Comment by OhMeadhbh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OhMeadhbh | Hacker News Reader

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This reminds me of an observation a flat-mate made when I was at university: Drugs amplify your personality. If you were cool before-hand, you would be more cool on drugs. If you were an asshole, you would be more of an asshole on drugs.

I've noticed the same thing about agentic coding. Not really the agents, but the way people responded to agents. If you were the kind of coder who was a little unsure of yourself, agents made you more unsure of yourself. If you were confident with your abilities, you were more confident.

By the transitive nature of HN comments, we can therefore conclude that LLM coding agents are drugs.

I am now wondering if there's a conversation to be had about Dunning-Kruger and Impostor Syndrome. In the modern agentic era, is it better to hire people who know less than experts, though clearly somewhere above complete novice? Perhaps this is why I find it difficult to find a job. Perhaps I am "overfit" to the world before descriptive ambiguity was an advantage?

I am reminded of the words of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs: "act like a dumb-sh*t and they'll treat you like an equal."

Anyway... yes... I agree with @freefaler on this one. AI is a qualia amplifier.

> If you were confident with your abilities, you were more confident

Confidence isn't a very good indicator of skills though

I've met a ton of high confidence people who are actually dogshit at what they do. Confidently incompetent is a dangerous mix and this is the sort of person I see amplifying themselves with AI the most.

Sure. But when you're trying to convince other people you know what you're talking about, confidence is probably about 50% of the game. To be sure, you need some skill, but given candidates who are a "grade a coder with zero confidence" and a "grade b coder with moderate confidence" and "grade c coder with extreme confidence," I am confident in saying the grade c coder will get hired 50% of the time.

It turns out that software engineering in large organizations is a process greatly influenced by human psychology.

Also, "confidence w/o ability" is the core of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You have to know a fair amount to understand how shit you are at things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

> "grade c coder with extreme confidence," I am confident in saying the grade c coder will get hired 50% of the time.

I agree with you. That's why everything is shit!

I'm pretty sure Bill Cosby said it first:

I said to a guy, "Tell me, what is it about cocaine that makes it so wonderful," and he said, "Because it intensifies your personality." I said, "Yes, but what if you're an asshole?"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083652/characters/nm0001070/

> drugs

slightly off topic, but we need to be clear that certain harder drugs -- the ones most likely to kill you -- can absolutely change people

To quote Faith No More: "The drug modified my personality. I was like a Crack Hitler."

I suspect the speaker was "diet pepsi hitler" before becoming "crack hitler."

Not necessarily. I'm thinking of TV shows now (yes I need to go out more) where people lose their inhibitions (House did it iirc), and they "became" assholes - or they were assholes all along.

But if you're an asshole on the inside but it never comes out, are you really one? This is a pretty dangerous trap. Compare abusive situations where someone needles someone else for ages until they've had enough and the target gets angry. What would be a good response? "I'm sorry I made you angry" or "I knew you were really like this all along!"

(there is no correct answer by the way, it depends on many factors and relationships can't be abstracted away that easily, let alone by an external person on the internet who hears only one side of the story)

Anyway, if Hitler was Hitler but had filters so he never actually said what was really on his mind, we wouldn't have had WW2 and co. In theory.

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