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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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728 points freetonik | 3 comments | 21 Aug 25 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.761s | source
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thallavajhula ◴[21 Aug 25 19:27 UTC] No.44976973[source]▶
I’m loving today. HN’s front page is filled with some good sources today. No nonsense sensationalism or preaching AI doom, but more realistic experiences.

I’ve completely turned off AI assist on my personal computer and only use AI assist sparingly on my work computer. It is so bad at compound work. AI assist is great at atomic work. The rest should be handled by humans and use AI wisely. It all boils down back to human intelligence. AI is only as smart as the human handling it. That’s the bottom line.

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tick_tock_tick ◴[21 Aug 25 19:44 UTC] No.44977158[source]▶
> AI is only as smart as the human handling it.

I think I'm slowly coming around to this viewpoint too. I really just couldn't understand how so many people were having widely different experiences. AI isn't magic; how could I have expected all the people I've worked with who struggle to explain stuff to team members, who have near perfect context, to manage to get anything valuable across to an AI?

I was original pretty optimistic that AI would allow most engineers to operate at a higher level but it really seems like instead it's going to massively exacerbate the difference between an ok engineer and a great engineer. Not really sure how I feel about that yet but at-least I understand now why some people think the stuff is useless.

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btucker ◴[21 Aug 25 20:03 UTC] No.44977381[source]▶
I've been starting to think of it like this:

Great Engineer + AI = Great Engineer++ (Where a great engineer isn't just someone who is a great coder, they also are a great communicator & collaborator, and love to learn)

Good Engineer + AI = Good Engineer

OK Engineer + AI = Mediocre Engineer

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1. QuercusMax ◴[21 Aug 25 20:23 UTC] No.44977612[source]▶
I recently watched a mid-level engineer use AI to summarize some our code, and he had it put together a big document describing all the various methods in a file, what they're used for, and so forth. It looked to me like a huge waste of time, as the code itself was already very readable (I say this as someone who recently joined the project), and the "documentation" the AI spit out wasn't that different than what you'd get just by running pydoc.

He took a couple days doing this, which was shocking to me. Such a waste of time that would have been better spent reading the code and improving any missing documentation - and most importantly asking teammates about necessary context that couldn't just be inferred from the code.

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2. stocksinsmocks ◴[22 Aug 25 02:15 UTC] No.44980387[source]▶
I hate to break it to you, but this guy probably wasn’t working at all. That sounds like a pretense to goof off.

Now I could believe an intern would do such a thing. I’ve seen a structural engineer intern spend four weeks creating a finite element model of a single concrete vault. he could have treated the top deck as a concrete beam used conservative assumptions about the loading and solved it with pen and paper in 30 minutes.

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3. QuercusMax ◴[22 Aug 25 22:06 UTC] No.44990428[source]▶
Well, said engineer is no longer working at my company. He wasn't exactly the best developer...