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by scragz 260 days ago
there's some minority that's in the venn diagram of being good at programming, being good at AI, then also being good at using AI for programming (which is mostly project management), and if everything aligns then there are superhuman productivity gains.

I'm tackling projects solo I never would have even attempted before but I could see people getting bad results and giving up.
2 comments
laserlight 260 days ago
> if everything aligns then there are superhuman productivity gains.

This is a truism and, I believe, is at the core of the disagreement on how useful AI tools are. Some people keep talking about outlier success. Other people are unimpressed with the performance in ordinary tasks, which seem to take longer because of back-and-forth prompting.

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serpix 260 days ago
Same here! Started learning self hosted k3s, with terraform and IaC and all the bells and whistles. I would never have had the energy to look up how to even get started. In three hours I have a cluster.
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lelanthran 260 days ago
Doesn't sound like you learned it, sounds like it did it for you, using you as the tool.

IOW, can you redo it by yourself? If you can't then you did not learn it.

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sally_glance 260 days ago
Is that really a fair comparison? I think the amount of people who can memorize each and every configuration item is vanishingly small... even when I was bootstrapping k8s clusters before the dawn of LLMs I had to lookup current documentation and maybe some up to date tutorials.

Knowing the abstract steps and tripwires yes, but details will always have to be looked up. If just not to miss any new developments.

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lelanthran 260 days ago
> Is that really a fair comparison?

Well, yes it is; you can't very well claim to have learned something if you are unable to do it.

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alvah 260 days ago
It doesn't matter - GP is now able to do things they were unable to do before. A distinction without a (real-world) difference.
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lelanthran 260 days ago
> It doesn't matter - GP is now able to do things they were unable to do before. A distinction without a (real-world) difference.

I get that point, but the original post I replied to didn't say "Hey, I know have $THING set up when I never had it before", he said "I learned to do $THING", which is a whole different assertion.

I'm not contending the assertion that he now has a thing he did not have before, I'm contending the assertion that he has learned something.

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