who can teach you, guide you, and make introductions for you.
Of course, I am kind of dumb and didn't really realize this stuff until after I graduated and was navigating the world as an adult. Relationships I built in college helped me land several jobs early in my career. I don't think my bachelor's degree did anything for me beyond my first job. People rapidly stopped asking about it.
The writer is quite elegant in her description of how LLMs are corrosive to the social aspect of university.
That is indeed a beautiful thing. Even at work, everything is codex/claude. Don't review code. If you are reading code, you are in the past. Everyone thinks some other company has achieved a 100x way of being productive by vibing their way.
Don't ask questions, ask claude to figure it out.
I really enjoyed building products for last 20 years. This year it feels different. Like we care less about our products, about the little details, about the users. Slop is okay, as long as you're moving fast.
But moving fast for what?