It’s the same at work. You don’t ask your colleagues for help anymore, you ask the agent. You can clone all the necessary repos, link to confluence/figma/drive and then ask.
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)
My anecdote is that most of my coworkers across multiple jobs didn't like to explain anything. I think most engineers don't enjoy being interrupted for questions and I would have appreciated a way to get answers without bothering them.
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.
They send a message asking to see you when you have a moment. In office settings I ask people things when I see them getting coffee and am likewise asked things myself.
Problem is that the type of person that leans towards collaboration and likes to explain things may be getting burned out right now or may be among the first to be replaced.
OTOH, it's great for the type of person like me, who likes answering questions but is rarely asking them. Like, I don't want to interrupt my colleagues for something I can figure out on my own in comparable amount of time/effort. AI is now scaling this to questions previously way too difficult to answer on my own.
Anecdata: I am that person, loves explaining things, love seeing my colleagues learn things and grow. Needless to say, I no longer hold a job in the industry.
I maybe liked to explain things, but never liked to ask other people, always liked to figure things by myself. Maybe it was the experience from school and university with a lot of teachers that didn't know what they were talking about, which made me not trust other people.
I'm the same as you. I hate asking other people, unless it's for a reference or material to learn. I like to grind to understand myself, and then answer questions and explain things via presentations or a drawing board. I never wonder why I'm like that, tho
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.
Oh, we do want a human connection. But we also want good information, and want to actually know this (i.e. hobby is something to do, not merely a pretext to socialize). The overlap between the two is low.
> At the same time, there's a type of person who loves to explain things.
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.
Efficiency in the short-term also leads to community degradation in the long term. And by efficiency I mean efficiency past the point of diminishing returns. Compiling code by hand would suck, but not writing code at all also sucks.
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.
"You ask the agent", you do? I would never ask an agent about a system at work. I see people doing this and they are getting very obvious, and bad results.
I do see this as a detriment for junior devs though since they may need help. But I will never let my dev team off the hook for writing documentation. Although they may now feel using LLM is ok for that.
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.
Hackers are not anti-social, we're just a subculture. Hacking itself is ultimately a community activity. You want others to appreciate this cool thing you've made, or share tips about it, or just in general provide people connection. People buy plane tickets and conference tickets, pick their university/major, accept materially non-optimal job offers, just to seek out other members of this culture.
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.
> Hacking itself is ultimately a community activity. You want others to appreciate this cool thing you've made, or share tips about it, or just in general provide people connection.
It's single player in the same way painting is. The process of painting is done by a single artist, but the broader context of art is defined by a community people. Without them you wouldn't have a rich history of ideas to draw from, peers to discuss your work, or an audience to appreciate it.
Neither do I. But what I suspect is that the unpleasantness of too much forced social interaction, which dominated discussions in times past, was also associated with the begrudgingly-acknowledged good it did, even for us introverts. Hey, I'm like that too. But AI has taken that away for many people, who are now realizing that occasionally eating those dark greens actually did some good and now they're gone, life is actually worse.
This stereotype of "hackers" feels very rooted in the late-90s/early-2000s. Ever since mid-2000s the prominent "hackers" have been collaborating in the open and chasing VC funding...
Not every hacker fits the stereotype of "guy typing fast in a basement filled with screens and terminals".
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.
hacking something alone is fun, but maintaining something that’s being hacked by someone else without coordination has always been a shitty experience.
Even those that have less bandwidth for human interaction value being in the loop.
Presumably the people who loved interacting with humans were too busy interacting to show up on forums. And now that interactions are being curtailed they do end up here.
> I'm surprised by this sudden "I love interacting with humans" surge.
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.
I've discovered that I either want to have no interaction with people, or I want to have real human interactions. I don't want the shitty half measure where my manager sends me whatever Claude sent them, or gives me instructions like I was a prompt ("do X now").
Hacker news has long drifted from being purely hacker-related content, if it ever was. From my experience, it's a melting-pot of stuff related to entrepreuneurship, IT, VCs, and stuff that happens around silicon valley.
I feel there are workplaces and career choices where those people go who want social contact and fulfil personal utopian ambitions, not necessarily having profit in mind, and jobs where you go to make money efficiently. And these days, the divide between those has gotten very large to the point many jobs have no personal contact or room for personal growth, interests or artistic skill anymore. It feels the sane middle ground for sane people who are looking for a sane balance has been or is being hollowed out.
And when that workday is done, everybody goes home by themselves to scroll some more.
Do you apply this logic to all efficiency gains or just ones that weren’t commonplace when you entered the industry?
