I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day. Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.

▲ ungreased0675 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.

▲ jvanderbot 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

Sure, but even worse, is the state-of-the-art: they use a cli agent and the "copy-paste, try to run, paste error, try to run" loop is called "Agentic engineering." Now we have to believe they're 10/10?

I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.

	▲	14 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
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	▲	derrida 10 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		while 0: `x=ctrl-c("output error report") eval(ctrl-v(x)) sleep(10) user("Input...")` something like this?

▲ xyproto 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's also very easy to dismiss everyone falling into the "AI trap" as being mediocre in the first place, though. But one just can't know this without having seen their work pre-AI.

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bigfishrunning 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think the "meat proxy" people are mediocre regardless of whether or not the were brilliant pre-AI. They've reduced themselves to a copy-paste go-between for claude and slack (or github or jira or whatever) and are mediocre now. If only they could turn back the clock...

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embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think people tend to forget that not only do we ourselves have different skillsets and can be amazing at one thing but horrible but another, but this also applies to other people in the world! Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.

Maybe this «spearheading AI person» just sucks at AI related stuff, as clearly that approach is bananas, but they could still be a OK developer.

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skydhash an hour ago | parent [-]

> Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.

If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results or be a reverse centaur, then I’d be glad not to be able to work with them.

I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow. No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools. Because they are great levers that lets you create more with less effort.

	▲	vehemenz an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Many developers have narrow job descriptions, and the creative, productive uses of AI aren’t really obvious. Where it shines is glueing systems together or building one-off automations that would take days, or weeks, to figure out. It’s for things you don’t have time to figure out or didn’t think were possible.
	▲	yoz-y an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Eh. The useful LLM usage I see is in internal tools (bugs don’t matter because the output or UI is the only thing that counts and they are throw away) or personal projects that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Both of these can be quite invisible. But the benefit is there.

▲ randusername an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All paradigm shifts and regime changes happen because of a coalition of people that have nothing to gain and everything to lose by the current system.

But I think we should decouple mediocrity from laziness. I haven't seen any team invest in the mentorship required to develop juniors in years, for example.

▲ surgical_fire 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.

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bonoboTP 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is.

Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately undocumented things, like knowing where the config files are and some such. They hate the idea of AI. For my non IT friends its great for diagnosing wifi issues. It's also great for competent network engineers. It's not great for those who gain a salary due to having memorized some actions or settings that they don't even understand much. Note that this group has also already resisted traditional script automation, just like US dock workers who resist automation.

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nmeagent 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.

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vehemenz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

More cringe than obnoxious, but yeah.

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bonoboTP 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mweh, I'm not a native English speaker. It's a definitely existing archetype, though, just like "Spießbürger" points at a thing in German.

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Jensson 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

People who uses the word "obnoxious" are also obnoxious. There are many unpleasant words, you have to use some of them and people don't like any of them.

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dml2135 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The word “obnoxious” does not carry the connotation of smug superiority that “midwit” does.

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nmeagent 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Would you refer to someone as a midwit in a typical office environment and expect your professional reputation to remain intact? If you were to do this on an ongoing basis for whatever reason, how long before you're asked to have a little chat with the folks in HR? Would you then attempt to explain it away as one of those unpleasant words that you just had to use? I want to be there for that conversation.

	▲	bonoboTP an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Different context, different politeness rules. I bet you're fun at parties. An online forum is a relaxed space, like a town pub. HR isn't breathing down our necks here. Personal attacks are a different sort of thing. Using a word to describe in a comment some abstract situations and kinds of characters you see at the office is not a personal attack. There is not one single discourse norm to rule them all and calling out every little thing as too offensive is just annoying. Yeah, yeah there are no midwits, everyone is a unique little genius flower, yeah.
	▲	ndriscoll an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Corporate offices are low trust environments where people do not really openly speak directly in any negative way (for basically the reason you've illustrated), so I wouldn't use them as any kind of standard for normal social interaction.

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surgical_fire 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> very competent who know when and how to use it and for what.

More productive? Sure, to an extent.

Being merely more productive is a tame claim for what some people unashamedly post here

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bonoboTP an hour ago | parent [-]

People apparently can get a very different picture of the same site. Anti-AI people think this site's commenters are mostly pro-AI and vice versa. I'm generally pro-using-AI-in-proper-ways, and mostly have the impression that people on here tend to complain and grumble about AI mostly and are generally skeptical and dismissive of everything which is right in the HN tradition (the famous Dropbox comment etc).

Karpathy, Carmack, Terence Tao, Simon Willison etc. are all smart people and manage to use AI effectively and productively because it doesn't hurt their ego.

	▲	surgical_fire an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Except I am not anti-AI. You can see my comment history.

▲ aquariusDue 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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