Notes/#ai×/2 entries

AI is everywhere now and most people hate that, at least in the West. I can understand why. I have to use AI daily now for my work as a software engineer, and increasingly many things I build are effectively some version of “use an LLM to make this feel like magic”. I can appreciate the sentiment behind this in the sense that LLMs appear remarkably capable when asked simple questions about a number of topics, but it is also way too easy to just throw an LLM into the mix and actually end up making everything worse. The industry has vastly underestimated the amount of engineering discipline it takes to make LLMs actually complete tasks reliably or do anything useful from a normal person’s perspective. Which IMO is a big part of what is behind the general disapproval of AI outside the tech industry (among many other reasons).

The overarching principle I wish all product engineers would adopt in their approach to integrating “AI” is that it should always remove friction, not create it. If your “agent” is effectively just throwing up walls of text for me to review, that is not helpful. Other things that are not helpful:

• making decisions that I have to figure out how to go double check or undo
• doing things on my behalf that I have to correct
• impersonating me

Hopefully you get the idea. If you are embedding AI into a product that people use, please ask yourself before you ship “does this make my user’s life better or worse?” If it adds friction to their experience in any way, do not ship it. Fix it first so that your users genuinely benefit from this new integrated “intelligence”, such as it is, and make sure it’s not just another thing they have to work around or figure out how to disable to use your product.

The thing I hate most about AI is that it has made it very difficult to actually learn something new anymore. I have become convinced that if you already know what you are doing, AI can be quite cool. It definitely allows me to develop more and better software than ever before (which I'm not convinced yet is necessarily a good thing, but it is cool). The problem is, though, if you don't know what you're doing, AI has made it more or less impossible to tell what is true or not anymore. This is actually a huge problem for learning. If you don't know what you don't know, how can you possibly sift through the sheer volume of slop that has flooded the internet on whatever topic you're trying to learn about? This is actually a frustrating problem.