>There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it.

Yes, it’s a god of the gaps situation. We don’t know what the ceiling is. We might have hit it, there might be a giant leap forward ahead, we might leap back (if there is a rug pull).

The most interesting questions are the ones that assume human equivalency.

Suppose an AI can produce like a human.

Are you ok with merging that code without human review?

Are you ok with having a codebase that is effectively a black box?

Are you ok with no human being responsible for how the codebase works, or able to take the reins if something changes?

Are you ok with being dependent on the company providing this code generation?

Are we collectively ok with the eventual loss of human skills, as our talents rust and the new generation doesn’t learn them?

Will we be ok if the well of public technical discussion LLMs are feeding from dries up?

Those are the interesting debates I think.

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Symmetry 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Are you ok with having a codebase that is effectively a black box?

When was the last time you looked at the machine code your compiler was giving you? For me, doing embedded development on an architecture without a mature compiler the answer is last Friday but I expect that the vast majority of readers here never look at their machine code. We have abstraction layers that we've come to trust because they work in practice. To do our work we're dependent on the companies that develop our compilers where we can at least see the output, but also companies that make our CPUs which we couldn't debug without a huge amount of specialized equipment. So I expect that mostly people will be ok with it.

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kace91 2 days ago | parent [-]

>When was the last time you looked at the machine code your compiler was giving you?

You could rephrase that as “when was the last time your compiler didn’t work as expected?”. Never in my whole career in my case. Can we expect that level of reliability?

I’m not making the argument of “the LLM is not good enough”. that would brings us back to the boring dissuasion of “maybe it will be”.

The thing is that human langauge is ambiguous and subject to interpretation, so I think we will have occasionally wrong output even with perfect LLMs. That makes black box behavior dangerous.

	▲	Symmetry 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		We certainly can't expect that with LLMs now but neither could compiler users back in the 1970s. I do agree that we probably won't ever have them generating code without more back and forth where the LLM complains that its instructions were ambiguous and then testing afterwards.

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listenallyall 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have you ever double-checked (in human fashion, not just using another calculator) the output from a calculator?

When calculators were first introduced I'm sure some people such as scientists and accountants did exactly that. Calculators were new, people likely had to be slowly convinced that these magic devices could be totally accurate.

But you and I were born well after the invention of calculators, our entire lives nobody has doubted that even a $2 calculator can immediately determine the square root of an 8-digit number and be totally accurate. So nobody verifies, and also, a lot of people can't do basic math.

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etherlord 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I dont think it really matters if your or I or regular people are ok with it if the people with power are. There doesnt seem to be much any of us regular folks can do to stop it, especially as Ai eliminates more and more jobs thus further reducing the economic power of everyday people

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kace91 2 days ago | parent [-]

I disagree. There are personal decisions to make:

Do you bet on keeping your technical skills sharpened, or stop and focus on product work and AI usage?

Do you work for companies that go full AI or try to find one that stays “manual”?

What advice do you offer as a technical lead when asked?

Leadership ignoring technical advice is nothing new, but there is still value in figuring out those questions.

	▲	bluefirebrand a day ago \| parent [-]
		> What advice do you offer as a technical lead when asked Learn to shoot a gun and grow your own food, that's my advice as a technical lead right now