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'The Oral Tradition That Built Software May Not Survive AI'

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1 month 1 week ago
A historian-turned-software engineer warns that "so little is ever written down" by professional programmers in a new article for Fast Company: Perhaps there's an early design doc, but then it turns out that everything was substantially revised before work began. Maybe there are a few wiki pages explaining known issues, some of which were solved a long time ago and others that have been left to molder in the codebase. Somebody might have left a comment in the code itself, but typically it's a warning not to change something or else something else will break... Software engineering has an ambivalent relationship with documentation. Everyone agrees documentation matters in theory, but in practice it's inconsistent, outdated, or missing entirely. Part of that is simple inertia. Writing documentation is usually less interesting than writing the code itself. But it's also ideological. The Agile movement emerged in part as a reaction against the heavily documented Waterfall methodology, and one of Agile's core values explicitly prioritizes "working software over comprehensive documentation." In escaping bureaucratic overdocumentation, the industry also normalized underdocumentation. High turnover at software jobs always brings "a constant drain of domain knowledge." And he's he's skeptical that generative AI will be able to fill in those gaps: [H]aving it generate documentation on the codebase itself might sound like a solution to the absence of other written information. LLMs can certainly summarize code back to you. But hold up with that idea. Beyond hallucinations, there's a deeper problem: Writing documentation is itself part of the thinking process. Whether I'm writing history or software, putting an approach into words helps refine it before I sink hours into implementation. Documentation also captures intent. An LLM may be able to summarize what a codebase does, but it cannot reliably explain why a developer chose one approach over another, or what trade-offs shaped that decision... An LLM can read code that I've written. It might even scan a large codebase and accurately summarize what it's doing. But it can't assess authorial intent. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat for sharing the article.

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EditorDavid

US Teachers' Union Urges Schools To Curb AI Chatbots and Screen Time

Slashdot
1 month 1 week ago
Axios reports: The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers' union in the U.S., released a 10-point plan to introduce AI and screen-time guardrails in classrooms. The plan would limit AI use and ban screens for students in prekindergarten through second grade "unless there is a compelling reason," such as supporting students with special needs. The teacher union's president Randi Weingarten warned that young students "are drowning in tech," according to the New York Times, which reports the union president also "called on schools on Wednesday to stop giving digital devices like iPads to children in prekindergarten through second grade." In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, Weingarten also urged elementary schools to avoid using artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Khan Academy's Khanmigo with children [and] called for new national privacy and safety standards for A.I. tools in all schools... "The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without A.I." The union's effort reflects a backlash among parents and educators against heavy use of school-issued laptops and apps. Some parents and nonprofit children's groups are also pushing back against campaigns by tech giants like Google and OpenAI to spread their A.I. products in schools... Weingarten said that the union was negotiating safety and privacy standards for A.I. use in schools with "our partners in the A.I. academy," and that Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic had agreed in principle to those standards. Weingarten "laid out a plan for reorienting public schooling toward human abilities and student well-being," according to the article, calling it "a devices down, eyes up, hands-on strategy." And meanwhile school cellphone bans are expanding into broader efforts to establish guardrails around AI in education and limit screen use, reports Axios. "At least 16 states — both red and blue — have introduced bills to limit classroom technology." Schools Beyond Screens formed with fewer than a dozen parents in Los Angeles Unified School District last year, but the nonprofit has grown to include thousands of parents and educators nationwide, SBS policy director Kate Brody tells Axios... McPherson Middle School principal Inge Esping told Axios that the suspension rate at her Kansas school fell 70% after cellphones were banned in 2022. Students also started speaking more with one another and with teachers. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

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EditorDavid