I don't care how well your "AI" works

https://fokus.cool/2025/11/25/i-dont-care-how-well-your-ai-works.html

by todsacerdoti • 8 months ago

487 768 8 months ago

shlip• 8 months ago

AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence.

Exactly. You can see that with the proliferation of chickenized reverse centaurs[1] in all kinds of jobs. Getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop is the aim now that bosses/stakeholders have seen the light.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize...

flir4• 8 months ago

Now apply that thinking to computers. Or levers.

I've seen the argument that computers let us prop up and even scale governmental systems that would have long since collapsed under their own weight if they’d remained manual more than once. I'm not sure I buy it, but computation undoubtedly shapes society.

The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.

I'm not even saying the core argument's wrong, exactly - clearly, tools build systems ("...and systems kill" - Crass). I guess I'm saying tools are value neutral. Guns don't kill people. So this argument against LLMs is an argument against all tools, unless you can explain how LLMs are a unique category of tool?

(Aside: calling out the lever sounds silly, but I think it's actually a great example. You can't do monumental architecture without levers, and the point in history where we start doing that is also the point where serious surplus extraction kicks in. I don't think that's coincidence).

amrocha7• 8 months ago

It’s a good thing that there’s centuries of philosophy on that subject and the general consensus is that no, tools are not “neutral” and do shape the systems they interact with, sometimes against the will of those wielding these tools.

See the nuclear bomb for an example.

prmph• 8 months ago

Tools are not value neutral in any way.

In my third world country, motorbikes, scooters, etc have exploded in popularity and use in the past decade. Many people riding these things have made the roads much more dangerous for all, but particularly for them. They keep dying by the hundreds per month, not only just due to the fact that they choose to ride them at all, but how they ride them: on busy high speed highways, weaving between lanes all the time, swerving in front of speeding cars, with barely any protective equipment whatsoever. A car crash is frequently very survivable; motorcycle crash, not so much. Even if you survive the initial collision, the probability of another vehicle running you over is very high on a busy highway.

On would think, given the clear evidence for how dangerous these things are, why do people (1) ride them at all on the highway, and (2) in such a dangerous manner? One might excuse (1) by recognizing that many are poor and can't buy a car, and the motorbikes represent economic possibility: for use in courier business, of being able to work much further from home, etc.

But here is the thing about (2), A motorbike wants to be ridden that way. No matter how well the rider recognizes the danger, there is only so much time can pass before the sheer expediency of riding that way overrides any sense of due caution. Where it would be safer to stop or keep to a fixed lane without any sudden movements, the rider thinks of the inconvenience of stopping, does a quick mental comparison it to the (in their minds) the minuscule additional risk, and carries on. Stopping or keeping to a proper lane in a car require far less discipline than doing that on a motorbike.

So this is what people mean when they say tech is not value neutral. The tech can theoretically be used in many ways. But some forms of use are so aligned with the form of the tech that in practice it shapes behavior.

idle_zealot• 8 months ago

The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.

Certainly it's biased. I'm not the author, but to me there's a huge difference between computer/software as a tool, designed and planned, with known deterministic behavior/functionality, then put in the hands of humans, vs automating agency. The former I see as a pretty straightforward expansion of humanity's long-standing relationship with tools, from simple sticks to hand axes to chainsaws. The sort of automation AI-hype seems focused on doesn't have a great parallel in history. We're talking about building a statistical system to replace the human wielding the tool, mostly so that companies don't have to worry about hiring employees. Even if the machine does a terrible job and most of humanity, former workers and current users, all suffer, the bet is that it will be worth the cost savings.

ML is very cool technology, and clearly one of the major frontiers of human progress. At this stage though, I wish the effort on the packaging side was being spent on wrapping the technology in the form of reliable capabilities for humans to call on. Stuff like OCR at the OS level or "separate tracks" buttons in audio editors. The market has decided instead that the majority of our collective effort should go towards automated liability-sinks and replacing jobs with automation that doesn't work reliably.

And the end state doesn't even make sense. If all this capital investment does achieve breakthroughs and creat true AGI, do investors really think they'll see returns? They'll have destroyed the entire concept of an economy. The only way to leverage power at that point would be to try to exercise control over a robot army or something similarly sci-fi and ridiculous.

countWSS• 8 months ago

Sounds like Manna control system: https://marshallbrain.com/manna

lynx972• 8 months ago

I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this kind of tech hate on HN of all places.

Would you prefer we heat our homes by burning wood, carry water from the nearby spring, and ride horses to visit relatives?

Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.

So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...

andrepd4• 8 months ago

"You don't like $instance_of_X? You must want to get rid of all $X" has got to be one of the most intellectually lazy things you could say.

You don't like leaded gasoline? You must want us to walk everywhere. Come on...

seu• 8 months ago

Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.

I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this lack of critical reflection on HN of all places.

Saying "progress is progress" serves nobody, except those who drive "progress" in directions that benefits them. All you do by saying "has always changed things" is taking "change" at face value, assuming it's something completely out of your control, and to be accepted without any questioning it's source, it's ways or its effects.

So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...

Amazing depiction of extremes as the only possible outcomes. Either take everything that is thrown at us, or go back into a supposed "dark age" (which, BTW, is nowadays understood to not have been that "dark" at all) . This, again, doesn't help have a proper discussion about the effects of technology and how it comes to be the way it is.

lm284694• 8 months ago

Would you prefer we heat our homes by burning wood, carry water from the nearby spring, and ride horses to visit relatives?

I'm more surprised that seemingly educated people have such simplistic views as "technology = progress, progress = good hence technology = good". Vaccines and running water are tech, megacorps owned "AI" being weaponised by surveillance obsessed governments is also tech.

If you don't push back on "tech" you're just blindingly accepting whatever someone else decided for you. Keep in mind the benefits of tech since the 80s have mostly been pocketed by the top 10%, the pleb still work as much, retire as old, &c. despite what politicians and technophiles have been saying

Aeolun2• 8 months ago

How is that different from making manual computation obsolete with the help of excel?

Glemkloksdjf10• 8 months ago

If you are a software engineere, you can leverage AI a lot better to write code than anyone else.

The complexity of good code, is still complicated.

which means 1. if software development is really solved, everyone else also gets a huge problem (ceo, cto, accountants, designers, etc. etc.) so we are in the back of the ai doomsday line.

And 2. it allows YOU to leverage AI a lot better which can enable you to create your own product.

In my startup, we leverage AI and we are not worried that another company just does the same thing because even if they do, we know how to write good code and architecture and we are also using AI. So we will always be ahead.

fennecfoxy2• 8 months ago

Lmao Cory Doctorow. Desperately trying to coin another catchphrase again.

aforwardslash3• 8 months ago

Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or <insert politics rant here>". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?

nullbyte8082• 8 months ago

Exactly.

stuartjohnson122• 8 months ago

There's a lot of overlap between "AI is evil megacapitalism" and "AI is ineffective", and I never understood the latter, but I am increasingly arriving to the understanding that the latter claim isn't real, it's just a soldier in the war being fought over the former.

zero-st4rs3• 8 months ago

I read the intersection as this:

We shape the world through our choices, generally under the umbrella of deterministic systems. AI is non-deterministic, but instead amplifies the concerns by a few wealthy corporations / individuals.

So is AI effective at generating marketing material or propagating arguably vapid value systems in the face of ecological, cultural, and economic crisis? I'd argue yes. But effective also depends on an intention, and that's not my intention, so it's not as effective for me.

I think we need more "manual" choice, and more agency.

andrepd4• 8 months ago

Ineffective at what? Writing good code, or producing any sort of valuable insight? Yes, it's ineffective. Writing unmaintainable slop at line rate? Or writing internet-filling spam, or propagating their owners' points of view? Very effective.

I just think the things they are effective at are a net negative for most of us.

trashb4• 8 months ago

Have you measured?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

owenthejumper• 8 months ago

You are not missing much. Yes there will be situations where AI won’t be helpful, but that’s not a majority

Used right, Claude Code is actually very impressive. You just have to already be a programmer to use it right - divide the problem into small chunks yourself, instruct it to work on the small chunks.

Second example - there is a certain expectation of language in American professional communication. As a non native speaker I can tell you that not following that expectation has real impact on a career. AI has been transformational, writing an email myself and asking it to ‘make this into American professional english’

bigstrat20033• 8 months ago

AI is not only unhelpful, but is counterproductive in the majority of situations. It is not in any way a good tool.

technothrasher• 8 months ago

What am I missing?

The youthful desire to rage against the machine?

irilesscent• 8 months ago

I prefer eternally enslaving a machine to do my bidding over just raging at them.

megous2• 8 months ago

Not much. Even the argument that AI is another tool to strip people of power is not that great.

It's possible to use AI chatbots against the system of power, to help detect and point out manipulation, or lack of nuance in arguments, or political texts. To help decipher legalese in contracts, or point out problematic passages in terms of use. To help with interactions with the sate, even non-trivial ones like FOI requests, or disputing information disclosure rejections, etc.

AI tools can be used to help against the systems of power.

andrepd4• 8 months ago

Yes, the black box that has been RLHF'd in god knows what way is surely going to help you gain power, and not its owners...

xg15• 8 months ago

Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been;

The entire open source movement would like a word with you.

IAmBroom7• 8 months ago

So would disruptive young Mr. Gates.

aforwardslash3• 8 months ago

I suggest you have a look at Bell Labs, Xerox and Berkeley, as a simple introduction to the topic - if you thing OSS came from "the goodness of their hearts" instead of a practical business necessity, I have a bridge to sell you.

I would also recommend you to peruse the last 50 years for completely reproductible, homegrown or open computing hardware systems you can build yourself from scratch without requiring overly expensive or exotic hardware. Yes, homegrown CPUs exist, but they "barely work" and often still rely on logic gates. Can you produce 74xx series ICs reliably in a homelab setting? Maybe, but for most of us, probably not. And certainly not for the guys ranting about "companies taking over".

If can't build your computing devices from scratch, store bought is fine. If you can, you're the exception and not the rule.

ryanjshaw2• 8 months ago

I was embarrassed recently to realize that almost all the code I create these days is written by AIs. Then I realized that’s OK. It’s a tool, and I’m making effective use of it. My job was to solve problems, not to write code.

I have a little pet theory brewing. Corporate work claims that we hire junior devs who become intermediate devs, who then become senior devs. The doomsday crowd claim that AI has replaced junior and intermediate devs, and is coming for the senior devs next.

This has felt off to me because I do way more than just code. Business users don’t want get into the details of building software. They want a guy like me to handle that.

I know how to talk to non-technical SMEs and extract their real requirements. I understand how to translate this into architecture decisions that align with the broader org. I know how to map it into a plan that meets those org objectives. And so on.

I think that really what happens is nerds exist and through osmosis a few of them become senior developers. They in turn have junior and intermediate assistant developers to help them deliver. Sometimes those assistants turn out to be nerds themselves, and they spontaneously transmute into senior developers!

AI is replacing those assistant human developers, but we will still need the senior developers because most business people want to sit with a real human being to solve their problem.

I will, however, get worried when AIs start running businesses. Then we are in trouble.

fragmede5• 8 months ago

Anthropic ran a vending machine business as an experiment, but I don't imagine someone out there isn't already seriously running one in production.

acuozzo• 8 months ago

? Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been

I guess it depends on what you define as "tech", but the '80s, '90s, and early '00s had an explosion of tiny hardware and software startups. Some even threatened Intel with x86 clones.

It wasn't until the late '90s that NVIDIA was the clear GPU winner, for instance. It had serious competition from 3DFX, ATI, and a bunch of other smaller companies.

aforwardslash3• 8 months ago

but the '80s, '90s, and early '00s had an explosion of tiny hardware and software startups

Most of them used intel, motorola or zilog tech at some capacity. Most of them with a clock used dallas semiconductor tech; Many of them with serial ports also used either intel or maxim/analog devices chips.

Many of those implementations are patented, and their inner designs were generically, "trade secrets". Most of the clones and rebrands were actually licensed (most of 80x51 microcontrollers and z80 chips are licensed tech, not original). As a tinkerer, you'd receive a black box (sometimes literally) with a series of pins and a datasheet.

If anything, i'd say you have much more choice today than in the 80s/90's.

justincormack• 8 months ago

Its interesting how people are still very positive about Marx’s labour theory of value, despite it being very much of its time and very discredited.

raincole3• 8 months ago

LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles

What a loaded sentence lol. Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive. And implying somehow anti-AI is progressive.

AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.

Really? So we're not going to see AI users celebrating over how much less power DeepSeek used, right?

Anyway guess what else is resource intensive? Making chips. Follow the line of logic you will find computers consolidate powers and real progressive hackers should use pencil and paper only.

Back to the first paragraph...

almost like a reflex, was a self-justification of why the way they use these tools is fine, while other approaches were reckless.

The irony is off the roof. This article is essentially: when I use computational power how I like, it's being a hacker. When others use computational power their way, it's being fascists.

ToucanLoucan• 8 months ago

Pro/regressive are terms that are highly contextual. Progress for progress’ sake alone can move anything forward. I would argue the progression of the attention economy has been extremely negative for most of the human race, yet that is “progressing.”

zmgsabst• 8 months ago

In this instance, it’s just claiming turf for the political movement in the US that has spent the last century:

- inventing scientific racism and (after that was debunked) reinventing other academic pretenses to institutionalize race-base governance and society

- forcibly sterilizing people with mental illnesses until the 1970s, through 2005 via coercion, and until the present via lies, fake studies, and ideological subversion

- being outspokenly antisemitic

Personally, I think it’s a moral failing we allow such vile people to pontificate about virtues without being booed out of the room.

_heimdall• 8 months ago

Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive

I didn't read it that way. "Progressive hacker circles" doesn't imply that all hackers are progressive, it can just be distinguishing progressive circles from conservative ones.

