This should be great for productivity.
And more time yet wasted tidying, sysadmining, dispensing with bureaucracy, eating, bathing, going to the toilet, socialising, travelling, and sleeping.
I have only one data point:
I am an embedded software developer. Recently, I had to attach and debug a stepper motor with a serial interface to an embedded control system. A bog standard task - basically, you need to initialize the motor, send it a home / referencing command, tell it to which position it has to go, and wait until it is there. Luckily for science, I had to do practically the same seven years ago with a lab system at a research institute. And in the current job, the senior engineer responsible for the motor interface is a heavy proponent of AI tools and uses these whenever he can.
Oh, and there are a few more pesky little differences:
- In the first job, I had to write the driver myself, as I had no working code, but some examples in Python and Java.
- I had only a partial protocol from the vendor and had to reverse-engineer important parts myself, as the vendor preferred to supply a closed-source windows driver.
- in the second job, we already had working though a bit old C++98 code written by somebody who had left the company, for an earlier iteration of that embedded system, which was in production for about 8 years.
- in the second case, the responsible engineer relied heavily on AI
- he told me that in multi-threaded C++ code, you don’t need locks for shared access, because the AI didn’t tell him. I had to educate him a bit about undefined behaviour in C++.
In both cases, the result had to be reliable, ad it was part of expensive and heavy machinery with high cost of failures.
The outcome? The task took less than four weeks in the first job, and over six months in the second job. In the first case, the result was very reliable. In the second, it is still not fully reliable.
You can point out that the second was a legacy system, which is more difficult to evolve. But that’s the point - AI does not “understand” legacy systems at all, and worse its use brings down and inhibits communication and knowledge transfer.
At best, you can conclude that AI is no substitute at all for a lack of knowledge and working institutional processes.
At best, you can conclude that AI is no substitute at all for a lack of knowledge and working institutional processes.
I think AI can stand in for a lack of knowledge and working institutional processes. I think they’re a pretty good match.
Woah, that is bonkers. An I assume the mental model of what the code does in the second example is also much more limited.
Any specific thing besides the usual that you can point out that made the second example so bad due to AI tools? I want to have more concrete examples on how this fails to try to push back where I work.
Thank you, this is what I have been trying to tell people, I am an IT guy at a financial services company, the entire company is currently AI pilled, and I hate it.
Replacing knowledge and skills with a statistics based chatbot is insane.
The only times I use AI is like a dynamic manual, and that is only if I couldn’t find the information through a normal googling.
I have tried to use AI to write code for me, and it terrified me, it was so easy, but I lost control and understanding of the code, and I hate that.
I want to be able to glance at the code of a script I have developed and be able to remember how it works, and I don’t get that with AI.
A skilled employee with knowledge of the code/system is far, far more valuable than a statistics based chatbot.
The way I look at it is AI is a time saving tool if you know what you’re doing. Otherwise it’s like playing IT Russian roulette. There are many times I could write the code or procedure I need manually but using AI has saved me countless hours. I’m not doing anything mission critical and I know how to read the code/scripts/configs it’s spitting out. I would never in a million years just accept what it spits out as gospel. I basically treat the output like a junior developer created it and I’m doing the code review. I’d also like to add in running all this on local models since I have the hardware to do that. And 95% of it is either for a lab or a proof of concept. I’ve also had it spit something out I didn’t understand and went and looked it up and learned something in the process. That’s always a nice surprise.
But you do bring up a very good point. It is VERY easy to lose control and understanding of what it’s spitting out. And you absolutely need people to understand what the code is doing, regardless of who or what wrote it. I’ve inherited projects when people leave that I have spent days if not months trying to understand.
There are many things I don’t like about AI… at least the kind run in giant data centers using up way too many resources like electricity and water. But under the right circumstances and used correctly, it can be a very powerful and useful tool.
Holy shit does this resonate!
I spend hours each week hand-holding, manipulating, and sometimes fighting with LLMs. We are encouraged to use them at work, but it’s always a coin toss. Will it nail the task at hand on the first attempt? Or will it fall down a black hole of bad assumptions and getting stuck in stupid loops?
And it’s not due to ‘bad prompts’ as the kool aid drinkers frequently claim. I’ve had enough practice with them now, and I’ve had others review them and give a thumbs up.
‘Botsitting’… I like that. Very apt.
We are encouraged to use them at work, but it’s always a coin toss. Will it nail the task at hand on the first attempt?
A digital slot machine.
Addictive by design.
And moreover, it makes you believe that it did the work, while in reality you do all the difficult stuff and on top take extra responsibility for it. Like self-checkout supermarket counters.
It makes you believe that it did the work, but also makes you feel like it’s your fault if it doesn’t do the work 😬
I only about 10 minutes. My old Roomba is a bit dumb sometimes.
Just need the bot’s waste heat to get concentrated into the kettle and I can waste two birds with one cuppa.
