MicroPosts
- AI is not about working faster
This is why I care so much about the productivity boost I get from LLMs so much: it's not about getting work done faster, it's about being able to ship projects that I wouldn't have been able to justify spending time on at all.
- Exploring codebases with AI
Good LLMs are great at answering questions about code.
This is also very low stakes: the worst that can happen is they might get something wrong, which may take you a tiny bit longer to figure out. It's still likely to save you time compared to digging through thousands of lines of code entirely by yourself.
The trick here is to dump the code into a long context model and start asking questions. My current favorite for this is the catchily titled gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05, a preview of Google's Gemini 2.0 Pro which is currently free to use via their API.
- Write the dumbest possible code
The AI took me too literally 😅
- Why I don't feel threatened by AI
My perspective on this as a developer who's been using these systems on a daily basis for a couple of years now is that I find that they enhance my value. I am so much more competent and capable as a developer because I've got these tools assisting me. I can write code in dozens of new programming languages that I never learned before.
But I still get to benefit from my 20 years of experience.
Take somebody off the street who's never written any code before and ask them to build an iPhone app with ChatGPT. They are going to run into so many pitfalls, because programming isn't just about can you write code - it's about thinking through the problems, understanding what's possible and what's not, understanding how to QA, what good code is, having good taste.
There's so much depth to what we do as software engineers.
I've said before that generative AI probably gives me like two to five times productivity boost on the part of my job that involves typing code into a laptop. But that's only 10 percent of what I do. As a software engineer, most of my time isn't actually spent with the typing of the code. It's all of those other activities.
The AI systems help with those other activities, too. They can help me think through architectural decisions and research library options and so on. But I still have to have that agency to understand what I'm doing.
So as a software engineer, I don't feel threatened. My most optimistic view of this is that the cost of developing software goes down because an engineer like myself can be more ambitious, can take on more things. As a result, demand for software goes up - because if you're a company that previously would never have dreamed of building a custom CRM for your industry because it would have taken 20 engineers a year before you got any results... If it now takes four engineers three months to get results, maybe you're in the market for software engineers now that you weren't before.
Accessibility and Gen AI Ep 6 - Simon Willison - Creator, Datasette
- AI allucination
- Human-AI Symbiosis
- Start with your idea and use AI on top
- Don't replace people or you lose wisdom: purpose, mission, culture
- A chess game with AI vs AI+Human would see the latter win 10x
- Automating with AI means you now have the time for the things you keep postponing (and not less work to do)
- How to develop creativity? Make people work on problems that can only be solved by being creative
- You need to know the domain to prompt properly an LLM
- The 70% AI problem
- AI is most useful to senior people
- AI gets you 70% of the way, but you need to know what you are doing to complete the remaining 30%
- Use AI to accelerate the known and/or explore possibilities
Source: https://addyo.substack.com/p/the-70-problem-hard-truths-about
- AI bias
I shared in Why Good Solutions Block Better Ones why the first idea that comes to your mind may make you ignore other ones.
And here we are!