Mashimo2• 8 months ago

The typical CCC / Hackerspace - circle is kinda progressive / left leaning. At least in my experience. Which I think she(or he?) was implying. Of course not every hacker is :)

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive

I mean, yeah, that kind of checks out. The quoted part doesn't make much sense to me, but that most hackers are progressives (as in "enact progress by change", not the twisted American version) should hardly come as a surprise. The opposite would be that a hacker could be a conservative (again, not the US version, but the global definition; "reluctant to change"), which is pretty much a oxymoron. Best would be to eschew political/ideological labels in total, and just say we hackers are unpolitical :)

nullbyte8082• 8 months ago

As a crappy programmer I love AI! Right now I'm focusing on building up my Math knowledge, general CS knowledge and ML knowledge. In the future, knowing how to read code and understanding it may be more important than writing it.

I think its amazing what giant vector matrices can do with a little code.

skydhash5• 8 months ago

The thing about reading code and understanding is logical reasoning, which you can do by knowing the semantic of each tokens. But the semantics are not universal. You have the Turing Machine, the lambda calculus, horn clauses, etc… Then there are more abstractions (and new semantics) built on top of those.

Writing code is very easy if you know the solution and the semantics of the coding platform. But knowing the solution is a difficult task, even in a business settings where the difficulty are more communication issues. Knowing the semantics of the coding platform is also a difficult one, because you’ll probably be using others’ code and you’ll face the same communication issue (lack of documentation, erroneous documentation, etc…)

So being good at programming does not really means knowing code. It’s more about knowing how to bypass communication barriers to get the knowledge you need.

hartator• 8 months ago

The main thing is everyone seems to hate reading someone else ChatGPT while we are still eager to share ours to others as it’s some sort of oracle.

Glemkloksdjf10• 8 months ago

Its ignorant. Thats what it is.

The big tech will build out compute in a never seen speed and we will reach 2e29 Flops faster than ever.

Big tech is competing with each other and they are the ones with the real money in our capitalistic world but even if they would find some slow down between each others, countries are also now competing.

In the next 4 years and the massive build out of compute, we will see a lot clearer how the progress will go.

And either we hit obvous limitations or not.

If we will not see an obvious limitation, fionas opinion will have 0 relevance.

The best chance for everyone is to keep a very very close eye on AI to either make the right decisions (not buying that house with a line of credit; creating your own product a lot faster thanks to ai, ...) or be aware what is coming.

Thanks for the fish and enjoy the ride.

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible.

I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that.

What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world).

And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.

If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts.

What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?

ulfw• 8 months ago

What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)

You do realise your position of luck is not normal, right? This is not how your average Techie 2025 is.

lopis2• 8 months ago

Specially for new developers. Entry level jobs have practically evaporated.

ishouldbework2• 8 months ago

Well, speaking just for central Europe, it is pretty average. Sure, entry-level positions are different story, but anyone with at least few years for work experience can find reasonably payed job fairly quickly.

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

I don't know what "position of luck" you're talking about, it's been dedicated effort to practice programming and suffer through a lot of shit until I got my first comfy programming job.

And even if I'm experienced now, I still have peers and acquaintances who are getting into the industry, I'm not sitting in my office with my eyes closed exactly.

Aeolun2• 8 months ago

That’s probably because the definition of ‘average techie’ has been on a rapid downward trajectory for years? You can justify the waste when money is free. Not when you need them to do something.

Glemkloksdjf10• 8 months ago

Every good 'techie' around me has it good.

lopis2• 8 months ago

The job of a programmer is, and has always been, 50% making our job obsolete (through various forms of automation) and 50% ensuring our job security (through various forms of abstraction).

empath753• 8 months ago

Over the course of my career, probably 2/3rds of the roles I have had (as in my day to day work, not necessarily the title) just no longer exist, because people like me eliminated them. I personally was the last person that had a few of those jobs because I mostly automated them and got promoted and they didn't hire a replacement. It's not that they hired less people though, they just hired more people, paid them more money, and they focused on more valuable work.

GlacierFox• 8 months ago

Are we living on the same planet?

belter• 8 months ago

No... :-)

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Considering we surely have wildly different experiences and contexts, you could almost say we live on the same planet, but it looks very different to each and one of us :)

kalaksi3• 8 months ago

programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks...

I don't know what kind of work you do but this depends a lot on what kind of projects you work on

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Across ~10 jobs or so, mostly as a employee of 5-100 person companies, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a freelancer, but always with a comfy paycheck compared to any other career, and never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer, and that some of my peers are still doing.

Of course, there is always exceptions, like programmers who need to hike to volcanos to setup sensors and what not, but generally, programmers have one of the most comfortable jobs on the planet today. If you're a programmer, I think it should come relatively easy to acknowledge this.

amrocha7• 8 months ago

There’s been over 1 million people laid off in tech in the past 4 years

https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Again, sucks to be in the US as a programmer today maybe, but this isn't true elsewhere in the world, and especially not if you already have at least some experience.

spicyusername3• 8 months ago

This has more to do with monetary policy than AI, though.

svantana• 8 months ago

According to that site, there were more tech layoffs in 2022 than in 2024 or 2025. Doesn't that speak against the "AI is taking tech jobs" hypothesis?

empath753• 8 months ago

I have been laid off 4 times. Tech has a lot of churn, there are a lot of high risk high reward companies.

csmantle• 8 months ago

programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it

Not in where I live though. Competition is fierce, both in industry and academia, for most posts being saturated and most employees face "HR optimization" in their late 30s. Not to mention working over time, and its physical consequences.

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Again, compare this to other professions, don't look at in isolation, and you'll see why you're still (or will have, seems you're a student still) having a much more pleasant life than others.

llm_nerd2• 8 months ago

"Not in where I live though"

I mean, not anywhere, and the data absolutely annihilates their ridiculous claims. In subsequent posts they've retreated back to "yeah, but someone somewhere has it worse", invalidating this whole absurd thread.

Their comment has little correlation with reality, and seems to be a contrived, self-comforting fiction. Most firms have implemented hiring freezes if not actively downsizing their dev staff. Many extremely experienced devs are finding the market absolutely atrocious, getting zero bites.

And for all of the "well us senior devs are safe" sentiment often seen on here, many shops seem to be more comfortable hiring cheap and eager junior devs and foregoing seniors because LLMs fill in a lot of the "grizzled wisdom". The junior to senior ratio is rapidly increasing, and devs who lived on golden handshakes are suddenly finding their ego bruised and a market where they're fighting for low-pay jobs.

Mashimo2• 8 months ago

What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing

A lot of newly skilled job applicants can't find anything in the job market right now.

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Based on conversations with peers for the last ~3 years or so, some of retrained to become programmers, this doesn't seem to as absolute as you paint it out to be.

But as mentioned earlier, the situation in the US seems much more dire than elsewhere. People I know who entered the programming profession in South America, Europe and Asia for these last years don't seem to have more troubles than I had when I got started. Yes, it requires work, just like it did before.

raincole3• 8 months ago

Because tech corps overhired[0] when the interest rate was low.

Even after the layoffs, most big tech corps still have more employees today than they did in 2020.

The situation is bad, but the lesson to learn here is that a country should handle a pandemic better than "lowering interest rate to near-zero and increasing government spending." It's just kicking and snowballing the problem to the next four years.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/could-layoffs-in-tech-jobs-spread-to-r...

DebtDeflation• 8 months ago

Likewise with experienced devs who find themselves out of work due to the neverending mass layoffs.

There's a huge difference between the perspective of someone currently employed versus that of someone in the market for a role, regardless of experience level. The job market of today is nothing like the job market of 3 years ago. More and more people are finding that out every day.

phkahler• 8 months ago

> A lot of newly skilled job applicants can't find anything in the job market right now.

That is not unique to programming or tech generally. The overall US job market is kind of shit right now.

throwawaysleep• 8 months ago

"Newly skilled" means needs supervision. If you have to supervise the work, then an AI is definitely superior.

wry_discontent• 8 months ago

I've always heard this sentiment, but I've also never met one of these newly skilled job applicants who could do anything resembling the job.

I've done a lot of interviews, and inevitably, most of the devs I interview can't pass a trivial interview (like implement fizzbuzz). The ones who can do a decent job are usually folks we have to compete for.

mschuster91• 8 months ago

What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"?

I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI. Behind an intern or junior? Sure, I enjoy that because I can tell them how shit works, where they went off the rails, and I can be sure they will not repeat that mistake and be better programmers afterwards.

But an AI? Oh good luck with that and good luck dealing with the "updates" that get forced upon you. Fuck all of that, I'm out.

flir4• 8 months ago

I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI.

I enjoy making things work better. I'm lucky in that, because there's always been more brownfield work than greenfield work. I think of it as being an editor, not an author.

Hacking into vibe code with a machete is kinda fun.

m_a_g• 8 months ago

I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)

In my Big Tech job, I sometimes forget that some people can really enjoy what they do. It seems like you're in a fortunate position of both high pay and high enjoyment. Congratulations! Out of curiosity, what do you work on?

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Right now I'm doing consulting for two companies, maybe a couple of hours per week, mostly having downtime and trying to expand on my machine learning knowledge.

But in general, every job I've had has been "high pay and high enjoyment" even when I initially had "shit pay" compared to other programmers, and the product wasn't really fun, I was still programming, an activity I still love.

Compare this to the jobs I did before, where the physical toll makes it impossible to do anything after work as you're exhausted, and even if I got paid more than my first programming job, that your body is literally unable to move once you get home, makes the pay matter less and feel less.

But for a programmer, you can literally sit still all day, have some meetings in a warm office, talk with some people, type some things into a document, sit and think for a while, and in the end of the month you get a paycheck.

If you never worked in another profession, I think you ("The Programmer") don't realize how lucky you are compared to the rest of the world.

zombot• 8 months ago

I'd love to live on the same planet you do.

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Gained life experience is always possible, regardless of your age :) Give other professions a try, and see the difference for yourself.

roxolotl• 8 months ago

I came here to quote the same quote but with the opposite sentiment. If you look at the history of work, at least in the states, it’s a history of almost continual devaluation and automation. I’ve been assuming that my generation, entering the profession in the 2010s, will be the last where it’s a pathway to an upper middle class life. Just like the factory workers before us automation will come for those who do mostly repetitive tasks. Sure there will be well paid professional software devs in the future just as there are some well paid factory workers who mostly maintain machines. But the scale of the opportunity will be much smaller.

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

But in the end, we didn't end up with less factories that do more, we ended up with more factories that does more.

Why wouldn't the same happen here? Instead of these programmers jamming out boilerplate 24/7, why are they unable to improve their skill further and move with the rest of the industry, if that's needed? Just like other professions adopt to how society is shaped, why should programming be an exception to that?

thunky3• 8 months ago

What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession

You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now.

But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it.

Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor quality outputs imo. And as that ignorance moat gets smaller, this becomes harder to pull off.

spicyusername3• 8 months ago

assign work to an LLM

This is just not happening anywhere around me. I don't know why it keeps getting repeated in every one of these discussions.

Every software engineer I know is using LLM tools, but every team around me is still hiring new developers. Zero firing is happening in any circle near me due to LLMs.

LLMs can not do unsupervised work, period. They do not replace developers. They replace Stack Overflow and Google.

xtiansimon• 8 months ago

“…exploiting our employer's lack of information…”

I agree in the sense that those of us who work in for-profit businesses have benefited from employer’s willingness to spend on dev budgets (salaries included)—without having to spend their own _time_ becoming increasingly involved in the work. As “AI” develops it will blur the boundaries of roles and reshape how capital can be invested to deliver results and have impact. And if the power dynamics shift (ie. out of the class of educated programmers to, I dunno, philosophy majors) then you’re in trouble.

singpolyma3• 8 months ago

If one is a junior the goal is to become a senior though. Not to remain a junior.

walt_grata• 8 months ago

LLMs vs human

Handholding the human pays off in the long run more than hand holding the llm, which requires more hand holding anyway.

Claude doesn't get better as I explain concepts to it the same way a jr engineer does.

HarHarVeryFunny4• 8 months ago

But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it.

This sounds kind of logical, but really isn't.

In reality you can ASSIGN a task to a junior dev and expect them to eventually complete it, and learn from the experience as well. Sure there'll likely be some interaction between the junior dev and mentor, and this is part of the learning process - something DESIREABLE since it leads to the developer getting better.

In contrast, you really cant "assign" something to an LLM. You can of course try to, and give it some "vibe coding" assignment like "build me a backend component to read the data from the database", but the LLM/agent isn't an autonomous entity that can take ownership of the assignment and be expected to do whatever it takes (e.g. coming back to you and asking for help) to get it done. With todays "AI" technology it's the AI that needs all the handholding, and the person using the AI is the one who has effectively taken the assignment, not the LLM.

Also, given the inability of LLMs to learn on the job, using an LLM as a tool to help get things done is going to be a groundhog day experience of having to micro-manage the process in the same way over and over again each time you use it... time that would have been better invested in helping a junior dev get up to speed and in the future be an independent developer that tasks can indeed be assigned to.

vrighter4• 8 months ago

provided the senior dev takes time off to review that slop.

luxuryballs• 8 months ago

It just makes you more powerful, not less. When we got rid of rooms full of typewriters it’s because we became more productive, not less.

Aldipower• 8 months ago

assign work to a LLM

What are your talking about? You seem to live in a parallel universe. Every single time I tried this or someone of my colleagues, this task failed tremendously hard.

marcosdumay2• 8 months ago

Rest assured that LLMs are completely incapable of replacing mildly competent junior developers. And that's fundamental to the technology.

Instead, it's them that benefit the most from using them.

It's only management that believes otherwise. Because of deceitful marketing from a few big corporations.

