I’m working on the front end of a transcription app. It’s a lot of moving buttons and labels around to get them where I want, but there’s no way I would ever be able to do it with a keyboard as fast as using an llm. Are we putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage to big tech et. al. by being anti ai purists?
I mean yes and no. LLMs are a tool and you should be well versed in using them as a part of your toolbox. Don’t use it to replace proper planning or actually thinking about what you want to make. Also remember that LLMs are massively subsidised at the moment, figuring out how to run stuff locally and use less powerful models for stuff is a good idea. When the music stops llm tokens will drastically increase in price.
Front ends are less about coding than about implementing something and then going through many iterations of looking at it and tweaking it. I don’t think AI can do the judgment part very well right now, but I’m not current on such things.
An AI wont protect you from my fists! Put em up, old chum! 🥊😆
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: ai is a tool. In some fields it improved productivity. Not using it might hurt.
Can I work my garden without power tools? Yes I can. Would I grow more tomatoes and eggplant with power tools? Indeed.
Should I do it? Depends… Not if manual gardening is your hobby and you have fun in doing the action yourself… Yes if your livelihood depends on feeding your family with your garden produce.
The thing about this example is that using power tools just makes your effort more efficient. You’re still learning and experiencing the effort of gardening.
When you use AI for tasks, you’re removing that effort. You are practicing writing prompts, NOT doing the task. You aren’t getting better at coding and managing your workflow or planning out how you could have done it better for next time, so you won’t ever improve.
If AI does all the entry level coding, then there won’t be any humans to LEARN coding. Then when senior coders retire, there is only AI to take their place.
And that goes for EVERYTHING. We are exactly 1 generation of talent away from having no humans who can code, or who can do art, or who can write stories, or who can make movies. The human experience is a process, and you have to actually do the damn work to get there.
The Fediverse militantly against AI, you’ll get heavily skewed results on here.
Not using AI or at least not keeping up with how you can use it, you risk falling behind.
I can do in a day what would have taken me a week, and at higher quality using a powerful LLM.
Good comment, i agree with you
Hàorán Che in fourth century Jiankang Jin province said ‘all competition is against the self’. But he married his horse so I don’t know.
I consider “don’t use LLMs to write code” and “don’t use AI to generate art” as two almost unrelated concerns and moral dilemmas.
90% of the code I use to hand type at work was fundamentally slop code written for slop purposes. In non-software terms, there’s few reasons for your average plumber to spend hours hand craft pipes instead of using the magic pipe box.
Whether or not some important detail with legal liabilities like credit card processing works logically and safely in your software is pretty much the same with LLMs as the risk of outsourcing. You could already pay randos on fiver to write you mystery code for you to ship without even looking at it. It’s just that the lazy negligent path is faster now. nothing about LLMs really stops you from safe software practices, in fact those are faster and more accessible with LLMs now, it’s just a matter of you yourself choosing to vibe slop code or engage in engineering principles.
If AI-assisted coding becomes the long-term norm, it will probably be accompanied by significantly different programming languages, workflows, and tools (as well as more-capable LLMs). The current batch of AI-generated slop will be regarded as a transitional mess unmaintainable by humans or AIs, and any practices picked up in this phase will have to be un-learned later on.
Are we putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage to big tech et. al. by being anti ai purists?
It doesn’t have to be either/or.
You can use LLMs as a tool and never touch Big Tech. You can use them for utilitarian purposes, without getting all cultish about them. You can actively hate “AI” while doing this.
Honestly, I think Big Tech is stoking the “Pro AI” and “Anti AI” divide, because what they’re most scared of is the public viewing it as yet another dumb automation tool. That would obliterate their business. They want the public to see it as an “all-in-with-us-or-nothing” affair, kinda like they did with social media.
Depends what you’re doing. For the lighter side of coding, you’ve probably nailed it. You’ll never keep up, writing boiler-plate frontend code by hand.
For, like, kernel or scientific coding, it’s probably more subjective. Of course, anything in meatspace is beyond LLMs entirely. AI is waiting on a whole new technology for that one, and so, timelines for AI electricians look barely different they did just before the LLM arrived.
Being a math person, human mathematics as we’ve known it is looking kind of doomed, now. Not because LLMs are super great at it, but because you can rigorously verify if every step works with conventional algorithms. With enough shitty lemmas thrown at the wall, if they’re all correct, you can eventually go somewhere.
In math, we’ve been replaced. Feels bad, man. (I’m not changing any takes now that it’s my field, though!)
Maybe.
AI is still a tool - you can use it to do these things better you do best, or unlearn them and lose them.
In some ways yes, in other ways no. Would you rather be fast at stuff or have a sense of judgement, morals, and a wealth of experience? Maybe it has us beat at literal transcription, but it can’t make good human-oriented decisions about UX and UI.
