Programming

I fear this is a problem that may never be solved. I mean that people of any intelligence fall for the mind's biases.

There's just too little to be gained feelings-wise. Yeah, you make better decisions, but you're also sacrificing "going with the flow", acting like our nature wants us to act. Going against your own nature is hard and sometimes painful.

Making wrong decisions is objectively worse, leading to worse outcomes, but if it doesn't feel worse (because you're not attributing the effects of the wrong decisions to the right cause, i.e. acting irrationally), then why should a person do it. If you follow the mind's bias towards attributing your problems away from irrationality, it's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Great article.

Reponding to another comment in [email protected]:

Writing code is itself a process of scientific exploration; you think about what will happen, and then you test it, from different angles, to confirm or falsify your assumptions.

What you confuse here is doing something that can benefit from applying logical thinking with doing science. For exanple, mathematical arithmetic is part of math and math is science. But summing numbers is not necessarily doing science. And if you roll, say, octal dice to see if the result happens to match an addition task, it is certainly not doing science, and no, the dice still can't think logically and certainly don't do math even if the result sometimes happens to be correct.

For the dynamic vs static typing debate, see the article by Dan Luu:

https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/

But this is not the central point of the above blog post. The central point of it is that, by the very nature of LLMs to produce statistically plausible output, self-experimenting with them subjects one to very strong psychological biases because of the Barnum effect and therefore it is, first, not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-experimentation(!) , and second, it is even harmful because these effects lead to self-reinforcing and harmful beliefs.

And the quibbling about what "thinking" means is just showing that the arguments pro-AI has degraded into a debate about belief - the argument has become "but it seems to be thinking to me" even if it is technically not possible and also not in reality observed that LLMs apply logical rules, cannot derive logical facts, can not explain output by reasoning , are not aware about what they 'know' and don't 'know', or can not optimize decisions for multiple complex and sometimes contradictory objectives (which is absolutely critical to any sane software architecture).

What would be needed here are objective controlled experiments whether developers equipped with LLMs can produce working and maintainable code any faster than ones not using them.

And the very likely result is that the code which they produce using LLMs is never better than the code they write themselves.

Another similar article that's really good:

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

If you have to use AI - maybe your work insists on it - always demand it cite its sources, hope they are relevant, and go read those instead.

What's the difference between copying a function from stack overflow and copying a function from a llm that has copied it from SO?

LLM are sort of a search engine with advanced language substitution features nothing more nothing less.