Xenoamorphous• 8 months ago

the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world

Are you sure about that?

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

No, I'm just pulling anecdotes out of my ass/am hallucinating.

Is there something specific you'd like to point me to, besides just replying with a soundbite?

spicyusername3• 8 months ago

100% my experience as well.

Negativity spreads so much more quickly than positivity online, and I feel as though too many people live in self reinforcing negative comment sections and blog posts than in the real world, which gives them a distorted view.

My opinion is that LLMs are doing nothing but accelerating what's possible with the craft, not eliminating it. If anything, this makes a single developer MORE valuable, because they can now do more with less.

evnp2• 8 months ago

Exactly. The problem is instead of getting a raise because "you can do more now" your colleagues will be laid off. Why pay for 3 devs when the work can be done by 1 now? And we all better hope that actually pans out in whatever legacy codebase we're dealing with.

Now the job market is flooded due to layoffs, further justifying lack of comp adjustment - add inflation, and you have "de-valuing" in direct form.

queenkjuul4• 8 months ago

You clearly haven't tried looking for a job in the last two years have you

hacb• 8 months ago

It's absolutely not easy to find a new job in France, and more generally in Europe

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

My experience and the ones I personally known, been in Western Europe, South America and Asia, and programmers I know have an easier time to find new jobs compared to other professions.

Don't get me wrong, it's a lot harder for new developers to enter the industry compared to a decade ago, even in Western Europe, but it's still way easier compared to the length people I know who aren't programmers or even in tech.

conradfr• 8 months ago

I didn't enter this profession because I love reviewing code though.

elif• 8 months ago

Then use better software engineering paradigms in how your AI builds projects.

I find the more I specify about all the stuff I thought was hilariously pedantic hyper-analysis when I was in school, the less I have to interpret.

If you use test-driven, well-encapsulated object oriented programming in an idiomatic form for your language/framework, all you really end up needing to review is "are these tests really testing everything they should."

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

It is a part of gaining experience and knowledge though. If you aren't a senior right now, eventually you will be, and one of the expectations will be that you can read and review more novice programmers code and help them improve it, and lend a helping hand when you can. Eventually, all you do will be to review the work others have done after you instructing them to do the thing. Not to mention reading through really great written programs is personally a great joy for me, and almost always learn something new.

But, probably remaining a developer who runs through tickets in JIRA without much care for collaboration could be feasible in some type of companies too.

tester7562• 8 months ago

the job is easy

software engineering is easy? you live in bubble, try teaching programming to someone new to it and you'll realize how muuuuch effort it requires

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Have you tried any other jobs? Have to ever tried teaching just the basics of plumbing to a 18 year old who can barely hold a screwdriver?

If you want a challenge, try almost any other job than development, and you'll realize how easy all this stuff actually is.

swatcoder2• 8 months ago

The "devaluation" they mention is just the correction against the absurd ZIRP bump, that lured would-be doctors and lawyers into tech jobs at FAANG and FAANG-alike firms with the promise of upper middle class lifestyles for trivially weaving together API calls and jockeying JIRA tickets. You didn't have to spend years more in grad school, you didn't have to be a diligent engineer. You just had to had to have a knack for standardized tests (Leetcode) and the time to grid some prep.

The compensation and hiring for that kind of inexpert work were completely out of sync with anything sustainable but held up for almost a decade because money was cheap. Now, money is held much more tightly and we stumbled into a tech that can cheaply regurgitate a lot of so the trivial inexpert work, meaning the bottom fell out of these untenable, overpaid jobs.

You and I may not be effected, having charted a different path through the industry and built some kind of professional career foundation, but these kids who were (irresponsibly) promised an easy upper middle class life are still real people with real life plans, who are now finding themselves in a deeply disappointing and disorienting situation. They didn't believe the correction would come, let alone so suddenly, and now they don't know how they're supposed to get themselves back on track for the luxury lifestyle they thought they legitimately earned.

j4coh• 8 months ago

I don't believe companies can reliably tell expert and non-expert developers apart, to sort them so efficiently to play out like you say.

bavell• 8 months ago

Nailed it. It's a pendulum and we're swinging back to baseline. We just finished our last big swing (zirp, post COVID dev glut) and are now in full free fall.

sosodev3• 8 months ago

While that is part of the equation it's not at all that simple. If the average business owner wants a custom piece of software for their workflow how are they getting it now? For decades the answer would have been new hires, agencies, consultants, and freelancers. It didn't matter that most software boiled down to a simple CRUD backend and a flashy frontend. There was still a need for developers to create every piece of software.

Now AI makes it unbelievably easy to make those simple but bespoke software packages. The business owner can boot up Lovable and get something that is good enough. The non-software folk generally aren't scrutinizing the software they use. It doesn't matter if the backend is spaghetti code or if there are bugs here and there. If it works well enough then they're happy.

In my opinion that's the unfortunate truth of AI software development. It's dirt cheap, fast, and good enough for most people. Computer's couldn't write software before and now they can. Obviously that is real devaluation, right?

NewsaHackO• 8 months ago

I love this post. It really encapsulates a lot of what my take on the situation is as well. It has just been so blatantly obvious that a lot of people have a very protectionist mindset surrounding AI, and a legitimate fear that they are going to be replaced by it.

Mountain_Skies• 8 months ago

Your complete lack of empathy is going to be your undoing. Might want to check in on that.

i_love_retros• 8 months ago

I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy

Eh?

I'm happy for you (and envious), because that is not my experience. The job is hard. Agile's constant fortnightly deadlines, a complete lack of respect by the rest of the stakeholders for the work developers do (even more so now because "ai can do that"), changing requirements but an expectation to welcome changing requirements because that is agile, incredibly egotistical assholes that seem to gravitate to engineering manager roles, and a job market that's been dead for a few years now.

No doubt some will comment and say that if I think my job is hard I should compare it to a coal miner in the 1940's. True, but as Neil Young sang: "Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away."

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

I guess ultimately our perspectives shape how we see current situations.

When I write that, I write that with the history and experience of doing other things. Deadlines, lack of respect from stakeholders, egoists and changing requirements just don't sound so bad when you compare to "Ah yeah resident 41 broke their leg completely and we need to clean up their entire apartment from the pools of blood and pus + work with the ambulance crew to get them to the hospital".

I guess it's kind of a PTSD of sorts or something, as soldiers describe the same thing coming home to a "normal life" after spending time in a battle-zone. Everything just seems so trivial compared to the situations you've faced before.

monegator• 8 months ago

What exactly is being de-valuated We are being second guessed by any sub organism with little brain, but opposable thumbs, at a rate much greater than before, because now the sub organism can simply ask the LLM to type their arguments for them. How many times have you received screenshots of an LLM output yesanding whatever bizarre request you already tried to explain and dismiss as not possible/feasible/unnecessary? the sub organism has delegated their thoughts to the LLM and i always find that extremely infuriating, because all i want to do is to shake that organism and cry "why don't you get it? think! THINK! THINK FOR YOURSELF FOR JUST A SECOND"

Also, i enjoy programming. Even typing boring shit as boilerplate because i keep my brain engaged. As much as i type i keep thinking, is this really necessary? and maybe figure out something leaner. LLMs want to deprive me of enjoyment of my work (research, learn) and of my brain. No thanks, no LLM for me. And i don't care whatever garbage it outputs, i'd much prefere if the garbage was your output, or you are useless.

The only use i have for LLMs and diffusion models is to entertain myself with stupid bullshit i come up with that i would find funny. I massively enjoy projects such as https://dumbassideas.com/

Note: Not taking into account the "classic" ML uses, my rant only going to LLMs and the LLM craze. A tool made by grifters, for grifters.

abraxas• 8 months ago

You sound exactly like that turkey from Nassim Taleb's books that came to the conclusion that the purpose of human beings is to make turkeys very happy with lots of food and breeding opportunities. And the turkey's thesis gets validated perfectly every day he wakes up to a delicious fatty meal.

Until Thanksgiving.

lxgr12• 8 months ago

Unlike the turkeys, they seem rather self aware about it.

ragazzina• 8 months ago

The turkey story predates Nassim Taleb books by decades.

theonething2• 8 months ago

Your comment is hyperbolic fear mongering dressed up in a cutesie story.

Our industry is being disrupted by AI. What industry in history has not been disrupted by technological progression? It's called life. And those that can adapt to life changing will continue to thrive. And those who can't will get left behind. There is no wholesale turkey slaughter.

JeremyNT• 8 months ago

And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.

What do you think they're building all those datacenters for? Why do you think so much money is pouring into AI companies?

It's not to help make developers more efficient with code assistants.

Traditional computation will be replaced with bots in every aspect of software. The goal is to devalue our labor and replace it with computation performed by machines owned by the wealthy, who can lease this out.

If you can't see this coming you lack both imagination and historical perspective.

Five years ago Claude Code would have been essentially unimaginable. Consider this.

So sure, enjoy your job churning out buggy whips while you can, but you better have a plan B for when the automobiles truly arrive.

aishsh• 8 months ago

I think it’s much more likely they’ll be used for mass surveillance purposes. The tech is already there, they just need the compute (and a lot of it).

Most of the economy is making things that aren’t really needed. Why bother keeping that afloat when it’s 90% trinkets for the proles? Once they’ve got the infra to ensure compliance why bother with all the fake work which is the real opium of the masses.

allturtles2• 8 months ago

I agree with all this, except there is no plan B. What could plan B possibly be when white collar work collapses? You can go into a trade, but who will be hiring the tradespeople?

syllogism4• 8 months ago

Software to date has been a [Jevons good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). Demand for software has been constrained by the cost efficiency and risk of software projects. Productivity improvements in software engineering have resulted in higher demand for software, not less, because each improvement in productivity unblocks more of the backlog of projects that weren't cost effective before.

There's no law of nature that says this has to continue forever, but it's a trend that's been with us since the birth of the industry. You don't need to look at AI tools or methodoligies or whatever. We have code reuse! Productivity has obviously improved, it's just that there's also an arms race between software products in UI complexity, features, etc.

If you don't keep improving how efficiently you can ship value, your work will indeed be devalued. It could be that the economics shift such that pretty much all programming work gets paid less, it could be that if you're good and diligent you do even better than before. I don't know.

What I do know is that whichever way the economics shake out, it's morally neutral. It sounds like the author of this post leans into a labor theory of value, and if you buy into that, well...You end up with some pretty confused and contradictory ideas. They position software as a "craft" that's valuable in itself. It's nonsense. People have shit to do and things they want. It's up to us to make ourselves useful. This isn't performance art.

ewzimm• 8 months ago

What is devalued is traditional labor-based ideology. The blog references Marx's theory of alienation. The Marxist labor theory of value, that the value of anything is determined by the labor that creates it, gives the working class moral authority over the owner class. When labor is reduced, the basis of socialist revolution is devalued, as the working class no longer can claim superior contributions to value creation.

If one doesn't subscribe to traditional Marxist ideology, this argument won't land the same way, but elements of these ideas have made their way into popular ideas of value.

elektronika• 8 months ago

Marx addressed exactly this sort of improvement in productivity from automation. He was writing with full hindsight on the industrial revolution after all. I hope coding LLMs give professional computer touchers a wakeup call to develop some sorely lacking class consciousness.

the capitalist who applies the improved method of production, appropriates to surplus-labour a greater portion of the working day, than the other capitalists in the same trade […] The law of the determination of value by labour-time, a law which brings under its sway the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production, by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value, this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method.

From Capital, Vol 1 Chapter 12 if you're curious.

Trasmatta• 8 months ago

What is this "devaluation"?

The part where writing performant, readable, resilient, extensible, and pleasing code used to actually be a valued part of the craft? I feel like I'm being gaslit after decades of being lectured on how to be a better software developer, only to be told that my craft is pointless, the only thing of value is the output, and that I should be happy spending my day babysitting agents and reviewing AI code slop.

acedTrex3• 8 months ago

I consider the devaluation of the craft to be completely independent from the professional occupation of software.

Programming has been devalued because more people can do it at a basic level with LLM tooling. People that I do not consider smart enough or to have put enough work in to output the things that they have nor do they really understand it themselves.

It is of course the new reality and now we all have to go find new markers/things to judge peoples output by. Thats the devaluation of the craft itself.

For what its worth, this devaluation has happened many times in this field. ASM, Compilers, managed gc languages, the cloud, abstractions have continually opened up the field to people the old timers consider unworthy.

LLMs are a unique twist on that standard pattern.

jrm44• 8 months ago

Excellent take; this is like saying "being an amazing chef is devalued because McDonalds exists."

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Programming has been devalued because more people can do it at a basic level with LLM tooling

But just because more people can do something doesn't mean it's devalued, or am I misunderstanding the word? The value of programs remains the same, regardless of who composes them. The availability of computers, the internet and the web seems to have had the opposite effect so far, making entire industries much more valued than they were in the decades before.

Neither do I see ASM, compilers, and all your other examples of devalualing, it seems like it's "nichifying" the industry if anything, which requires more experts, not fewer. The more abstractions we have in reality, the more experts are needed for being able to handle those things.

an0malous2• 8 months ago

I think comments like yours should include what salary range, industry, and company size your job entails. The last few years have been absolutely miserable for me at Series A YC startups

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

Salary range: 400 > 8000 EUR (monthly) over the years (starting job 10 years ago > last full-time salary)

Industry I guess would be "startups" or just "tech", it ranges across holiday related, infrastructure, distributed networks, application development frameworks and some others.

Smallest company I worked at was 4 including the CEO, largest been 300 people. Most of them I joined when it was 5-10 people, and left once they got to around 100.

moralestapia• 8 months ago

Same here, my rate keeps going up ...

I do see a shortage of entry-level positions (number of them, not salaries).

Going through the author's bio ... it seems like he's just not able to provide value in any of the high-paying positions that exist right now; not that he should be, he's just not aligned with it and that's ok.

