RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116219642373307943
I wish I could recommend this piece more, because it makes a bunch of great points, but the "normal technology" case feels misleading to me. It's not _wrong_, exactly, but radium paint was also a "normal technology" according to this rubric, and I still very much don't want to get any on me and especially not in my mouth
For me, this is the body horror money quote from that Scientific American article:
"participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all"
So maybe you can't use it "responsibly", or "safely". You can't even ignore it and choose not to use it once you've seen it.
If you can see it, the basilisk has already won.
But, as Cory puts it:
"""
It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale.
"""
I had a very visceral emotional reaction to this particular paragraph, and I find it very important to refute. Here are two points to consider:
1. YES THEY ARE.
They are vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They are generating tech debt at scale. They don't THINK that that's what they're doing. Do you think most programmers conceive of their daily (non-LLM) activities as "putting in lots of bugs"? No, that is never what we say we're doing. Yet, we turn around, and there all the bugs are.
With LLMs, we can look at the mission-critical AWS modules and ask after the fact, were they vibe-coded? AWS says yes https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes.1511983/
Furthermore, it is not "nuts" to dismiss LLM user experiences. In fact, you must dismiss all subjective experience of LLM use as evidence of objective phenomena, even if the LLM user is yourself. Fly by instruments because the cognitive fog is too thick for your eyes to see.
Because the novel thing about LLMs, the thing that makes them dangerous, is that they are—by design—epistemic disruptors.
They can produce symboloids more rapidly than a thinking mind. Repetition influences cognition.
@glyph I like your breakdown in those articles.
I think that some of the more valuable stuff has been not when juniors prompt and don’t get value, but when seniors prompt, go do something else for a bit while the machine churns for a couple of minutes, and then come back to something that is pretty close to a good solution.
Think about a thing that might take you 15 minutes to kinda menially do (add some CLI bo flag that then needs to get passed down 3 layers in some spot for example)
@glyph lowering of activation energy is how I see that. And while I agree that the futzing is way undercounted (and that, IMO, a lot of this falls over in longer sessions and is just not worth it)… a strong dev who knows exactly what the solution is supposed to look like can get paper cut-y stuff cleaned up. A lot.
The “whine on slack about a thing being busted” turns into a fix, and most of that you can just go get a cup of water or review something in the meantime. Cool party trick at least
@raphael @glyph The thing that the LLM is getting you to not think about is that it shouldn't take passing things down three layers (much less more, which is more common). This is the boilerplate that everyone hates and the goal should be to remove the need for it at all, not produce more faster.
"The least worst way to use an LLM is to do something you already know how to do", now with the addendum that we don't know what we don't know.
Glyph
Raphael
Russell