@einalex @robpike well they work right up until they don't. We had engineering to deal with that before, but apparently that was dull.
Would an AI Bro want to fly a plane his chat bot built? Or walk his family across a bridge one of them sketched up? (a few took their families down in a sub that an A-level mechanics student could have told you was a bad idea, so I'm not actually sure the answer to either of those is a "no").

@golemwire @robpike exactly. These tools skip the "why" and the "how" of the things they do. Even if you ask them to explain the "why" of something, you can't trust the answer. At least if I ask a good teacher why they want me to do X a certain way they can (I hope), give me an honest answer that I can research further (even if it is that best of honest answers "I don't know").

@einalex @robpike my friends mini-ATX motherboard is not sitting in a mini-ATX case that is definitely a case.
Now, he could have taken measurements, and built that case. Even modified another design. he could have understood what he did, and he would then be able to modify it without paying billionaires to do so.
LLMs are an intellectual catastrophe, and a moral failing. But we look stupid if we deny the daily reality of people using them.

@einalex @robpike On the specific cases of both Tacoma bridge, and the Millenium bridge, you do a disservice to the *engineers* that built those to the understood specs. Tacoma wasn't built with unprecedented winds in mind, and the millenium bridge was fine until unexpectedly large crowds did something we didn't realise they did.
We're doing a terrible thing with LLMs which is *exactly* the opposite of what the studious, learned, and hard working engineers on both those bridge actually did.

@einalex @robpike that's not reality. I was at his house for dinner, there were 6 of us there. I was the only one not using these tools. Everyone else is using them daily. Two of those were kids.
He built an actual object, a working case. It doesn't matter to him that it is built on the stolen work of others. He wanted to do a thing, and it did it (the object exists, that's not something that can be argued against).

@einalex @robpike this particular friend is definitely not "neurotypical", and wouldn't have got as far as he has without being curious. I get the desire to just get stuff done.
In fact, he *did* describe what he'd genuinely learned about approaching tasks using an LLM, and that was in itself interesting.
But he hadn't learned how to do the thing he wanted to do. He'd learned how to pay someone else to do it for him, and he was weirdly excited about that bit.

@nickzoic ...and he did it in ways I don't think 99% of the population would even imagine, with simple geometry, rotations, and extrusions and symmetry, and extruded swept shapes. (what I'd later know as CSG).
It completely blew my mind that there was this entirely different way of seeing the world.
And that's the joy of learning, and I really cannot fathom why people would want to skip that.

@nickzoic dad always used to ask me questions about how I thought things worked (to keep me curious I guess). I caught a glimpse of him working over his shoulder and asked him what he was doing, and in the process I asked him how he make a model of a chair.
He opened an empty document and proceeded to build a proper sculpted, curved, chair (the style with baton for a back rest). No child's sketch. A real chair. He did it in about 5 minutes...

@nickzoic since you're a CAD person, I'll share a story I shared with him during this discussion.
My dad was a product engineer and product designer, and specialised in autocad and pro-engineer. I always thought he was smart but never really understood what he did. Then, one day I went in to his office on a weekend (to play games on one of the PCs, we didn't have one at home)...

@robpike I've been programming since I was seven, and doing this stuff professionally for 30 years . I've got 15 years worth of mortgage left. All I really want to do right now is crawl under a rock. I simply can't bring myself to use these things. Not just the tools, I could cope with a bit of fancy auto complete, but it's the insane money, all going back to a dozen people. Paying them o turn our industry into another meat grinder?
It's all too much.

@robpike I had a conversation with a close friend (also works in IT, we met 30 years ago).
He'd built a 3d print of a computer case using Claude to generate OpenSCAD.
What was most curious was his complete indifference to the generated code. He said he didn't learn any openscad syntax, and could not modify it without Claude if he wanted to.
The complete lack of curiosity involved was fascinating, and mildly chilling. Fine for a 48 year old man /maybe/, but is that what we want?