I can see why he's desperate.

jimbokun13• 8 months ago

Because there are now massive layoffs and graduating CS majors have a higher unemployment rate than the average new college graduate.

Summershard• 8 months ago

The amount of negativity your positive comment has received looks almost overwhelming. I remember HN being a much happier place a few years ago. Perhaps I should take a break from it.

People working in one of the coolest industries on Earth really do not appreciate their lives nowadays.

theshrike79• 8 months ago

The only way to create senior programmers is for someone to hire juniors and let them grow.

I'm not worried for my job, I can work _with_ AI very well. I'm not precious about my processes or ways of working.

What I AM worried about is that if companies stop hiring juniors because they (try to) replace them with AI, we'll no longer have new seniors and the craft itself will deteriorate.

rho42• 8 months ago

And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.

skydhash5• 8 months ago

If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away.

If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away.

If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one.

What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.

embedding-shape36• 8 months ago

What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.

"reliability" can mean multiple things though. LLM invocations are as reliable (granted you know how program properly) as any other software invocation, if you're seeing crashes you're doing something wrong.

But what you're really talking about is "correctness" I think, in the actual text that's been responded with. And if you're expecting/waiting for that to be 100% "accurate" every time, then yeah, that's not a use case for LLMs, and I don't think anyone is arguing for jamming LLMs in there even today.

Where the LLMs are useful, is where there is no 100% "right or wrong" answer, think summarization, categorization, tagging and so on.

tokioyoyo2• 8 months ago

You can have this position, but the reality is that the industry is accepting it and moving forward. Whether you’ll embrace some of it and utilize it to improve your workflow, is up to you. But over-exaggerating the problem to this point is kinda funny.

fennecfoxy2• 8 months ago

Except it's more a case of "my phone won't teleport me to Hawaii sad faec lemme throw it out" than anything else.

There are plenty of people manufacturing their expectations around the capabilities of LLMs inside their heads for some reason. Sure there's marketing; but for individuals susceptible to marketing without engaging some neurons and fact checking, there's already not much hope.

Imagine refusing to drive a car in the 60s because they haven't reach 1kbhp yet. Ahaha.

crazygringo• 8 months ago

Honestly, LLMs are about as reliable as the rest of my tools are.

Just yesterday, AirDrop wouldn't work until I restarted my Mac. Google Drive wouldn't sync properly until I restarted it. And a bug in Screen Sharing file transfer used up 20 GB of RAM to transfer a 40 GB file, which used swap space so my hard drive ran out of space.

My regular software breaks constantly. All the time. It's a rare day where everything works as it should.

LLMs have certainly gotten to the point where they seem about as reliable as the rest of the tools I use. I've never seen it say 2+2=5. I'm not going to use it for complicated arithmetic, but that's not what it's for. I'm also not going to ask my calculator to write code for me.

candiddevmike• 8 months ago

Sorry you're being downvoted even though you're 100% correct. There are use cases where the poor LLM reliability is as good or better than the alternatives (like search/summarization), but arguing over whether LLMs are reliable is silly. And if you need reliability (or even consistency, maybe) for your use case, LLMs are not the right tool.

AlexandrB5• 8 months ago

What I want from my tools is autonomy/control. LLMs raise the bar on being at the mercy of the vendor. Anything you can do with an LLM today can silently be removed or enshittified tomorrow, either for revenue or ideological reasons. The forums for Cursor are filled with people complaining about removed features and functional regressions.

0xEF2• 8 months ago

I was once in your camp, thinking there was some sort of middle-ground to be had with the emergence of Generative AI and it's potential as a useful tool to help me do more work in less time, but I suppose the folks who opposed automated industrial machinery back in the day did the same.

The problem is that, historically speaking, you have two choices;

1. Resist as long as you can, risking being labeled a Luddite or whatever.

2. Acquiesce.

Choice 1 is fraught with difficulty, like a dinosaur struggling to breathe as an asteroid came and changed the atmosphere it had developed lungs to use. Choice 2 is a relinquishment of agency, handing over control of the future to the ones pulling the levers on the machine. I suppose there is a rare Choice 3 that only the elite few are able to pick, which is to accelerate the change.

My increased cynicism about technology was not something that I started out with. Growing up as a teen in the late-80's/early-90's, computers were hotly debated as being either a fad that would die out in a few years or something that was going to revolutionize the way we worked and give us more free time to enjoy life. That never happened, obviously. Sure, we get more work done in less time, but most of us still work until we are too broken to continue and we didn't really gain anything by acquiescing. We could have lived just fine without smartphones or laptops (we did, I remember) and all the invasive things that brought with it such as surveillance, brain-hacking advertising and dopamine burnout. The massive structures that came out of all the money and genius that went into our tech became megacorporations that people like William Gibson and others warned us of, exerting a level of control over us that turned us all into batteries for their toys, discarded and replaced as we are used up. It's a little frightening to me, knowing how hyperbolic that used to sound 30 years ago, and yet, here we stand.

Generative AI threatens so much more than just altering the way we work, though. In some cases, its use in tasks might even be welcomed. I've played with Claude Code, every generative model that Poe.com has access to, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, etc...they're all quite fascinating, especially when viewed as I view them; a dark mirror reflecting our own vastly misunderstood minds back to us. But it's a weird place to be in when you start seeing them replace musicians, artists, writers...all things that humanity has developed over many thousands of years as forms of existential expression, individuality, and humanness because there is no question that we feel quite alone in our experience of consciousness. Perhaps that is why we are trying to build a companion.

To me, the dangers are far too clear and present to take any sort of moderate position, which is why I decided to stop participating in its proliferation. We risk losing something that makes us us by handing off our creativity and thinking to this thing that has no cognizance or comprehension of its own existence. We are not ready for AI, and AI is not ready for us, but as the Accelerationists and Broligarchs continue to inject it into literally every bit of tech they can, we have to make a choice; resist or capitulate.

At my age, I'm a bit tired of capitulating, because it seems every time we hand the reigns over to someone who says they know what they are doing, they fuck it up royally for the rest of us.

senordevnyc3• 8 months ago

Maybe the dilemma isn’t whether to “resist” or “acquiesce”, but rather whether to frame technological change as an inherently adversarial and zero sum struggle, versus looking for opportunities to leverage those technologies for greater productivity, comfort, prosperity, etc. Stop pushing against the idea of change. It’s going to happen, and keep happening, forever. Work with it.

And by any metric, the average citizen of a developed country is wildly better off than a century or two ago. All those moments of change in the past that people wrung their hands over ultimately improved our lives, and this probably won’t be any different.

benjiro• 8 months ago

Maybe its just me, but i often feel that the issue in these debates is not that we give up creativity but people unwillingness to change their creativity.

When PCs came around, people looked down on the idea of painting on a screen. Some stubborn held on to their easel, while the often younger generation embraced the new tech, and made their carriers.

LLMs are the same ... We have people who are stubborn and still want to do everything on their easel and good for them. But those that adapted, will turn out more work and eventually replace most of the die hards in the workplace. Sure, there will be people who are needed, just like we had Fortran programmers 50 years later making bank, or painters who make bank.

But the idea that it makes us less creative is stupid. Did PCs make us less creative in painting? No, we got a ton of new media and changes. We adapted to the tools and possibilities.

O, PCs came on the market, well, no way somebody is going to use that to make ... MUSIC ... you only do that with real instruments. Que entire generation of techno, movie music etc all made digitally. You did not need to be a directory, know how to play dozens of different instruments to make insane pieces of music. You used your creativity to use the tools at your disposal !

The fact that you can now do the work in a few weeks, that will have taken you a year as a programmer, that opens up the doors for more creativity. Prototyping a idea does not take months, but days. It changes the industry...

Why do i need to pay license cost for a piece of software that is "enterprise", when i can now make the same level of software in a few weeks. It actually take the power away from big corporations, sure, you rely on the tool, and whoever is behind the tool for now (like anthropic etc) but as time moves forwards, more hardware will become more powerful, and LLMs will be more in the open source, ...

Remember what i said about music ... hey, maybe creative people will be able to make music that is different thanks to AI. Hey, you wanted to make a Magic The Gathering game but the art was a delima, ... LLMs suddenly open the door to make new products, and change the industry away from large corporation where the entry fee is high.

We are on a threshold of change, those that stay behind and think it kills creativity, never really used the new tools.

I am writing software right now, that will have took me a year to write. It duplicates the function of some enterprise software that will have cost me insane money. BUTTTTTT, because i now control this software, i can add features that i always found lacking or missing, because that enterprise software only looked at the companies, now what somebody like me may need.

All for the low low price of barely $40, what is probably 70~100k in developer cost. That is still being creative, i made something new using a existing idea, with my own touches to it. But i used a tool for it... Eventually, my code if open source, may be used in other LLMs to improve them. What in turn makes them smarter and maybe some of my idea get used by others.

This is frankly how we as the human race advanced, not by stagnating and not embracing change, but by often copying, improving, using our creativity. Does that mean i need to know how a LLM works? No, just like do not need to know how a bread slicer works, ...

Anyway, ... this discussion is never going to end, because there is always resistance to change. I remember my parents about smartphones, ... guess who uses them, even at their old age. Eventually some power always get consolidated but for now, with the progress i am seeing in the open source/open weights LLM progress, there will been a escape hatch for those that do not want to be linked to specific corporations, just like Linux etc exists.

RicoElectrico• 8 months ago

You're preaching to the wrong crowd I guess. Many people here think in extremes.

rsynnott3• 8 months ago

Don't be the person refusing the 4GL/Segway/3D TV/NFT/Metaverse. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks.

Like, I mean, at a certain point it runs out of chances. If someone can show me compelling quantitive evidence that these things are broadly useful I may reconsider, but until then I see no particular reason to do my own sampling. If and when they are useful, there will be _evidence_ of that.

(In fairness Segways seem to have a weird afterlife in certain cities helping to make tourists more annoying; there are sometimes niche uses for even the most pointless tech fads.)

cons0le• 8 months ago

I detest LLMs , but I want to point out that segway tech became the basis for EUCs , which are based https://youtu.be/Ze6HRKt3bCA?t=1117

These things are wicked, and unlike some new garbage javascript framework, it's revolutionary technology that regular people can actually use and benefit from. The mobility they provide is insane.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ElectricUnicycle/comments/1ddd9c1/i...

Spivak• 8 months ago

I mean sure but none of these even claimed to help you do things you were already doing. If your job is writing code none of these help you do that.

That being said the metaverse happened but it just wasn't the metaverse those weird cringy tech libertarians wanted it to be. Online spaces where people hang out are bigger than ever. Segways also happened they just changed form to electric scooters.

aurareturn3• 8 months ago

  Like, I mean, at a certain point it runs out of chances. If someone can show me compelling quantitive evidence that these things are broadly useful I may reconsider, but until then I see no particular reason to do my own sampling. If and when they are useful, there will be _evidence_ of that.

My relative came to me to make a small business website for her. She knew I was a "coder". She gave me a logo and what her small business does.

I fed all of it into Vercel v0 and out came a professional looking website that is based on the logo design and the business segment. It was mobile friendly too. I took the website and fed it to ChatGPT and asked it to improve the marketing copy. I fed the suggestions back to v0 to make changes.

My relative was extremely happy with the result.

It took me about 10 minutes to do all of this.

In the past, it probably would have taken me 2 weeks. One week to design, write copy, get feedback. Another week to code it, make it mobile friendly, publish it. Honestly, there is no way I could have done a better job given the time constraint.

I even showed my non-tech relative how to use v0. Since all changes requested to v0 was in english, she had no trouble learning how to use it in one minute.

empath753• 8 months ago

The biggest change in my career was when I got promoted to be a linux sysadmin at a large tech company that was moving to AWS. It was my first sysadmin job and I barely knew what I was doing, but I knew some bash and python. I had a chance to learn how to manage stuff in data centers by logging into servers with ssh and running perl scripts, or I could learn cloudformation because that was what management wanted. Everybody else on my team thought AWS was a fad and refused to touch it, unless absolutely forced to. I wrote a ton of terrible cloudformation and chef cookbooks and got promoted twice times and my salary went from $50,000 a year to $150,000 a year in 3 years after I took a job elsewhere. AFAIK, most of the people on that team got laid off when that whole team was eliminated a few years after I left.

mazone• 8 months ago

Does the author feel the same way of running the models locally?

Separo• 8 months ago

If as the author suggests AI is inherently designed to further concentrate control and capital, that may be so, but that is also the aim of every business.

abbadadda• 8 months ago

I really enjoyed how your words made me _feel._ They encouraged me to "keep fighting the good fight" when it comes to avoiding social media, et. al.

I do Vibe Code occasionally, Claude did a decent job with Terraform and SaltStack recently, but the words ring true in my head about how AI weakens my thinking, especially when it comes to Python or any programming language. Tread carefully indeed. And reading a book does help - I've been tearing through the Dune books after putting them off too long at my brother's recommendation. Very interesting reflections in those books on power/human nature that may apply in some ways to our current predicament.

At any rate, thank you for the thoughtful & eloquent words of caution.

scld• 8 months ago

Doesn't Python weaken your thinking about how computers actually work?

marcus_cemes• 8 months ago

You could make the same argument for any language. It still requires you to think and implement the solution yourself, just at a certain level of abstraction.

miningape4• 8 months ago

It may - but it doesn't weaken your ability to think computationally

paddleon2• 8 months ago

you mean by calling arrays "lists"?

zkmon3• 8 months ago

So, you want to rebel and stay as organic-minded human? But the what exactly is "being a human"?

The biological senses and abilities were constantly augmented throughput the centuries, pushing the organic human to hide inside deeper layers of what you call as yourself.

What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.

