AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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.

> 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.

One of my mental models is that the notion of "effective engineer" used to mean "effective software developer" whether or not they were good at system design.

Now, an "effective engineer" can be a less battle-tested software developer, but they must be good at system design.

(And by system design, I don't just mean architecture diagrams: it's a personal culture of constantly questioning and innovating around "let's think critically to see what might go wrong when all these assumptions collide, and if one of them ends up being incorrect." Because AI will only suggest those things for cut-and-dry situations where a bug is apparent from a few files' context, and no ambitious idea is fully that cut-and-dry.)

The set of effective engineers is thus shifting - and it's not at all a valid assumption that every formerly good developer will see their productivity skyrocket.