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- Hacker News
- An AI system cannot replace professional people. It doesn’t replicate or do the work that they do. That’s not what it is for and it is incapable of performing these tasks.
If you are using these systems you still need to know what you want and how to specify it. You can use agents to automate much of the work but it can’t tell you that your ideas are bad, that there’s a better way to accomplish your goals; it can’t tell you what you want. And if you can’t understand what it is outputting you’re failing in your primary task as a developer: understanding the problem.
I agree with the title. I just don’t think these systems will ever be capable of replacing humans. As much as product managers and executives would love it and not have to deal with us; they’ll just be shooting themselves in the foot if they try to replace professional developers with AI harnesses and fire all the people with the institutional knowledge and skill.
by agentultra - "What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy?" Maybe some form of liability, accountability...
New concept: the AI patsy
by 01284a7e - Airline pilots and train conductors are basically meat proxies 95% of the time and they are still employed. Still necessary for when things really go wrong.by LZ_Khan
- You are a photographer from the olden age. Taking a photo back then took forever. You are standing on a hill trying to get the perfect picture of a sunset. You measure and sort and calculate angles and light. A tourist stands next to you with an high-speed iphone auto-settings camera. They spin around and get thousands of photos from different angles while you are thinking and measuring your one shot. That’s what AI does. It gives you many shots at the same problem. The thinking guy with the one approach will likely lose a photo competition to one of the accidentally better shots of the person who tried a lot more. Make and filter now may be a better approach than overthink and try only once.by dzink
- I think a lot of people are not able to reason to this point and then adjust behaviour accordingly. They probably reason to the point when pressed for it, but cannot resist the low effort and low resistance route of asking AI, and then probably make up reasons why in their case it's fine (typical behaviour to address cognitive dissonance).
Then again, for many people their job security doesn't depend on what work they do, it depends on how well they are embedded in the organisation. Before AI you also already had plenty of people doing their job at a questionable level, yet never seem to get fired.
by jochem9 - Even pre-LLM: I've found a lot of colleagues (mystifyingly to me, both seniors and juniors) who really want to be able to turn their brain off when doing investigations into complicated cross-system behavior (feedback loops abound), and they don't like hearing that it can't be collapsed into a runbook. If a drinking bird (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird) on an Enter key could do it, I could rig something up so I wouldn't need you!by kixiQu
- It doesn't help that this is being forced from above. I agree you can't turn off your brain, but any time I argue that AI isn't the right tool for something management gets angry. There is a constant push to fully automate things, regardless of what those things are.
Even if I agree that you have to use your brain, when my boss is literally telling me to stop questioning whether AI automation is the right answer in team meetings/chats I'm just going to shut up and give them what they want.
by Arainach - Yes, and: the most important time to use your brain isn't in the loop.
That _is_ valuable, and will remain so, but the temptation to turn it off is there because the loop is good and getting better at what it does. Once you're in the loop, with the rare high-value exception of catching total mistakes nad redirecting, you're mostly choosing between similar-yet-reasonable options. This isn't so much right-vs-wrong as relativistic optimization. Letting the loop do the work will get you a mediocre result quickly, and that's usually fine.
The most important time to use your brain is _before the prompt_. Once you engage with your LLM and agent, you start biasing yourself, and its reasonable suggestions constrain your visibility into other options, other worlds.
First, use your brain. Then write the prompt.
by Arubis