Now let's wind back. Why resist just one more layer of augmentation of our senses, mind and physical abilities?

zero-st4rs3• 8 months ago

What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.

perhaps a being that has the capacity for intention and will?

zkmon3• 8 months ago

Capacity for intention and will were already driven by augmentations that were knowledge and reasoning. Knowledge was sourced externally and reasoning was developed from externally recorded memory of past. Even the instincts get updated by experiences and knowledge.

noobcoder• 8 months ago

I see this play out everywhere actually be it code, thoughts, even intent, atomized for the capital engine. Its more than a productivity hack, its a subtle power shift decisions getting abstracted, agency getting diluted

Opting in to weirdness and curiosity is the only bug worth keeping which will eventually become a norm

skwee357• 8 months ago

Well, there are two aspects from which I can react to this post.

The first aspect is the “I don’t touch AI with a stick”. AI is a tool. Nobody is obligated to touch it obviously, but it is useful in certain situations. So I disagree with the author’a position to avoid using AI. It reads like stubbornness for the sake of avoiding new tech.

The second angle is the “bigtech corporate control” angle. And honestly, I don’t get this argument at all. Computers and the digital world has created the biggest distopian world we have ever witnessed. From absurd amounts of misinformation and propaganda fueled by bot farms operated at government levels, all the way to digital surveillance tech. You have that strong of an opinion against big tech and digital surveillance, blaming AI for that, while enjoying the other perils of big tech, is virtue signaling.

Also, what’s up with the overuse of “fascism” in places where it does not belong?

simianwords• 8 months ago

What's with these kinda people and their obsession with the pejorative "fascist". Overused to the point where it means nothing.

arowthway• 8 months ago

I like the "what’s left" part of the article. It’s applicable regardless of your preferred flavor of resentment about where things are going.

dangus• 8 months ago

This piece started relatively well but devolved by the end.

Is AI resource-intensive by design? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I think companies are furiously working toward reducing AI costs.

Is AI a tool of fascism? Well, I’d say anything that can make money can be a tool of fascism.

I can sort of jive with the argument that AI is/will be reinforcing the ideals of those in power, although I think traditional media and the tooling that AI intends to replace like search engines accomplished that just fine.

What we are left with is, I think, an author who is in denial about their special snowflake status as a programmer. It was okay for the factory worker to be automated away, but now that it’s my turn to be automated away I’m crying fascism and ethics.

Their friends behave the way they do about AI because they know it’s useful but know it’s unpopular. They’re trying to save face while still using the tool because it’s so obviously useful and beneficial.

I think the analogy is similar to the move from film to digital. There will be a tiny amount of people who never buy in, there will be these “ashamed” adopters who support the idea of film and hope it continues on, but for themselves personally would never go back to film, and then the majority who don’t see the problem with letting film die.

metalman• 8 months ago

"chat~fu"

cachonk!

snap your cuffs, wait fot it eyebrows!

and demonstrate your mastery ,to the muterings of the golly gee's

it will last several more months untill the , GASP!!!, bills ,maintenance costs, regulatory burdens, and various legal issues combine to, pop AI's balloon, where then AI will be left automating all of the tedious, but chair filling, beurocratic/secretarial/appretice positions through out the white collar world. technology is slowly pushing into other sectors, where legacy methods and equipment can now be reduced to a free app on a phone, more to the point, a free, local only app. fact is that we are way over siliconed going forward and that will bite as well, terra bite phones for $100, what then?

ErroneousBosh• 8 months ago

I recently had to write a simple web app to search through a database, but full-text searching wasn't quite cutting it. The underlying data was too inconsistent and the kind of things people would ask for would mean searching across five or six columns.

Just the job for an AI agent!

So what I did is this - I wrote the app in Django, because it's what I'm familiar with.

Then in the view for the search page, I picked apart the search terms. If they start with "01" it's an old phone number so look in that column, if they start with "03" it's a new phone number so look in that column, if they start with "07" it's a mobile, if it's a letter followed by two digits it's a site code, if it's numeric but doesn't have a 0 at the start it's an internal number, and if it doesn't match anything then see if it exists as a substring in the description column.

There we go. Very fast and natural searching that Does What You Mean (mostly).

No Artificial Intelligence.

All done with Organic Home-grown Brute Force and Ignorance.

Because that's sometimes just what you need.

eisbaw• 8 months ago

Programming and CS is the art of solving problems - hopefully problems that matter.

AI lets you do that faster.

AI may suggest a dumb way, so you have to think, and tell it what to do.

My rate of thinking is faster than typing, so the bottleneck has switched from typing to thinking!

Don't let AI think for you. Do actual intensional arch design.

Programmers that don't know CS who only care about hammering the keyboards because they're artisans have little future.

AI also give me back my hobby after having kids -- time is valuable, and AI is energy efficient.

We are truly living in a cambrian explosion -- lot of slop will be produced, but market and selection pressure will weed those out.

danillonunes• 8 months ago

My rate of thinking is faster than typing, so the bottleneck has switched from typing to thinking!

Unless you're neuralinking to AI, you're still typing.

What changed is what you type. You type less words to solve your problem. The machine does the conversion from less words to more words. At the expense of less precision: the machine can do the conversion to the incorrect sequence of more words.

everdrive2• 8 months ago

In a world where fascists redefine truth, where surveillance capitalist companies, more powerful than democratically elected leaders, exert control over our desires, do we really want their machines to become part of our thought process? To share our most intimate thoughts and connections with them?

Generally speaking people just cannot really think this way. People broadly are short term thinkers. If something is convenient, people will use it. Is it easier to spray your lawn with pesticides? Yep, cancer (or biome collapse) is a tomorrow problem and we have a "pest" problem today. Is it difficult to sit alone with your thoughts? Well good news, Youtube exists and now you don't have to. What happens next (radicalization, tracking, profiling, propaganda, brain rot) is a tomorrow problem. Do you want to scroll at the end of the day and find out what people are talking about? Well, social media is here for you. Whether or not it's accidentally part of a privatized social credit system? Well again, that 's a problem for later. I _need_ to feel comfortable _right now_. It doesn't matter what I do to the world so long as I'm comfortable _right now._

I don't see any way out of it. People can't seem to avoid these patterns of behavior. People asking for regulation are about as realistic as people hoping for abstinence. It's a correct answer in principle but just isn't going to happen.

Razengan3• 8 months ago

People broadly are short term thinkers.

I wonder how much of that is "nature vs. nurture"?

Like the Tolkienesque elves in fantasy worlds, would humans be more chill too if our natural lifespans were counted in centuries instead of decades?

Or is it the pace of society, our civilization, that always keeps us on edge?

I mean I'm not sure if we're born with a biological sense of mortality, an hourglass of doom encoded into our genes..

What if everybody had 4 days of work per week, guaranteed vacation time every few months, kids didn't have to wake up at 7/8 in the morning every day, and progress was measured biennially, e.g. 2 years between school grades/exams, and economic performance was also reviewed in 2 year periods, and so on, could we as a species mellow the fuck out?

IAmBroom7• 8 months ago

I've wondered about this a lot, and I think it's genetic and optimized for survival in general.

Dogs barely set food aside; they prefer gorging, which is a good survival technique when your food spoils and can be stolen.

Bees, at the other end of the spectrum, spend their lives storing food (or "canning", if you will - storing prepared food).

We first evolved in areas that were storage-adverse (Africa), and more recently many of us moved to areas with winters (both good and needful storage). I think "finish your meal, you might not get one tomorrow" is our baseline survival instinct; "Winter is coming!" is an afterthought, and might be more nurture-based behavior than the other.

Razengan3• 8 months ago

I _need_ to feel comfortable _right now_. It doesn't matter what I do to the world so long as I'm comfortable _right now._

I think that can be offset if you have a strong motivation, a clear goal to look forward to in a reasonable amount of time, to help you endure through the discomfort:

Before I had enough financial independence to be able to travel at will, I was often stuck in a shit ass city, where the most fun to be had was video games and fantasizing about my next vacation coming up in a month or 2, and that helped me a lot in coping with my circumstances.

Too few people are allowed or can afford even this luxury of a pleasant future, a promise of a life different/better than their current.

mono4422• 8 months ago

The author may not care but I doubt people care that a software has been developed by AI instead of a human. Just like nobody cares whenever a hole has been dug by hand using a shovel or by an excavator.

cpburns20093• 8 months ago

The problem is the AI excavator destroying the road because it hallucinated the ditch.

notTooFarGone• 8 months ago

people care if there is noone able to fix the software or adjust it.

Think of old SAP systems with a million obscure customization - any medium to large codebase that is mostly vibe coded is instantly legacy code.

In your hole analogy: People don't care if a mine is dug by a bot or planned by humans until there is structural integrity issues or tunnels that are collapsing and nobody is able to read the map properly.

bigstrat20033• 8 months ago

No, but people do care if the software works. And the software developed by LLMs doesn't work.

0xFEE1DEAD2• 8 months ago

I honestly don't get vibe coding.

I've tried it multiple times, but even after spending 4 hours on a fresh project I don't feel like I know what the hell is going on anymore.

At that point I'm just guessing what the next prompt is to make it work. I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would probably take longer than 4 hours).

I don't understand how anyone can work like that and have confidence in their code.

gavmor• 8 months ago

I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would probably take longer than 4 hours).

Peter Naur argues that programming is fundamentally an activity of theory building, not just program text production. The code itself is merely the artifact of the real work.

You must not confuse the artifact (the source code) with the mind that produced the artifact. The theory is not contained in the text output of the theory-making process.

The problems of program modification arise from acting on the assumption that programming is just text production; the decay of a program is a result of modifications made by programmers without a proper grasp of the underlying theory. LLMs cannot obtain Naur's Ryleian "theory" because they "ingest the output of work" rather than developing the theory by doing the work.

LLMs may _appear_ to have a theory about a program, but this is an illusion.

To believe that LLMs can write software, one must mistakenly assume that the main activity of the programmer is simply to produce source code, which is (according to Naur) inaccurate.

0xFEE1DEAD2• 8 months ago

I agree with this take, but I'm wondering what vibe coders are doing differently?

Are they mainly using certain frameworks that already have a rigid structure, thus allowing LLMs to not worry about code structure/software architecture?

Are they worry-free and just run with it?

Not asking rhetorically, I seriously want to know.

xrrocha• 8 months ago

This is one of the most insightful thoughts I've read about the role of LLM's in software development. So much so, indeed, its pertinence would remain pristine after removing all references to LLM's

esafak5• 8 months ago

There isn't a whole lot of theory building when you're writing a shell script or a Kubernetes manifest... You're just glad to get the damn thing working.

teaearlgraycold• 8 months ago

I recently made a few changes to a small personal web app using an LLM. Everything was 100% within my capabilities to pull off. Easily a few levels below the limits of my knowledge. And I’d already written the start of the code by hand. So when I went to AI I could give it small tasks. Create a React context component, store this in there, and use it in this file. Most of that code is boilerplate.

Poll this API endpoint in this file and populate the context with the result. Only a few lines of code.

Update all API calls to that endpoint with a view into the context.

I can give the AI those steps as a list and go adjust styles on the page to my liking while it works. This isn’t the kind of parallelism I’ve found to be common with LLMs. Often you are stuck on figuring out a solution. In that case AI isn’t much help. But some code is mostly boilerplate. Some is really simple. Just always read through everything it gives you and fix up the issues.

After that sequence of edits I don’t feel any less knowledgeable of the code. I completely comprehend every line and still have the whole app mapped in my head.

Probably the biggest benefit I’ve found is getting over the activation energy of starting something. Sometimes I’d rather polish up AI code than start from a blank file.

layer83• 8 months ago

If you’re reviewing the code, it’s not vibe coding. You’re relying on your assessment of the code, not on the “vibes” of the running program.

AlexandrB5• 8 months ago

It's interesting that this is a similar criticism to what was levelled at Ruby on Rails back in the day. I think generating a bunch of code - whether through AI or a "framework" - always has the effect of obscuring the mental model of what's going on. Though at least with Rails there's a consistent output for a given input that can eventually be grokked.

NoGravitas• 8 months ago

A framework provides axioms that your theory-building can work on top of. It works until there are bugs or inconsistencies in the framework that mean you can't trust those axioms.

yoyohello13• 8 months ago

I have no critical knowledge about the codebase

This is the default state for a lot of programmers, so vibe coding doesn't feel any different.

zajio1am• 8 months ago

We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft.

Valuation is fundamentally connected to scarcity. 'Devaluation' is just negative spin for making it plentyful.

When cicumstances changed to make something less scarce, one cannot expect to get the same value for it because of past valuation. That is just rent-seeking.

nachox999• 8 months ago

It's up to you to use candles instead of lightbulbs

bgwalter4• 8 months ago

The increasingly rough tone against "AI" critics in the comments and the preposterous talking points ("you are not a senior developer if you do not get value from 'AI'") is an indication that the bubble will burst soon.

It is the tool obsessed people who treat everything like a computer game that like "AI" for software engineering. Most of them have never written anything substantial themselves and only know the Jira workflow for small and insignificant tickets.

cwiz• 8 months ago

well, maybe adopt an outlook that things you think are real aren't, and just maybe it will work just as fine if you completely ignore them. going forward ignoring ai that are smarter than autocomplete may be just the way to go

ojr• 8 months ago

I always thought years of experience in a language was a silly job requirement. LLMs allow me to write Rust code as a total Rust beginner and allows me to create a valuable SaaS while most experienced Rust developer never built anything that made $1 outside of their work. I wouldn't say devaluation, my programming experience definitely helps with debugging. LLMs eliminate boilerplate, not engineering judgement and product decisions.

mountainriver• 8 months ago

I really love LLMs for Rust. Before them I was an intermediate Rust dev, and only used it in specific circumstances where the extra coding overhead paid off.