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.
In capitalism companies do things what is good for the company.
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.
I'm glad I finished my Ph.D. before any of this stuff hit the market. It sounds like it would have been a substantially different experience, and I suspect I might not have finished it with as solid a grasp on my thesis subject as I have.
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.
I feel incredibly lucky to have 25 years of computer and programming experience before the LLMs arrived. All the things I have learned through hard experience and curiosity!
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.
on the contrary, I'm unhappy that I had to study in university without ChatGPT. I was unable to learn many things because I didn't have access to someone who could teach me and correct me quickly and I lost interest.
as a software developer I felt I learned a lot more coding skills and software architecture at my first job (albeit with a great manager who kept challenging me with interesting work) than any of my teachers ever tried to teach me in uni D:
I somewhat agree with the article on the narrative level.
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).
>It is so much easier to avoid forcing yourself to learn or explore hard stuff and just ask the model instead.
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.
Learning stuff is hard for most people. We like to avoid hard stuff. Of course you can say that it's just about having the right mindset, but so is quitting to smoke.
> In particular, it would be pretty sad to destroy one of the few things that makes our life meaningful, not the fancy prize or the fancy position, but simply having a community to share and discuss and learn.
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.
I feel like people are trapping themselves with LLM use patterns. As OP has noted it's a pretty damn good self tutor tool, it's also great for offloading tasks you don't care about. But it will be devastating when people use it to do the important things foe them instead.
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.
The problem is that it's really hard for the average person (including myself) to understand which problems I should and shouldn't care about. Often the most trivial of tasks end up becoming inspirations to me, and I have some of the best ideas when I'm sweeping the floor.
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.
It's not the focus of the post but there is a word missing at the end of the post and it is "PhD supervisor". There are supposed the first person to interact with about your
They too will tell you to ask the AI. Then you can go to your supervisors supervisor, which is already a big pain, because academia is also a lot about interpersonal dependence, as your supervisor can make your life easy or hard, and they might not take criticism well.
Really? The writer seems like a piece of work to me. Half the post is bragging, a big chunk is insinuating bad qualities at peers and superiors.
> "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.
Reads like a diary entry. I sympathise, I just wish there were some conclusion the piece could come to, some action I could take or insight I could gleam. But nope, its just another soul trapped in the torment matrix.
(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)
I’m being reminded of “journey before destination”, quite a bit since AI has come out.
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 was wondering about this the other day
Thank God OpenAI didn't come up with Docker. Otherwise we would be drinking water from bottles rhat are docker enabled
Time and time again, I see the same complaints. A new technology comes and it removes bottlenecks. The ideal person should be ecstatic with new capabilities being unlocked. But they are complaining. Why?
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.
The purpose of a university is to provide a paper stating that one has completed it. If llms can do something decently, it is a waste of time to learn it properly.
If you're using a university to get credentials that are necessary to open the doors you need to reach your goals, then sure, that's what they are for. That's more or less how I thought of them before I went to college.
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.
Not worth reading. A lot of whining about ChatGPT and lazy Oxford students, not enough substance, only "wisdoms" like "But mirrors can be dangerous if we stay for too long too charmed by our own reflection".
> Classic slavic attitude (judging by your username). Worst software colleagues I ever had (you always have to be like binary with them: either you are right or wrong, either you provide something “valuable” or not… never something in between, never sympathy)
Didn’t like their comment either but what in the world kind of racist response is this. Where did this come from?
Race and culture are distinct. Slavic is not considered a race, but an ethnolinguistic and cultural classification.
Having said that, this is pretty lazy stereotyping (Slavic -> binary thinking).
Some societies may encourage more categorical, absolutist, or hierarchical ways of thinking, depending on their educational systems, political traditions, and social norms.
But such an analysis would probably have to be done at a country level.
It’s the same at work. You don’t ask your colleagues for help anymore, you ask the agent. You can clone all the necessary repos, link to confluence/figma/drive and then ask.
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)
My anecdote is that most of my coworkers across multiple jobs didn't like to explain anything. I think most engineers don't enjoy being interrupted for questions and I would have appreciated a way to get answers without bothering them.
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.
I don't like being interrupted, but I'm happy to answer a question when I'm at a good stopping/breaking point with whatever I'm working on.
How does the other person know you’re at such a point?
They send a message asking to see you when you have a moment. In office settings I ask people things when I see them getting coffee and am likewise asked things myself.
Send the question using an asynchronous communication medium (slack, email...) and I'll get back to it when I'm at that point.
