Discussion

Average Is All You Need

bashwizard: The majority of devs are average. What a shocker.

drfloyd51: If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves?Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with?Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.

CodeyWhizzBang: Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average.I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.

sva_: > Half of people will be below average.s/average/median

wongarsu: The article assumes a normal distribution, making the distinction mootBut it is useful to question whether that is true in all cases. The cases that aren't normal-distributed might be exactly the cases where it pays off to be neither average or median

jagged-chisel: I don’t believe this is a meaningful distinction when we’re not going to agree on how to judge performance of software engineers. If this were solely about income, it might be an important distinction.

winterbloom: how do you know those queries are actually correct without domain knowledge?Do you know enough about JOINs and how they work to be able to break those big queries down and figure out whether they are doing exactly what you're asking for in English?

tsimionescu: > But this is a pain, first because, if you do anything that is not selling a product online that people can buy right when they click a button, it is a drag to create those attribution models effectively: is it last click, first click, weighted attribution... who knows. Nobody knows. Everybody gives up and just adds it to a dashboard and pretends it makes sense.Yes, thinking about your data and how to check it is so annoying. Much better to do something average, see if the result puts you in a good light, and share that insight into your company's working with ~~everyone on the internet~~ your boss.Rarely have I seen "we help you create meaningless slop more easily" advertised so explicitly. Or is this also average?

JackSlateur: Average is all we need ! I mean, working 50% is enough, right ?A car that starts 50% of the time ?A plane that stops on 50% of the flights ?A pacemaker that beats only 50% of the time ?David Goodenought said that average is enough ..

CodeyWhizzBang: A car that starts 50% of the time isn't "average". The average new car starts more or less every time. (And if you said 'modal average', I'd say the modal average new car starts every time).

JackSlateur: It is not average today because people in the past tried to do better, not average things

segh: Being average is a just stage LLMs pass through as AI makes its way towards 'expert' and 'super human' levels.

marginalia_nu: LLMs are trained to predict tokens on highly mediocre code though. How will it exceed its training data?

throwaway98797: adding LLMs to the incompetent doesn’t transform themif anything it makes the world more dangerousa reckoning is comingthe top decile will be janitors for the rest

roenxi: [delayed]

bluegatty: The power saw makes average cuts, it didn't disemploy carpenters, we just made better homes.

utopiah: This is yet another ad, it's tiring.It's a post claiming average AI is useful... by a for-profit "data platform with a CLI that LLM agents can use directly". What are they going to do? Criticize the whole industry they are selling to?

jerf: Reducing the amount of time I spend on the average code has meant I'm spending more time adding my above-average contributions to the code base.How stable that is on the long term, I don't know any more than the next guy, but it is where I'm contributing now.

utopiah: Who are you to question our faith? /s

Retr0id: Humans can decide to write above-average code by putting in more effort, writing comprehensive tests, iteratively refactoring, etc.I think you can have LLMs do that too, and then generate synthetic training data for "high-effort code".

programjames: The majority of any filtered group are below average. Imposter syndrome isn't a thing, 80% of people really did just barely make the cutoff.

j45: The average of quality isn't always available in all people.

bluGill: Because you ask it to improve things and so it produces slightly better than average results - the average person can find things wrong with something, and fix it as well. Then you feed that improved result back in and generate a model where the average is better./end extreme over optimism.

jihadjihad: > You did not write a single line of SQL. You did not set up an attribution model. You asked a question, in English, and got a table.But nobody bothered to check if it was correct. It might seem correct, but I've been burned by queries exactly like the first example many, many times. What can often happen is that you end up with multiplied rows, and the answer isn't "let's just add a DISTINCT somewhere".The answer is to look at the base table and the joins. You're joining customers to two separate one-to-many tables, charges and email_events. If there are multiple charge rows per customer, or an email can match multiple events rows, you can end up with a Cartesian multiplication of the rows since any combination of matches from the base table to the joined tables will be included.So the COUNT (the one without the DISTINCT), AVG, and SUM values are quite possibly inflated, and therefore the pretty pictures you passed along to your boss are wrong.

HWR_14: We make more homes, but I would say the construction of the average home is worse after the invention of the power saw than before it.

antisthenes: Another writer trying to redefine a common english word to mean whatever they want it to mean at the time.Pass.

movedx01: Average is only a tombstone of someone having failed to do better. And settling for average means pulling down.When it comes to bs dashboard where "average is all you need", maybe the "better than average" result would be asking yourself if it's even worth doing in the first place?

marginalia_nu: Well state of the art LLMs sure can't consistently produce high quality code outside of small greenfield projects or tiny demos, which is a domain that was always easy even for humans as there are very few constraints to consider, and the context is very small.Part of the problem is that better code is almost always less code. Where a skilled programmer will introduce a surgical 1-3 LOC diff, an incompetent programmer will introduce 100 LOC. So you'll almost always have a case where the bad code outnumbers the good.

Retr0id: Current LLMs do tend to explode complexity if left to their own devices but I don't think that's an inherent limitation. Mediocre programmers can write good code if they try hard enough and spend enough time on it.

analog31: For that matter, how does a business differentiate themselves, if people can write their own software? While we're busy trying to replace our employees with AI, our customers are trying to replace our products with AI.

throw310822: Why average? I've always taken pride in my work and developed things that went beyond the expectations of the management and of the final users. Now I'm using LLMs a lot and I've been able to do much more than I used to- I find them great coworkers, technically very knowledgeable, patient and fast. I provide the big picture, keep an eye on the architectural soundness and code quality, and design the features. The LLM does the rest. The results are way above average.

kfk: This is all fun and games when you work with toy data samples. But most organizations are more complex, they have to match invoices from SAP with opportunities in Hubspot; or they have to consider that little sales territory exception for the sales guy in Munich to calculate the proper commission projection; or they have custom tables in Salesforce with 0 documentation; or... you get my point.Not all context is documented, and some context has to even be changed because it doesn't make sense.I find AI very useful, but I think a lot of this AI SQL products are misleading.

fedeb95: yes. Most people are upset and fear losing their job because they feel their job is sub-par. In reality, that's for most of them impostor syndrome, for some could be a wake up call.

chriswait: I always find it a bit weird to see posts on the front page where all the comments disagree with the central premise of the article. In this case the post is an ad advocating for executing code you didn't write and handing the results to your manager.It makes me wonder if Hacker News has a silent majority of people who would actually use AI in this way without wanting to admit it, and a vocal minority of people who wouldn't.

bluegatty: Good gosh no.That's like saying 'cars were better made in the 1950's because they used tons of steel'. Like they were 'heavier and more robust' - but that doesn't mean better.Foundations are way better, more robust, especially weatherized. Windows today are like magic compared to windows 100 years ago.What we do more poorly now is we don't use wood everywhere, aka doors, and certain kinds of workmanship are not there - like winding staircases, mouldings - but you can easily have that if you want to pay for it. That's a choice.AI is power and leverage, it will make better things as long as it's directed by skilled operators.