Now I write just about everything in Rust because why not? If I can vibe code Rust about as fast as Python, why would I ever use Python outside of ML?

drudolph914• 8 months ago

I think when the author says

“We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft”

my interpretation of what the author means by devaluation is the general trend that we’re seeing in LLMs

The theory that I hear from investors is as LLMs generally improve, there will exist a day where a LLMs default code output, coupled with continued hardware speeds, will become _good enough_ for the majority of companies - even if the code looks like crap and is 100x slower than it needs to be

This doesn’t mean there won’t be a few companies that still need SWEs to drop down and do engineering, but tbh, the majority of companies today just need a basic web app - and we’ve commoditized web app dev tools to oblivion. I’d even go as far to argue that what most programmers do today isn’t engineering, it’s gluing together an ecosystem of tooling and or API’s.

Real engineering seems to happen outside of work on open source projects, at the mav 7 on specialized teams, or at niche deeply technical startups

EDIT: I’m not saying this is good or bad, but I’m just making the observation that there is a trend towards devaluing this work in the economy for the majority of people, and I generally empathize with people who just want stability and to raise a family within reasonable means

TrackerFF• 8 months ago

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff.

But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever.

If your org is blindly data/metric driven, it is probably just a mater of time until managers start asking why everyone else is producing so much, while you're slow?

zwnow3• 8 months ago

You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper.

I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. If it doesn't, yay refactoring prompts instead of tackling the actual problem. Also I can write code for free, LLMs coding assistants aren't free. I can fit business problems amd edge cases into my brain given some time, a LLM is unaware about edge cases, legal requirements, decoupled dependencies, potential refactors or the occasional call of boss asking for something to be sneaked into the code right now. If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into.

Aurornis6• 8 months ago

I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not.

You don’t have to let the LLM write code for you. They’re very useful as a smart search engine for your code base, a smart refactoring tool, a suggestion generator, and many other ways.

I rarely have LLMs write code for me from scratch that I have to review, but I do give them specific instructions to do what I want to the codebase. They can do it much faster than I can search around the codebase and type out myself.

There are so many ways to make LLMs useful without having them do all the work while you sit back and judge. I think some people are determined to get no value out of the LLM because they feel compelled to be anti-hype, so they’re missing out on all the different little ways they can be used to help. Even just using it as a smarter search engine (in the modes where they can search and find the right sections of right articles or even GitHub issues for you) has been very helpful. But you have to actually learn how to use them.

If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into.

Okay, good luck with your hut in the forest. The rest of us will move on using these tools how we see fit, which for many of us doesn’t actually include this idea where the LLM is the author of the code and you just ask nicely and reject edits until it produces the exact code you want. The tools are useful in many ways and you don’t have to stop writing your own code. In fact, anyone who believes they can have the LLM do all the coding is in for a bad surprise when they realize that specific hype is a lie.

fileeditview3• 8 months ago

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over.

The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse.

edit: sentence fixed.

lxgr12• 8 months ago

The era of software mass production has begun.

We've been in that era for at least two decades now. We just only now invented the steam engine.

I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down.

At least one such artifact of craft and beauty already literally crashed two airplanes. Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs.

afro88• 8 months ago

I think you'll be waiting a while for the "crashing down". I was a kid when manufacturing went off shore and mass production went into overdrive. I remember my parents complaining about how low quality a lot of mass produced things were. Yet for decades most of what we buy is mass produced, comparatively low quality goods. We got used to it, the benefits outweighed the negatives. What we thought mattered didn't in the face of a lot of previously unaffordable goods now broadly available and affordable.

You can still buy high goods made with care when it matters to you, but that's the exception. It will be the same with software. A lot of what we use will be mass produced with AI, and even produced in realtime on the fly (in 5 years maybe?). There will be some things where we'll pay a premium for software crafted with care, but for most it won't matter because of the benefits of rapidly produced software.

We've got a glimpse of this with things like Claude Artifacts. I now have a piece of software quite unique to my needs that simply wouldn't have existed otherwise. I don't care that it's one big js file. It works and it's what I need and I got it pretty much for free. The capability of things like Artifacts will continue to grow and we'll care less and less that it wasn't human produced with care.

carlosjobim4• 8 months ago

Why didn't programmers think of stepping down from their ivory towers and start making small apps which solve small problems? That people and businesses are very happy to pay for?

But no! Programmers seem to only like working on giant scale projects, which only are of interest to huge enterprises, governments, or the open source quagmire of virtualization within virtualization within virtualization.

There's exactly one good invoicing app I've found which is good for freelancers and small businesses. While the amount of potential customers are in the tens of millions. Why aren't there at least 10 good competitors?

My impression is that programmers consider it to be below their dignity to work on simple software which solves real problems and are great for their niche. Instead it has to be big and complicated, enterprise-scale. And if they can't get a job doing that, they will pretend to have a job doing that by spending their time making open source software for enterprise-scale problems.

Instead of earning a very good living by making boutique software for paying users.

davidmurdoch• 8 months ago

This just happened to me this week.

I work on the platform everyone builds on top of. A change here can subtlety break any feature, no matter how distant.

AI just can't cope with this yet. So my team has been told that we are too slow.

Meanwhile, earlier this week we halted a roll out because if a bug introduced by AI, as it worked around a privacy feature by just allow listing the behavior it wanted, instead of changing the code to address to policy. It wasn't caught in review because the file that was changed didn't require my teams review (because we ship more slowly, they removed us as code owners for many files recently).

BarryMilo• 8 months ago

As it was foretold since the beginning, IA use is breaking security wantonly.

rho42• 8 months ago

Ouch, so painful to read.

grayhatter4• 8 months ago

It wasn't caught in review because the file that was changed didn't require my teams review (because we ship more slowly, they removed us as code owners for many files recently).

I've lost your fight, but won mine before, you can sell this as risk reduction to your boss. I've never seen eng win this argument on quality grounds. Quality is rarely something that can be understood by company leadership. But having a risk reduction team that moves a bit slower and protects the company from extreme exposures like this, is much harder to cut from the process. "Imagine the law suits missing something like this would cause." and "we don't move slower, we do more than the other teams, the code is more visible, but the elimination of mistakes that will be very expensive legally and reputationally is what we're the best at"

miningape4• 8 months ago

Fuck it - let them reap the consequences. Ideally wait until there's something particularly destructive, then do the post-mortem as publicly as possible - call out the structures and practises that enabled that commit to get into production.

AndrewKemendo4• 8 months ago

If your org is blindly data/metric driven

Are there for profit companies (not non profits, research institutes etc…) that are not metric driven?

intothemild• 8 months ago

Most early stage startups I've been in weren't metric driven. It's impossible when everyone is just working as hard as they can to get it built, to suddenly slow down and start measuring everyone's output.

It's not until later. When it's gotten to a larger size, do you have the resources to be metric driven.

layer83• 8 months ago

“Blindly” is the operative word here.

syllogism4• 8 months ago

I think LLMs are net helpful if used well, but there's also a big problem with them in workplaces that needs to be called out.

It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. If all your coworkers use LLMs and you don't you're gonna get eaten alive. LLMs are unreasonably effective at generating large volumes of stuff that resembles diligent work on the surface.

The other thing is, tools change trade-offs. If you're in a team that's decided to lean into static analysis, and you don't use type checking in your editor, you're getting all the costs and less of the benefits. Or if you're in a team that's decided to go dynamic, writing good types for just your module is mostly a waste of time.

LLMs are like this too. If you're using a very different workflow from everyone else on your team, you're going to end up constantly arguing for different trade-offs, and ultimately you're going to cause a bunch of pointless friction. If you don't want to work the same way as the rest of the team just join a different team, it's really better for everyone.

arscan• 8 months ago

It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people.

This is my biggest gripe with LLM use in practice.

acedTrex3• 8 months ago

It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people.

This is so incredibly true.

Aurornis6• 8 months ago

Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever.

Honestly I think you’re swallowing some of the hype here.

I think the biggest advantages of LLMs go to the experienced coders who know how to leverage them in their workflows. That may not even include having the LLM write the code directly.

The non-coders producing apps meme is all over social media, but the real world results aren’t there. All over Twitter there were “build in public” indie non-tech developers using LLMs to write their apps and the hype didn’t match reality. Some people could get minimal apps out the door that kind of talked to a back end, but even those people were running into issues not breaking everything on update or managing software lifecycle.

The top complaint in all of the social circles I have about LLMs is with juniors submitting LLM junk PRs and then blaming the LLM. It’s just not true that juniors are expertly solving tasks with LLMs faster than seniors.

I think LLMs are helpful and anyone senior isn’t learning how to use them to their advantage (which doesn’t mean telling the LLM what to write and hoping for the best) is missing out. I think people swallowing the hype about non-tech people and juniors doing senior work is getting misled about the actual ways to use these tools effectively.

jvanderbot• 8 months ago

It's not just "juniors". It's people who should know better turning out LLM junk outside their actual experience areas because "They are experienced enough to use LLMs".

There are just some things that need lots of extra scrutiny in a system, and the experienced ones know where that is. An LLM rarely seems to, especially for systems of anywhere near real world production size.

intended2• 8 months ago

I didnt read the parent comment as celebrating this state. More like they were decrying it, and the blindness of people who just run on metrics.

stocksinsmocks2• 8 months ago

I’m a garage coder and the kind of engineer that has a license. I had the capacity with my kids to make a usable application for my work about once every 6 months. Now it’s once a weekend or so. You don’t have to believe it.

reedlaw• 8 months ago

I feel sorry for juniors because they have even less incentive to troubleshoot or learn languages. At the same time, the sheer size of APIs make me relieved that I will never have to remember another command, DSL, or argument list again. Ruby has hundreds of methods, Rails hundreds more, and they constantly change. I'd rather write a prompt saying what I mean than figure out obscure incantations, especially with infrequently used tools like ffmpeg.

Advent of Code (https://adventofcode.com/2025/about) says:

Should I use AI to solve Advent of Code puzzles? No. If you send a friend to the gym on your behalf, would you expect to get stronger? Advent of Code puzzles are designed to be interesting for humans to solve - no consideration is made for whether AI can or cannot solve a puzzle. If you want practice prompting an AI, there are almost certainly better exercises elsewhere designed with that in mind.

I would advocate for Advent of Code in every workplace, but finding interest is rare. No matter how much craft is emphasized, ultimately businesses are concerned with solving problems. Even personally, sometimes I want to solve a problem so I can move on to something more interesting.

atleastoptimal5• 8 months ago

Many people actually are becoming more productive. I know you're using quotes around productive to insulate yourself from the indignity of admitting that AI actually is useful in specific domains.

bluefirebrand6• 8 months ago

If AI is making you more productive, then I doubt you were very productive pre-AI

grayhatter4• 8 months ago

Many people actually are becoming more productive. I know you're using quotes around productive to insulate yourself from the indignity of admitting that AI actually is useful in specific domains.

Equally, my read is you're fixating on the syntax used in their comment to insulate yourself from actually engaging with their idea and point. You refuse to try to understand the parts of the system that negate the surface level popularity, eer productivity gains.

People who enjoy the productivity boost of AI are right, you can absolutely, without question build a house faster with AI.

The people who claim there's not really any reasonable productivity gains from AI are also right, because using AI to build a multistory anything, requires you to waste all that time starting with a house, to then raze it to the ground and rebuild a usable foundation.

yes, "but its useful in specific domains" is technically correct statement, but whataboutism is rarely a useful conversational response.

SpicyLemonZest4• 8 months ago

If your org is blindly data/metric driven, it is probably just a mater of time until managers start asking why everyone else is producing so much, while you're slow?

It’s a reasonable question, and my response is that I’ve encountered multiple specific examples now of a project being delayed a week because some junior tried to “save” a day by having AI write bad code.

Good managers generally understand the concept of a misleading productivity metric that fails to reflect real value. There’s a reason, after all, why most of us don’t get promoted based on lines of code delivered. I understand why people who don’t trust their managers to get this would round it off to artisanship for its own sake.

sambuccid• 8 months ago

In my experience I saw the complete opposite of "juniors looking like savants", there are a few pieces of code made by some juniors and som mid engineers in my company(one also involving a senior) that were clearly made with AI, and they are such a mess that they haven't been touched ever since because it's just impossible to understand, and this wasn't caught in the PR because the size of it was so large that people didn't actually bother reading it.

I did see a few good senior engineers using AI and producing good code, but for junior and mid engineers I have witnessed the complete opposite.

JimmaDaRustla• 8 months ago

We don't care that you don't care

jillesvangurp• 8 months ago

Harsh but fair. In short, some people are upset about change happening to them. They think it's unfair and that they deserve better. Maybe that's true. But unfair things happen to lots of people all the time. And ultimately people move on, mostly. There's a futility to being very emotional about it.

I don't get all the whining of people about having to adapt. That's a constant in our industry and always has been. If what you were doing was so easy that it fell victim to the first generation of AI tools that are doing a decent enough job of it, then maybe what you were doing was a bit Ground Hog day to begin with. I've certainly been involved with a lot of projects where a lot of the work felt that way. Customer wants a web app thing with a log in flow and a this and a that. 99% of that stuff is kind of very predictable. That's why agentic coding tools are so good at this stuff. But lets be honest, it was kind of low value stuff to begin with. And it's nice that people over-payed for that for a while but it was never going to be forever.

There's still plenty of stuff these tools are less good at. It gets progressively harder if you are integrating lots of different niche things or doing some non standard/non trivial things. And even those things where it does a decent job, it still requires good judgment and expertise to 1) be able to even ask for the right thing and then 2) judge if what comes back is fit for purpose.

There's plenty of work out there supporting companies with decades of legacy software that are not going to be throwing away everything they have overnight. Leveling up their UIs with AI powered features, cross integrating a lot of stuff, etc. is going to generate lots of work and business. And most companies are very poorly equipped to do that in house even if they have access to agentic coding tools.