Problem is that the type of person that leans towards collaboration and likes to explain things may be getting burned out right now or may be among the first to be replaced.
OTOH, it's great for the type of person like me, who likes answering questions but is rarely asking them. Like, I don't want to interrupt my colleagues for something I can figure out on my own in comparable amount of time/effort. AI is now scaling this to questions previously way too difficult to answer on my own.
Anecdata: I am that person, loves explaining things, love seeing my colleagues learn things and grow. Needless to say, I no longer hold a job in the industry.
What did you move to?
what did you switch to?
I maybe liked to explain things, but never liked to ask other people, always liked to figure things by myself. Maybe it was the experience from school and university with a lot of teachers that didn't know what they were talking about, which made me not trust other people.
I'm the same as you. I hate asking other people, unless it's for a reference or material to learn. I like to grind to understand myself, and then answer questions and explain things via presentations or a drawing board. I never wonder why I'm like that, tho
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.
Oh, we do want a human connection. But we also want good information, and want to actually know this (i.e. hobby is something to do, not merely a pretext to socialize). The overlap between the two is low.
i love explaining things. it takes the workload off of myself because there is now one more person who could be more independent
> At the same time, there's a type of person who loves to explain things.
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.
Efficiency in the short-term also leads to community degradation in the long term. And by efficiency I mean efficiency past the point of diminishing returns. Compiling code by hand would suck, but not writing code at all also sucks.
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.
"You ask the agent", you do? I would never ask an agent about a system at work. I see people doing this and they are getting very obvious, and bad results. I do see this as a detriment for junior devs though since they may need help. But I will never let my dev team off the hook for writing documentation. Although they may now feel using LLM is ok for that.
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.
I'm surprised by this sudden "I love interacting with humans" surge. It's not something I associate with hackers.
Hackers are not anti-social, we're just a subculture. Hacking itself is ultimately a community activity. You want others to appreciate this cool thing you've made, or share tips about it, or just in general provide people connection. People buy plane tickets and conference tickets, pick their university/major, accept materially non-optimal job offers, just to seek out other members of this culture.
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.
> Hacking itself is ultimately a community activity. You want others to appreciate this cool thing you've made, or share tips about it, or just in general provide people connection.
It is, but it is largely also single-player.
It's single player in the same way painting is. The process of painting is done by a single artist, but the broader context of art is defined by a community people. Without them you wouldn't have a rich history of ideas to draw from, peers to discuss your work, or an audience to appreciate it.
Neither do I. But what I suspect is that the unpleasantness of too much forced social interaction, which dominated discussions in times past, was also associated with the begrudgingly-acknowledged good it did, even for us introverts. Hey, I'm like that too. But AI has taken that away for many people, who are now realizing that occasionally eating those dark greens actually did some good and now they're gone, life is actually worse.
This stereotype of "hackers" feels very rooted in the late-90s/early-2000s. Ever since mid-2000s the prominent "hackers" have been collaborating in the open and chasing VC funding...
Not every hacker fits the stereotype of "guy typing fast in a basement filled with screens and terminals".
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.
There's a wide gap between "introvert" and "no interaction ever".
hacking something alone is fun, but maintaining something that’s being hacked by someone else without coordination has always been a shitty experience.
Even those that have less bandwidth for human interaction value being in the loop.
Presumably the people who loved interacting with humans were too busy interacting to show up on forums. And now that interactions are being curtailed they do end up here.
> I'm surprised by this sudden "I love interacting with humans" surge.
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.
I've discovered that I either want to have no interaction with people, or I want to have real human interactions. I don't want the shitty half measure where my manager sends me whatever Claude sent them, or gives me instructions like I was a prompt ("do X now").
There are people working in IT or CS who aren't hackers.
I was mainly referring to comments on Hacker News.
Hacker news has long drifted from being purely hacker-related content, if it ever was. From my experience, it's a melting-pot of stuff related to entrepreuneurship, IT, VCs, and stuff that happens around silicon valley.
perhaps consider what motivates a person to read comments on a forum like hacker news. Or indeed, post on such a forum.
There may be reasons other than self promotion
I feel there are workplaces and career choices where those people go who want social contact and fulfil personal utopian ambitions, not necessarily having profit in mind, and jobs where you go to make money efficiently. And these days, the divide between those has gotten very large to the point many jobs have no personal contact or room for personal growth, interests or artistic skill anymore. It feels the sane middle ground for sane people who are looking for a sane balance has been or is being hollowed out.
And when that workday is done, everybody goes home by themselves to scroll some more.
no, it’s absolutely awesome.
