alt Hacker NewsA natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users.
I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people.
I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting.
I think what's happening is the AI system draws poorly aligned and led engineers into this ego inflation feedback loop where they are completely detached from reality because these tools can simulate a better one.
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I'm seeing this happen in the security space right now. Someone on my team I was helping train and bring along is all of sudden regressing in their understanding of the issues we're working on, and instead focusing on AI tool outputs to do their job for them.
I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it
I think what's happening is ... poorly aligned and led engineers [in] this ego inflation feedback loop where they are completely detached from reality
A story about a team of humans with some very human problems.
I've felt that AI can figure out and fix 90% issues, but it rarely does minimal, non invasive fixes. That still requires manual effort. But going from a broad to minimal fix is still a different skillset from actual debugging, so in the the end it does lead to skill atrophy.
I it usually doesn't get me in this weird state of mind, but I once spent 6 months (all-in) building a thing that I, once finished, just left alone completely (on disk gathering dust). Weird experience. So I'd say AI physchosis is real.
Sincerely , I think you're blaming the AI incorrectly there. You just got incompetents on your payroll.
I think LLMs have some of the same risks and benefits of stimulant drugs. They can make you more productive if used effectively as a tool, but they can also delude you into thinking you are better than you are and create a dependence such that you aren't just less productive without the LLM/drug, you fail to be productive at all because you don't know how to function without it.
I don't think it's engineers, it's the rest of the org insulating the tech workers from every side of the business
If the solution is so simple, why claude did not found it? At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me).
After three decades of outsourcing to lowest bidder, I do not buy that humans are somehow better!
> patient, old school troubleshooting
I usually see similar arguments around systems with major red flags (no docs, poor CI, decade ago no CVS...). And engineers with private stash of workarounds for job security!
Claude does not do anything special.
Or perhaps claude was misconfigured, it had no access to relevant part of system, and it tryied to work within its limitation. Often it means decompiling binaries in desperate loop...
It's the uncanny valley of AI. It's still not quite good enough that you can trust it blindly on a big codebase, so you still have to read and understand everything - which is often harder than just writing it up yourself.
EDIT: don’t get me wrong. I still think AI is incredibly useful for a lot of tasks! But when implementing an architecturally hairy thing, I find it less stressful and equally quick to jump down to the editor level and use AI just for code completion.