For me AI is actually generating more work, not less. I'm now taking on bigger things that were previously impossible to take on without involving more people. I have about 10x more things I want to do than I have bandwidth for. I have to take decisions about doing things the stupid old way because it's better/faster or attempting to generate some code. All new tools do is accelerate the pace and raise the ambition levels. That too is nothing new in our industry. Things that were hard are now easy, so we do more of them and find yet harder things to do next. We're not about to run out of hard things to do any time soon.

Adapting is hard. Not everyone will manage. Some people might burn out doing that or change career. And some people are in denial or angry about that. And you can't really expect others to loose a lot of sleep over this. Whether that's unfair or not doesn't really matter.

lxgr12• 8 months ago

I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles.

Anything worth reading beyond this transparent and hopefully unsuccessful appeal to tribalism?

Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different?

the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. A fate that designers, writers, translators, tailors or book-binders lived through before us

What is it with this perceived right to fulfilling, but also highly paid, employment in software engineering?

Nobody is stopping anyone from doing things by hand that machines can do at 10 times the quality and 100 times the speed.

Some people will even pay for it, but not many. Much will be relegated to unpaid pastime activities, and the associated craftspeople will move on to other activities to pay the bills (unless we achieve post-scarcity first). That's just human progress in a nutshell.

If the underlying problem is that many societies define a person's worth via their employability, that seems like a problem best fixed by restructuring said societies, not by artificially blocking technological progress. "progressive hackers"...

ceejayoz2• 8 months ago

Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different?

Who says we haven't tried it out?

lxgr12• 8 months ago

Seems like various hackers came to various different conclusions from trying them out, then. Why feign surprise about this?

hamdingers2• 8 months ago

I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment.

FTA.

I know tons of people where "tried it out" means they've seen Google's abysmal search summary feature, or merely seen the memes and read news articles about how it's wrong sometimes, and haven't explored any further.

stocksinsmocks2• 8 months ago

There seems to be a surprising theme that programmers wages are some kind of sunk cost and that their work was free of defects before.

I can get bad code written for the cost of electricity now

markbnj• 8 months ago

I think the dangers that LLMs pose to the ability of engineers to earn a living is overstated, while at the same time the superpowers that they hand us don't seem to get much discussion. When I was starting out in the 80's I had to prowl dial-up BBSs or order expensive books and manuals to find out how to do something. I once paid IBM $140 for a manual on the VGA interface so I could answer a question. The turn around time on that answer was a week or two. The other day I asked claude something similar to this: "when using github as an OIDC provider for authentication and assumption of an AWS IAM role the JWT token presented during role assumption may have a "context" field. Please list the possible values of this field and the repository events associated with them." I got back a multi-page answer complete with examples.

I'm sure github has documents out there somewhere that explain this, but typing that prompt took me two minutes. I'm able daily to get fast answers to complex questions that in years past would have taken me potentially hours of research. Most of the time these answers are correct, and when they are wrong it still takes less time to generate the correct answer than all that research would have taken before. So I guess my advice is: if you're starting out in this business worry less about LLMs replacing you and more about how to efficiently use that global expert on everything that is sitting on your shoulder. And also realize that code, and the ability to write working code, is a small part of what we do every day.

hvb2• 8 months ago

So I guess my advice is: if you're starting out in this business worry less about LLMs replacing you and more about how to efficiently use that global expert on everything that is sitting on your shoulder.

There's a real danger in that they use so many resources though. Both in the physical world (electricity, raw materials, water etc.) as well as in a financial sense.

All the money spent on AI will not go to your other promising idea. There's a real opportunity cost there. I can't imagine that, at this point, good ideas go without funding because they're not AI.

skydhash5• 8 months ago

I’m glad you listed the manual example. Usually when people are solving problems, they’re not asking the kind of super targeted question in you second example. Instead it’s an exploration. You read and target the next concept you need to understand. And if you do have this specific question, you want the surrounding context because you’ll likely have more questions after the first.

So what people do is collecting documentations. Give them a glance (or at least the TOC), the start the process to understand the concepts. Sure you can ask the escape code for setting a terminal title, but will it says that not all terminals support that code? Or that piping does not strip out escape codes? That’s the kind of gotchas you can learn from proper manuals.

mono4422• 8 months ago

I don't agree. LLMs don't have to completly replace software developers, it is enough to reduce the need for them by 30% or so and the salaries will nosedive making this particular career path unattractive.

kleiba• 8 months ago

Damn, I knew I shouldn't have read on after "falafel sandwich"...

disambiguation• 8 months ago

I'm under the impression that AI is still negative ROI. Creating absolute value is different from creating value greater than the cost. A tool is a tool, but could you continue performing professionally if it was suddenly no longer available?

ttul2• 8 months ago

This post raises genuine concerns about the integration of large language models into creative and technical work, and the author writes with evident passion about what they perceive as a threat to human autonomy and craft. BUT… the piece suffers from internal contradictions, selective reasoning, and rhetorical moves that undermine its own arguments in ways worth examining carefully.

My opinion: This sort of low-evidence writing is all too common in tech circles. It makes me wish computer science and engineering majors were forced to spend at least one semester doing nothing but the arts.

The most striking inconsistency emerges in how the author frames the people who use LLM tools. Early in the piece, colleagues experimenting with AI coding assistants are described in the language of addiction and pathology: they are “sucked into the belly of the vibecoding grind,” experiencing “existential crisis,” engaged in “harmful coping.” The comparison to watching a friend develop a drinking problem is explicit and damning. This framing treats AI adoption as a personal failure, a weakness of character, a moral lapse. Yet only paragraphs later, the author pivots to acknowledging that people are “forced to use these systems” by bosses, UI patterns, peer pressure, and structural disadvantages in school and work. They even note their own privilege in being able to abstain. These two framings cannot coexist coherently. If using AI tools is coerced by material circumstances and power structures, then the addiction metaphor is not just inapt but cruel — it assigns individual blame for systemic conditions. The author wants to have it both ways: to morally condemn users while also absolving them as victims of circumstance.

This tension extends to the author’s treatment of their own social position. Having acknowledged that abstention from LLMs requires privilege, they nonetheless continue to describe AI adoption as a “brainworm” that has infected even “progressive hacker circles.” The disgust is palpable. But if avoiding these tools is a luxury, then expressing contempt for those who cannot afford that luxury is inconsistent at best and self-congratulatory at worst. The acknowledgment of privilege becomes a ritual disclaimer rather than something that actually modifies the moral judgments being rendered.

The author’s claims about intentionality represent another significant weakness. The assertion that AI systems being resource-intensive “is not a side effect — it’s the point” is presented as revelation, but it functions as an unfalsifiable claim. No evidence is offered that anyone designed these systems to be resource-hungry as a mechanism of control. The technical requirements of training large models, competitive market pressure to scale, and the emergent dynamics of venture capital investment all offer more parsimonious explanations that don’t require attributing coordinated malicious intent. Similarly, the claim that “AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence” is stated as though it were established fact rather than contested interpretation. This is the central claim of the piece, and yet it receives no argument — it is simply asserted and then built upon, which amounts to begging the question.

The essay also suffers from a pronounced selection bias in its examples. Every person described using AI tools is in crisis, suffering, or compromised. No one uses them mundanely, critically, or with benefit. This creates a distorted picture that serves rhetorical purposes but does not reflect the range of actual use cases. The author’s friends who share their anti-AI sentiment are mentioned approvingly, establishing clear in-group and out-group boundaries. This is identity formation masquerading as analysis — good people resist, compromised people succumb.

There is a false dichotomy running through the piece that deserves attention. The implied choice is between the author’s total abstention, not touching LLMs “with a stick,” and being consumed by the pathological grind described earlier. No middle ground exists in this telling. The possibility of critical, limited, or thoughtful engagement with these tools is never acknowledged as legitimate. You are either pure or contaminated.

Reality doesn’t work this way! It’s not black and white. My take: AI is a transformative technology and the spectrum of uses and misuses of AI is vast and growing.

The philosophical core of their argument also contains an unexamined equivocation. The author invokes the extended cognition thesis — the idea that tools become part of us and shape who we are — to make AI seem uniquely threatening. But this same argument applies to every tool mentioned in the piece: hammers, pens, keyboards, dictionaries. The author describes their own fingers “flying over the keyboard, switching windows, opening notes, looking up words in a dictionary” as part of their extended cognitive process. If consulting a dictionary shapes thought and becomes part of our cognitive process, what exactly distinguishes that from asking a language model to check grammar or suggest a word? The author never establishes what makes AI categorically different from the other tools that have already become part of us. The danger is assumed rather than demonstrated.

There is also a genetic fallacy at work in the argument about power. The author suggests AI is bad partly because of who controls it — surveillance capitalists, fascists, those with enormous physical infrastructure. But this argument conflates the origin and ownership of a technology with its inherent properties. One could make identical arguments about the printing press, the telephone, or the internet itself. The question of whether these tools could be structured differently, owned differently, or used toward different ends is never engaged. Everything becomes evidence of a monolithic system of control.

Finally, there is an unacknowledged irony in the piece’s medium and advice. The author recommends spending less time on social media and reading books instead, while writing a blog post clearly designed for social sharing, complete with the vivid metaphors, escalating moral stakes, and calls to action that characterize viral content. The post exists within and depends upon the very attention economy it criticizes. This is not necessarily hypocrisy — we all must operate within systems we find problematic — but the lack of self-awareness about it is notable given how readily the author judges others for their compromises.

The essay is most compelling when it stays concrete: the phenomenology of writing as discovery, the real pressures workers face, the genuine concerns about who controls these systems and toward what ends. It is weakest when it reaches for grand unified theories of intentional domination, when it mistakes assertion for argument, and when it allows moral contempt to override the structural analysis it claims to offer. The author clearly cares about human flourishing and autonomy, but the piece would be stronger if that care extended more generously to those navigating these technologies without the privilege of refusal.

joestrouth1• 8 months ago

Your reading of the addiction angle is much different than mine.

I didn't hear the author criticizing the character of their colleagues. On the contrary, they wrote a whole section on how folks are pressured or forced to use AI tools. That pressure (and fear of being left behind) drives repeated/excessive exposure. That in turn manifests as dependence and progressive atrophy of the skills they once had. Their colleagues seem aware of this as evidenced by "what followed in most of them, almost like a reflex, was a self-justification of why the way they use these tools is fine". When you're dependent on something, you can always find a 'reason'/excuse to use. AA and other programs talk about this at length without morally condemning addicts or assigning individual blame.

For most of us, self-justification was the maker of excuses; excuses, of course, for drinking, and for all kinds of crazy and damaging conduct. We had made the invention of alibis a fine art. [...] We had to drink because at work we were great successes or dismal failures. We had to drink because our nation had won a war or lost a peace. And so it went, ad infinitum. We thought "conditions" drove us to drink, and when we tried to correct these conditions and found that we couldn't to our entire satisfaction, our drinking went out of hand

Framing something as addictive does not necessarily mean that those suffering from it are failures/weak/immoral but you seem to have projected that onto the author.

Their other analogy ("brainworm") is similar. Something that no-one would willingly sign up for if presented with all the facts up front but that slips in and slowly develops into a serious issue. Faced with mounting evidence of the problem, folks have a strong incentive to downplay the issue because it's cognitively uncomfortable and demands action. That's where the "harmful coping" comes in: minimizing the severity of the problem, avoiding the topic when possible, telling yourself or others stories about how you're in control or things will work out fine, etc.

miningape4• 8 months ago

Claude, summarise this for me

ttul2• 8 months ago

I wrote this, and honestly when I read it, I also want to reach for the LLM.

64718283661• 8 months ago

The answer is I will kill myself when I become replaced by LLMs entirely.

easterncalculus• 8 months ago

I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles.

That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture.

I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away" from superintelligence for the forseeable future. All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.

poszlem• 8 months ago

That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture.

People who haven't lived through the transition will likely come here to tell you how wrong you are, but you are 100% correct.

codeflo• 8 months ago

You were proven right three minutes after you posted this. Something happened, I'm not sure what and how. Hacking became reduced to "hacktivism", and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.

dude250711• 8 months ago

The folks who love command-line and terminals had not been luddites all this time?

jrm44• 8 months ago

No. You're both about 50% correct; what's making everything weird is that the things associated with "hacking" transitioned from "completely optional side hobby" to "fundamental basis of the economy, both bullshit and not."

This is why I'm finding most of this discussion very odd.

bgwalter4• 8 months ago

Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT.

Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter.

It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use things like VSCode and have no issues with all their actions being tracked and surveilled by their corporate masters.

Please do no co-opt the term "hacker".

Aurornis6• 8 months ago

Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter.

A lot of hackers, including the black hat kind, DGAF about your ideological purity. They get things done with the tools that make it easy. The tools they’re familiar with.

Some of the hacker circles I was most familiar with in my younger days primarily used Windows as their OS. They did a lot of reverse engineering using Windows tools. They might have used .NET to write their custom tools because it was familiar and fast. They pulled off some amazing reverse engineering feats.

Yet when I tell people they preferred Windows and not Linux you can tell who’s more focused on ideological purity than actual achievements because eww Windows.

Please do no co-opt the term "hacker".

Right back at you. To me, hacker is about results, not about enforcing ideological purity about only using the acceptable tools on your computer.

In my experience: The more time someone spends identifying as a hacker, gatekeeping the word, and trying to make it a culture war thing about the tools you use, the less “hacker” like they are. When I think of hacker culture I think about the people who accomplish amazing things regardless of the tools or whether HN finds them ideologically acceptable to use.

lxgr12• 8 months ago

hackers have always rejected bloated tools [...] Hackers have historically derided any website generators

Ah yes, true hackers would never, say, build a Debian package...

