ai-yi-yi

Like everyone else, still trying to get a read on the present and future of AI in tech. Most everyone is daunted by being on the wrong side of a "have and have not" divide in terms of being able to use these tools, and thoughtful people have concerns ranging from the cultural to the environmental about the long term impacts.

People's results when handing parts of development over to AI seem to vary greatly, and it's hard to know if people are tackling different problems (so it's not apples to apples comparisons) or if some people are using better tools (or throwing more tokens at things!) or using methods to provide more structure to the AI, vs the "prompt and pray" approach.

It may be useful to see places that are taking more experimental and data-driven approaches, than just relying on anecdotes...

One paper was "How AI Impacts Skill Formation" (by some Anthropic fellows): 

from the abstract:

"Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. [...] We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library."

Another video is "We Studied 150 Developers Using AI" that had a special focus on longer term maintainability, vs just the initial cost.

"Well, the headline is there was no significant difference between the cost of maintenance between AI and human generated code. That's interesting and perhaps not what we might have expected. Code written with AI assistance was no harder to change, no easier to change, no worse in quality and no better in quality."

And also, besides some of the speed up in dev, dev who used AI on the the regular tended to make more idiomatic "normal" code.

Anecdotally this lines up with some of my experiments with Claude Code - where you give high level direction as a PM/QA rather than using CoPilot or ChatGPT has a coding buddy. I feel like the sweet spot is using AI to augment rather than replace the classic developer role. Maybe some of that's wishful thinking, maybe some of that's recognizing the cost these systems have and how they really can lose the thread sometimes. (I mean so can humans, but it has a different feel...)

the old blogosphere and fear of mailto:

Recently I saw an ad for Wes Iseli's "flip" coin magic trick (the algos have figured out I kind of like 'magic exposed' videos) and went to google up more on it and found this blog boston.conman.org entry

So I was tickled to see a link to my own blog,  kirk.is site on the side

(And then a link to flutterby - another long running blog site, even more aggressively rooted in the page layout tropes of an earlier era.)

I realized that the only reason I could reach out to the first link was because of an oldschool mailto: tag - and that my own site didn't have any "contact me" info. I probably avoided putting my own email up because of spammers, though that fight has more or less moved on. (Also there's a kind of half-wise, half-dumb assumption that most people who view my blog actually know me IRL) 

Still, it's nice to see fellow old-school-bloggers still at it. There's probably a kind of mental hangup that keeps us at a pursuit for over two decades... but owning a little piece of the 'net that way before Web 2.0 moved everything onto other people's sites is still kind of fun.

kindle colors

I'm annoyed Amazon swapped up the colors it offers for highlighting in the Kindle App (and the devices that support color.)

Like the colors had meaning that made sense to my brain in a synesthesia kinda of way - yellow "plain old highlight", blue "quote this on the blog" (blue being the color of links), red "I disagree or it makes me annoyed" (red being associated with anger), leaving orange which I used for "I want to go look this up"

These are the new colors, and "Aqua" replaces Blue and "Pink" the old version of Red. Like the colors are close enough that there's not too much conclusion, but it's annoying to have the new palette retroactively applied to all my years of past reading. (I wonder if the choice is aesthetic or has some accessibility concerns I'm unaware of.)

yar's revenge's revenge

In 1982, Atari had a movie trailer commercial featuring the game "Yar's Revenge"....specifically, it was a fanciful "making of" that had the programmer making all kinds of absurdly high level voice commands and gestures to construct an original game.

Of course, this commercial was hitting differently from 1982-2022 (the introduction of accessible LLMs) than it does now - it's still out there but less of a crazy fantasy.

And we've had a year or two of extreme hype. Was LLM - FINALLY - the fulfillment of the dream (started with COBOL, believe it or not) of "*now* the non-programmers can make a program from plain text"?

Well, sort of.

In some places the wheels have fallen off the hype bus. It's tougher to "vibe code" your way to complete system than was promised. When you use a complex "do it all" system like Claude, at least without detailed BDUF (big design up front)/waterfall, regressions show up all the time, and if you're not throwing tons of money at it, you hit token/usage ceilings frustratingly quickly.

I'm fascinated by the modes of collaborating with AI to program. I think I've seen three modes:

A basic chat ala ChatGPT, where you CAN copy and paste a file or block in, but its mostly working out of its sandbox

B do it all systems like Claude... still chat based, but it's more geared at getting a lot of instructions at the outset and doing it all for you

C context sensitive, in-editor solutions like CoPilot in VS Code

I've had a lot of luck with style A, and use style C for work.

I've been writing a bespoke todo webapp with Claude in style B, and the results have been mixed. I repeatedly hit usage limits with the $17/mo program (charged annually) and I'm not positive if that represents Anthropic being more upfront about the costs, or if I'm just asking Claude to do to much, to keep to much in its cyberhead.

Which is the decisive factor right now - when top down things go badly, are you just not doing enough design in your prompts? Should you be throwing more money at it? Or would be better if to take a more "paired programmer" approach.

I think I need to start paying for some CoPilot... letting the human drive the context probably gets better results from "dumber" AI than have an LLM do it all.

As a sci-fi loving kid I said "I think the sweet spot will be computers working in tandem with humans, over computers or humans alone". That seems (optimistically!) weirdly prescient at this moment.

touch screen natives

 My 11 year old nephew independently discovered a kind of fun art technique I made up for myself a decade ago - using layers to draw over a photo, and then using the eyedropper tool to grab a flat color and then apply it to a larger region, resulting in a nice illustrated/cel shaded look.

Being a life long doodler myself, I bought him an iPad and an Apple Pencil last year to encourage this kind of play, but was curious that he ignores the Pencil in favor of the fingers nature gave him. This sort of surprised me; when I doodle on my own iPad I NEED the precision of a good stylus... with a fat opaque fingertip it's too hard to make lines meetup. And his lines were fine!

But I put on my UX researcher hat and observed - and in a minute the answer was clear - he pinches and zooms in ALL the time as needed to where the imprecision of a finger doesn't matter. And not just zoom, but rotate to get a more convenient angle for the coloring motion of his fingertips.

Stodgy old me, growing up with pen-on-paper, this wasn't an option. And I never was comfortable with how some iPad art programs made it "too easy" to rotate. (Heck, my current favorite doodle pad Apple Notes doesn't even have zoom in!)

But this next generation - they're touchscreen native in a way I will never be... The kids are alright.

too many icons

 Making the rounds (as in, Apple fans seeing it on Daring Fireball)

A seriously damning critique of Apples overuse + underdistinguishment of icons on dropdown menus: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

The root cause is that assuming every item needs an icon is a misthink.

I don't know if there's a counter argument that for certain cognitive ways of being, for certain visual thinkers, all the icons help. But probably the old Apple HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) got it right.