'AI' is Not a Tool
www.linkedin.com
(I keep delivering this as a quip, here's a bit more) First order of business - is 'tool' going to have an interesting, distinguishing and thus illuminative meaning or be a mere platitudinous stand-in for "anything useful"? We'll save tool as "anyone/thing that can be exploited" for the AI titans, f
  • dieTasse@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    I think that is the whole issue. AI should be used as a tool to enhance our skill, instead people are using it as self sufficient entities, the result of which are burnt tokens and unmaintainable and buggy code. Same is valid for other areas. Instead of letting it generate an email - a wall of text that has to be interpreted by another llm - maybe use it to check on your grammar or suggest changes in the text you write.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      3 days ago

      Is it true that more experienced / knowledgeable / capable people, if at all, have more of an advantage from it, than juniors?

      And on the other hand, it seems to me that these things are designed to take things out of our hands - “let me write that difficult email for you”, and so on…

      • dieTasse@feddit.orgEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        Yes it is true. AI gets better if you know the right questions to ask. Inexperienced people ask the wrong questions because they don’t know the pitfalls.

        It’s such a bad experience to have to read ai written emails. I would rather read short grammatically incorrect email than formally well written novel from llm. Write your email, ask ai to fix grammar or check formal vs informal phrases and send it, you will do a favor to your recipient and on top of that you will learn something.

      • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        3 days ago

        Is it true that more experienced / knowledgeable / capable people, if at all, have more of an advantage from it, than juniors?

        100% true. The kids using clankers to write code didn’t cut their teeth on all of the subtle code flaws that can creep into your own hand-written code if you didn’t have a good understanding of the problem to begin with. Clankers pick the most pedestrian, mediocre solutions possible if you let them because the vast majority of code that can be scraped for training data is pedestrian and mediocre.

        At work, I review what the juniors generated with the clanker and constantly find shitty things they missed (eg. I found they had added a boolean argument to a function and passed it all the way down a very long call chain so they could do a branch somewhere stupid. note that boolean wasn’t used anywhere else). These are also the kind of people that will create single call site private methods in classes that makes it impossible to grok a piece of code without the doorway effect because they cargo culted the idea of DRY. All of this shit is in the training data because most of your software engineers are also on a normal distribution and most of them suck. So yeah, giving kids access to clankers is a recipe for shitloads of re-work and wasted tokens. Kids can’t catch the clanker fuck ups because they’ve never seen them before.

      • aksdb@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I would say yes. I have colleagues who have a hard time solving some tasks with an agent. Then I take a stab at it and succeed almost immediately. We both have the same freedom to choose and customize the available tools, but apparently my setup and usage is better.

      • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
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        3 days ago

        “let me write that difficult email for you”

        Honestly I like this one because people don’t appreciate the brief nature that I write in. I draft a message and then let AI rewrite all the feel good stuff people want to see.