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.
Yeah this is infinitely preferable to meetings, particularly if you're on remote teams where someone is forced to be online at unhealthy hours
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Do you apply this logic to all efficiency gains or just ones that weren’t commonplace when you entered the industry?
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.
I think the key question to answer for all of us - Where would you be in 5 years? :-)
In capitalism companies do things what is good for the company.
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.
I'm glad I finished my Ph.D. before any of this stuff hit the market. It sounds like it would have been a substantially different experience, and I suspect I might not have finished it with as solid a grasp on my thesis subject as I have.
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.
I feel incredibly lucky to have 25 years of computer and programming experience before the LLMs arrived. All the things I have learned through hard experience and curiosity!
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.
on the contrary, I'm unhappy that I had to study in university without ChatGPT. I was unable to learn many things because I didn't have access to someone who could teach me and correct me quickly and I lost interest.
as a software developer I felt I learned a lot more coding skills and software architecture at my first job (albeit with a great manager who kept challenging me with interesting work) than any of my teachers ever tried to teach me in uni D:
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Society benefits when in person collaboration builds understanding and creates new ideas and approaches /in both parties/.
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.
I somewhat agree with the article on the narrative level.
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).
>It is so much easier to avoid forcing yourself to learn or explore hard stuff and just ask the model instead.
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.
Learning stuff is hard for most people. We like to avoid hard stuff. Of course you can say that it's just about having the right mindset, but so is quitting to smoke.
> In particular, it would be pretty sad to destroy one of the few things that makes our life meaningful, not the fancy prize or the fancy position, but simply having a community to share and discuss and learn.
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.
I feel like people are trapping themselves with LLM use patterns. As OP has noted it's a pretty damn good self tutor tool, it's also great for offloading tasks you don't care about. But it will be devastating when people use it to do the important things foe them instead.
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.
The problem is that it's really hard for the average person (including myself) to understand which problems I should and shouldn't care about. Often the most trivial of tasks end up becoming inspirations to me, and I have some of the best ideas when I'm sweeping the floor.
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.
It's not the focus of the post but there is a word missing at the end of the post and it is "PhD supervisor". There are supposed the first person to interact with about your
They too will tell you to ask the AI. Then you can go to your supervisors supervisor, which is already a big pain, because academia is also a lot about interpersonal dependence, as your supervisor can make your life easy or hard, and they might not take criticism well.
> They too will tell you to ask the AI
I’m sorry you had that experience. It sounds like your supervisors don’t take their job seriously.
Beautiful writing style. So light, still eloquent.
Really? The writer seems like a piece of work to me. Half the post is bragging, a big chunk is insinuating bad qualities at peers and superiors.
> "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.
Reads like a diary entry. I sympathise, I just wish there were some conclusion the piece could come to, some action I could take or insight I could gleam. But nope, its just another soul trapped in the torment matrix.
(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)
I’m being reminded of “journey before destination”, quite a bit since AI has come out.
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 was wondering about this the other day Thank God OpenAI didn't come up with Docker. Otherwise we would be drinking water from bottles rhat are docker enabled
Time and time again, I see the same complaints. A new technology comes and it removes bottlenecks. The ideal person should be ecstatic with new capabilities being unlocked. But they are complaining. Why?
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.
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The purpose of a university is to provide a paper stating that one has completed it. If llms can do something decently, it is a waste of time to learn it properly.
If you're using a university to get credentials that are necessary to open the doors you need to reach your goals, then sure, that's what they are for. That's more or less how I thought of them before I went to college.
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.
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Not worth reading. A lot of whining about ChatGPT and lazy Oxford students, not enough substance, only "wisdoms" like "But mirrors can be dangerous if we stay for too long too charmed by our own reflection".
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> Classic slavic attitude (judging by your username). Worst software colleagues I ever had (you always have to be like binary with them: either you are right or wrong, either you provide something “valuable” or not… never something in between, never sympathy)
Didn’t like their comment either but what in the world kind of racist response is this. Where did this come from?
Probably experience.
(Disclaimer: I have Slavic roots.)
How is this bigoted reply getting upvoted and not reported?
I didn't expect racism on HN, but here we are.
Race and culture are distinct. Slavic is not considered a race, but an ethnolinguistic and cultural classification.
Having said that, this is pretty lazy stereotyping (Slavic -> binary thinking).
Some societies may encourage more categorical, absolutist, or hierarchical ways of thinking, depending on their educational systems, political traditions, and social norms.
But such an analysis would probably have to be done at a country level.
I'm pretty sure about existence of cultural racism