> If he's not the person to test, iterate, and deliver quality with AI, he probably wouldn't be without it
I see the take quite often on HN, and I have a major gripe with it. Yes, people were lazy and we had these problems before LLMs hit the scene, but clearly there has been a sea-change in both the frequency and degree of this behaviour since.
A problem can both exist independent of a catalyst and be exacerbated by it. Arguments that try to window-dress this away are not particularly productive.
I think one of my most repeated tropes on HN is bringing up that scale and degree matter. A problem of a kind is of a completely different kind when the scale is another order of magnitude.
A simple example: with picture editing software people have been able to create believable fake content for a long time, it did require skill which limited the scale, with genAI creating in seconds, by anyone, a much more plausible fake image than most people were able to before creates a whole other kind of problem that didn't exist before.
It's a tired argument to reduce issues to analogous which existed before and discard how the scale and degree of it changes the class of problem...
Seems like exactly the kind of distinction that would be a common refrain on HN, yet somehow on this topic it's gone out the window.
> A simple example: with picture editing software
Actually reminds me of a story a professor in a comsci ethics class once told about how the police in South Africa (during the apartheid years) would take photos of everyone protesting the regime at the university campus. Back then (this was the 80s) nobody really cared - what were they going to do, go through all the photos by hand?
He said "imagine how much more concerned people would be today". That was in 2011 or so.
It's a sea change because a lot of this code looks plausible and seems to work to someone inexperienced at assuring quality, and it will take some time before the people emboldened by that learn.
I just yesterday had an agent produce a prototype that appeared to work and that looked plausibly well engineered, except I knew from experience that what it had done should be doable with a tenth of the codebase.
Someone without experience might've just accepted that prototype. It took one prompt to get it turned into a reasonable MVP, but you'd need to know what to ask, and you'd need to know you needed to ask.
I think the argument is quite valid. OP writes "business partner". It begs the question - would their business partner get on board if they didn't have a AI subscription by their side? How about instead of 5K PR, OP got the same half-baked buggy crap or absolutely nothing instead? We don't know the business partner, but we are ready to throw the problem at AI agents right away. Well, I find this not particularly productive.
> but we are ready to throw the problem at AI agents right away
I'm not sure I understand this correctly, but I assume it means blaming the agents? If so, that's not my point - I'm describing how many people are using them to be lazy, which shouldn't be particularly controversial.
To your other question: if OP had gotten half the size PR to go through, that sounds more manageable to me? If they had gotten nothing, that could be a useful signal about the capability of their business partner, worth knowing now rather than later. Could one imagine a situation where AI enables a thoughtful business partner to provide more value? Absolutely. Should this be the default assumption? I'd argue that it absolutely shouldn't.
we started this project before was mainstream (we got sidetracked by other work) and him having less experience but being a very good programmer (I went with him to college and worked together for years), he would listen to my input, fix, and adjust. I have decades of experience.
Really sorry to hear so. Your story reinforces a fear I have that humanity is being squeezed out of all manner of things (pre AI too, but even more so since).
> With AI the solution to it is also trivial since an extra three seconds spent writing a prompt could have had the agent run and verify it.
This just recurses the original problem by an additional step: assuming someone is even bothered to write the prompt, they are just as unlikely as before to check what it spits out.
AI may be a productivity amplifier for some, but I don't think it's far-fetched to describe it as a laziness magnifier for the majority.
I agree with your sentiment. Simply saying 'AI' is not the reason, clouds what is actually happening. To illustrate I suggest playing the word swapping game. Swap AI in the sentence "AI isn't the problem" with, guns, drugs, gambling, or dare I say social media!
Human behaviour is complex. Patterns of behaviour that occur in general (there are always outliers of course) dictate so much in society, culture, politics and inter-human relations. Changing these behavioural patterns will affect meaningful real world change.
Social media has affected change in human behaviour. I suspect AI will too. We are starting to see the first shoots of the changes AI will bring.
Human behaviour on the average will choose convenience over effort. It is very difficult to buck this trend societally. To be clear, AI provides an immense amount of convenience.
I see the take quite often on HN, and I have a major gripe with it. Yes, people were lazy and we had these problems before LLMs hit the scene, but clearly there has been a sea-change in both the frequency and degree of this behaviour since.
A problem can both exist independent of a catalyst and be exacerbated by it. Arguments that try to window-dress this away are not particularly productive.