“Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition.

Bad News Nobody

@GossiTheDog who cares, soon there'll be no need for human coders anymore, whatever remains of the profession will be janitorial in nature. /s

Gabriel Adrian Samfira

@GossiTheDog this is no different than doing excessive hand holding as a mentor. When you answer questions instead of helping the mentee to fundamentally understand the thing they're asking about, and figuring out the issue for themselves (with your help), you take away from the valuable mental process that develops critical thinking and problem solving.

And a LLM does precisely this. It answers all your questions. You get the result. You never figure out the problem for yourself.

Volker Stolz

@GossiTheDog We’ll be busy removing this “digital asbestos” out of any software written this decade(?) for ages…

Little Art Histories

@GossiTheDog I wonder which impact this will have on society. Not that people become more stupid, etc. but the mental impact - can it lead to bore-out? Depression? Mental illness? Because our brains are craving activity.
The other concern is the erosion of the average jobs. What's left is work for unskilled workers or highly educated specialists. Which is also a problem in the long run. But, I guess, that's what they want. Cheap, unskilled labour with brain rot.

War in Pieces

@GossiTheDog indeed

i am living proof of this effect.

damianwalsh

@GossiTheDog Our study, conducted by Professor No Shit and Doctor Obvious, found that when people offloaded their thinking to AI, they put in less effort and were less engaged, creating a barrier to personal development in exchange for a marginal increase in productivity.

Little Art Histories

@womble @GossiTheDog It is so dumb when you look at it. They are complaining when people don't have a job because they are laid off, complaining that people are lazy wellfare-queens and at the same time want AI to replace every single job. It's the same with the old "Immigrants are lazy and getting our hard-earned money doing nothing while taking all our jobs".

I am pretty much convinced at this point that Capitalism is a cult, an addiction, and a scam.

filobus · 24-11-06/saudis-plan-100-billion-ai-powerhouse-to-rival-uae-s-tech-hub

@GossiTheDog @Npars01 first link seems to be broken

ckfinite

@GossiTheDog I was really (positively) surprised that Anthropic released this. Their results broadly align with my personal experience and feelings about AI usage, though I have substantial misgivings about their methodology (in particular how they controlled for participant experience).

Another issue that I worry a lot about with AI is second-order effects, wherein you use the LLM to write a library and then are expected to be able to evaluate the LLM's ability to use the LLM-written library. I think that this is both a priori very hard (to know all of the details of the library to be able to catch issues) and is lossy (in issues in library design or abstraction factoring that may be identified through use implementation).

Nicole Parsons

@filobus @GossiTheDog

Thanks! Fixed it.

astolk

@gabriel @GossiTheDog also not being able to see possible problems with the code generated by a LLM is going to be a major pita down the line. Even before when all the seniors are retired.

Neil Moffatt

@GossiTheDog Many behave in herd fashion down the path of outsourcing all they do to devices. The brain LOVES to economise so just lets cognitive functions atrophy as it does with unused muscles.

A systemically alarming state of affairs that is only now slowly being addressed - young children absent face to face spoken words are struggling to learn to read ... etc. etc.

Neo Ehproque

@hittitezombie @GossiTheDog just as soon as customers can describe what they want in precise unambiguous terms. I'll wait.

EQ

@dukeboitans @GossiTheDog What hurts most in your comment is that you had to put /s on the end. Because this is exactly how some talk and mean it as something good.

Gunther

@GossiTheDog I read the Anthropic article, the most interesting part to me was how different people use the LLM to assist their coding. You can choose to offload the cognitive effort or use it as a tool to help understand, it's up to you.

Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud

@ehproque @hittitezombie @GossiTheDog . I hate business rules, and yet that is probably what's kept me around as a developer.

Florian Weber

@GossiTheDog A really really great reflection on that very paper by @jenniferplusplus ️
https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/115990878133999416

generic holiday season brib

@art_histories @GossiTheDog

This essay puts it better than I ever could. It's not even about the jobs, it's about feeling like the work we do has value

https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence/

retech

@GossiTheDog All that $$$ and not a penny's worth of common sense.

JFC what I could do with just 1 month's worth of their budget.

Magnus Ahltorp

@GossiTheDog I watched a thousand machine generated piano concerts, and I’m still not better at playing the piano. Strange.