Managing complexity has always been part of the game. To a very large extent it is the game.

Hate the company selling you a SaaS subscription to the closed-source tool if you want, and push for open-source alternatives, but don't hate the tool, and definitely don't hate the need for the tool.

Please do no co-opt the term "hacker".

Indeed, please don't. And leave my true scotsman alone while we're at it!

FuriouslyAdrift• 8 months ago

VSCodium is the open source "clean" build of VS Code without all the Microsoft telemetry and under MIT license.

https://vscodium.com/

forgetfulness2• 8 months ago

Hackers never had a very cohesive and consistent ideology or moral framework, we heard non stop of the exploits of people funded as part of Cold War military pork projects that got the plug pulled eventually, but some antipathy and mistrust of the powerful and belief in the power of knowledge were recurrent themes nonetheless

So why is it a surprise that hackers mistrust these tools pushed by megacorps, that also sell surveillance to governments, with “suits” promising other “suits” that they’ll be making knowledge obsolete? That people will no longer need to use their brains, that people with knowledge won’t be useful?

It’s not Luddism that people with an ethos of empowering the individual with knowledge are resisting these forces

billy99k4• 8 months ago

Being anti-ai means you want to conserve the old ways in favor of new technology. Hardly what I would call 'progressive'.

otabdeveloper4• 8 months ago

is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do

Well, LLMs don't fix that problem.

(They fix the "need to train your classification model on your own data" problem, but none of you care about that, you want the quick sci-fi assistant dopamine hit.)

mattgreenrocks3• 8 months ago

This is the culture that replaced hacker culture.

Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities.

This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old set. The tension between money and what you make has been boiled away completely. We lean much more heavily on where someone has worked ("ex-Google") vs their tech chops, which (like management), have given up on trying to actually evaluate. We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact.

We sold out the culture, which paved the way for it to be hollowed out by LLMs.

There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. We need to stop being complicit in propagating that noxious cloud of inevitability and nihilism that is choking our culture. We need to call out the bullshit and extended psyops ("all software jobs are going away!") that have gone on for the past 2-3 years, and mock it ruthlessly: despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical.

In short, it's time to wake up.

robot-wrangler3• 8 months ago

I realized recently that if you want to talk about interesting topics with smart people, if you expect things like critical thinking and nuanced discussion, you're currently much better off talking literature or philosophy than anything related to tech. I mean, everyone knows that discussing politics/economics is rather hopelessly polarized, everyone has their grievances or their superstitions or injuries that they cannot really put aside. But this is a pretty new thing that discussing software/engineering on merits is almost impossible.

Yes, I know about the language / IDE / OS wars that software folks have indulged in before. But the reflexive shallow pro/anti takes on AI are way more extreme and are there even in otherwise serious people. And in general anti-intellectual sentiment, mindless follow-the-leader, and proudly ignorant stances on many topics are just out of control everywhere and curiosity seems to be dead or dying.

You can tell it's definitely tangled up with money though and this remains a good filter for real curiosity. Math that's not maybe related to ML is something HN is guaranteed to shit on. No one knows how to have a philosophy startup yet (WeWork and other culty scams notwithstanding!). Authors, readers, novels, and poetry aren't moving stock markets. So at least for now there's somewhere left for the intellectually curious to retreat

quantummagic• 8 months ago

we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers.

Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.

JustExAWS5• 8 months ago

I’ve been a “software engineer” or closely adjacent for 30 years. During that time, I’ve worked for small and medium “lifestyle companies”, startups, boring Big Enterprise, $BigTech and over the past 5 years (including my time at $BigTech) worked as a customer facing cloud consultant where I’ve seen every type of organization imaginable and how they work. No one ever gave a rip about “craftsmanship”. They hire you for one reason - to make them more money than they are paying you for or to save them more money than you are costing them. As far as me, I haven’t written a single line of code for “enjoyment” since the day I stepped into college. For the next four years it was about getting a degree and for the next 30, it was about exchanging my labor for money to support my addictions to food and shelter - that’s the transaction. I don’t dislike coding or dread my job. But at the end of the day (and at the beginning of the day) I’ve found plenty of things I enjoy that don’t involve computers - working out, teaching fitness classes part time, running, spending time with family and friends, traveling, etc. If an LLM helps me exchange my labor for money more efficiently, I’m going to use it just like I graduated from writing everything in assembly in 1987 on my Apple //e to using a C compiler or even for awhile using Visual Basic 6.

everdrive2• 8 months ago

Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place.

At some point people started universally accepting the idea that any sort of gatekeeping was a bad thing.I think by now people are starting to realize that this was a flawed idea. (at best, gatekeeping is not a pure negative; it's situational) But, despite coming to realize this I think parts of our culture still maintain this as a default value. "If more people can code, that's a _good_ thing!" Are we 100% sure that's true? Are there _no_ downsides? Even if it's a net positive, we should be able to have some discussion about the downsides as well.

Glemkloksdjf10• 8 months ago

We need to change the underlying system.

We do not need to do things no one needs. We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application.

We need a system which allows the earth resources being used as efficient and fair as possible.

Then we can again start apprechiating real craftmanship but not for critical things and not because we need to feed ourselves but because we want to do it.

CamperBob26• 8 months ago

We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs.

I'm tempted to say "You're not helping," as my eyes roll back in their sockets far enough to hurt. But I can also understand how threatening LLMs must appear to programmers, writers, and artists who aren't very good at their jobs.

What I don't get is why I should care.

ineedasername4• 8 months ago

"There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs"

This is the exact sentiment when said about some other profession or craft, countless people elsewhere and on HN have noted that it's neither productive not wise to be so precious about a task that evolved as a necessity into the ritualized, reified, pedestal-putting that prevents progress. It conflates process with every single other thing about whatever is being spoken about.

Also: Complaining that a new technology bottlenecked by lack of infrastructure, pushback from people with your mindset, poorly understood in its best use because the people who aren't of your mindset are still figuring out and creating the basic tooling we currently lack?

That is a failure of basic observation. A failure to see the thing you don't like because you don't like and decide not to look. Will you like it if you look? I don't know, sounds like your mind is made up, or you might find good reasons why you should maintain your stance. In the later case, you'd be able to make a solid contribution to the discussion.

jrm44• 8 months ago

"Dignifies work done by developers?"

Hmm. No. Not really. I don't think "hacker" ever much meant this at all; mostly because "hacker" never actually was much connected to "labor for money."

"Going to work" and "being a hacker" were overwhelmingly mutually exclusive. Hacking was what you don't do on company time (in favor of the company.)

JohnBooty3• 8 months ago

    we need to create a culture that values craftmanship 
    and dignifies work done by developers.

I don't think that is at ALL at odds with using AI as a coding assistant!

I am not going to tell you I am a coding god, but I have been doing this for nearly 30 years and I feel I'm pretty competent craftsman.

AI has helped me to be a better craftsman. The big picture ideas are mine, but AI has helped immensely with some details.

asdfman123• 8 months ago

This is the fate that befalls any wildly successful subculture: the MOPs start showing up, fascinated by it, and the sociopaths monetize it to get rich. The original geeks who created the scene become increasingly powerless.

Relevant article: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

zero_k• 8 months ago

YES. The "This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative" is so incredibly true. I went to a privacy event about Web3, and the event organisers hired a photographer who took photos of everyone (no "no photo" stickers available), and they even flew a drone above our heads to take overarching videos of everyone :D I guess "privacy" should have been in quotes. All the values and aesthetics of the original set of people who actually cared about privacy (and were attracted to it) has been evaporated. All that remained are the hype. It was wild.

supern0va• 8 months ago

"We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact."

I actually disagree with this pretty fundamentally. I've never seen hacker culture as defined by "craftsmanship" so much as about getting things done. When I think of our culture historically, it's cleverness, quick thinking, building out quick and dirty prototypes in weekend "hackathons", startup culture that cuts corners to get an MVP product out there. I mean, look at your URL bar: do you think YC companies are prioritizing artisanal lines of code?

We didn't trade craftsmanship for "Business Impact". The latter just aligns well with our culture of Getting Shit Done. Whether it's for play (look at the jank folks bring out to the playa that's "good enough") or business, the ethos is the same.

If anything, I feel like there has been more of an attempt to erase/sideline our actual culture by folks like y'all as a backlash against AI. But frankly, while a lot of us scruffy hacker types might have some concerns about AI, we also see a valuable tool that helps us move faster sometimes. And if there's a good tool that gets a thing done in a way that I deem satisfactory, I'm not going to let someone's political treatise get in my way. I'm busy building.

blackqueeriroh17• 8 months ago

we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers.

Developers waste a lot of time writing a bunch of boilerplate code that they hate writing and that doesn’t make them happy and has nothing to do with craftmanship. We also just spent 60 years in a culture that dignified work done by developers to the extreme, and honestly that produced some of the most narcissistic minds the world has ever seen: Thiel, Andressen, et al - and why? Because we dignify work in a capitalistic culture by increasing wages.

You want to talk about a culture that values craftmanship? Let everyone have the time and the freedom and the security to build whatever they want to build, instead of what they have to build in order to have health insurance.

We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs.

Uhhhhhh…..excuse me?

despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical.

More money was invested in the dot-com boom, and in the lead up to the railroad era, before anyone could ride. So this isn’t new.

underlipton• 8 months ago

Get some black dudes involved. Black dudes know how to keep it real.

(It will be interesting to see many people are able to accurately draw the conceptual line between what part of my sentiment is a joke and what part is serious.)

EDIT: Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message.

Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. And you had an entire group of people, whose existing ethos was based on appropriating and remixing and building something from the metal up, right there.

amarant3• 8 months ago

It's Turing's Law:

Any person who posts a sufficiently long text online will be mistaken for an AI.

pksebben3• 8 months ago

Likely progressive, but definitely not luddite [0]. Anti-capitalist for sure.

I struggle with this discourse deeply. With many posters like OP, I align almost completely - unions are good, large megacorps are bad, death to facists etc. It's when we get to the AI issue that I do a bit of a double take.

Right now, AI is almost completely in the hands of a few large corp entities, yes. But once upon a time, so was the internet, so were processing chips, so was software. This is the power of the byte - it shrinks progressively and multiplies infinitely - thus making it inherently diffuse and populist (at the end of the day). It's not the relationship to our cultural standards that causes this - it's baked right into the structure of the underlying system. Computing systems are like sand - you can melt them into a tower of glass, but those are fragile and will inevitably become sand once again. Sand is famously difficult to hold in a tight grasp.

I won't say that we should stop fighting against the entrenchment of powers like OpenAI - fine, that's potentially a worthy fight and if that's what you want to focus on go ahead. However, if you really want to hack the planet, democratize power and distribute control, what you have to be doing is working towards smaller local models, distributed training, and finding an alternative to backprop that can compete without the same functional costs.

We are this close to having a guide in our pocket that can help us understand the machine better. Forget having AI "do the work" for you, it can help you to grok the deeper parts of the system such that you can hack them better - and if we're to come out of this tectonic shift in tech with our heads above water, we absolutely need to create models that cannot be owned by the guy with the $5B datacenter.

Deepseek shows us the glimmer of a way forward. We have to take it. The megacorp AI is already here to stay, and the only panacea is an AI that they cannot control. It all comes down to whether or not you genuinely believe that the way of the hacker can overcome the monolith. I, for one, am a believer.

0 - https://phrack.org/issues/7/3

billy99k4• 8 months ago

How are unions any better than mega corps? My brother is part of a union and the leaders make millions.

He's pigenholed at the same low pay rate and can't ever get a raise, until everyone in the same role also gets a raise (which will never happen). It traps people, because many union jobs can't or won't innovate, and when they look elsewhere, are underskilled (and stuck).

You mention 'deepseek'. Are you joking? It's owned by the Chinese government..and you claim to hate fascism? Lol?

Big companies only have the power now, because the processing power to run LLMs is expensive. Once there are break throughs, anyone can have the same power in their house.

We have been in a tech slump for awhile now. Large companies will drive innovations for AI that will help everyone.

jimbokun13• 8 months ago

Not true for the Internet. It was the open system anyone could join and many people were shocked it succeeded over the proprietary networks being developed.

paganel• 8 months ago

That's because AI-generated memes are lame, not saying that memes are smart, generally speaking, but the AI-generated ones are even lamer. And nothing wrong with being a luddite, to the contrary, in this day and age still thinking that technology is the way forward no matter what is nothing short of criminal.

nrclark• 8 months ago

Ironically, the actual luddites weren't anti-technology at all. Mechanized looms at the time produced low-quality, low-durability cloth at low prices. The luddite pushback was more about the shift from durable to disposable.

It's a message that's actually pretty relevant in an age of AI slop.

CharlesW• 8 months ago

They were anti-technology in the sense that they destroyed the machines, because of the machines' negative effects on pay and quality. Maybe you could debate whether they were anti-technology absent its effects, but all technologies have effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

blackqueeriroh17• 8 months ago

Show me AI slop and then I’ll immediately show you AI haute cuisine.

If you think LLMs only produce low effort garbage, you truly haven’t been paying attention.

brendoelfrendo• 8 months ago

That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality.

I think, by definition, Luddites or neo-Luddites or whatever you want to call them are reactionaries but I think that's kind of orthogonal to being "progressive." Not sure where progressive comes in.

All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this.

I think that's maybe part of the problem? We shouldn't try to automate the busy work, we should acknowledge that it doesn't matter and stop doing it. In this regard, AI addresses a symptom but does not cure the underlying illness caused by dysfunctional systems. It just shifts work over so we get to a point where AI generated output is being analyzed by an AI and the only "winner" is Anthropic or Google or whoever you paid for those tokens.

These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.

I don't believe for a second that a gaggle of tumblrinas are more harmful to society than a single Sam Altman, lol.

chemotaxis• 8 months ago

It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people.

It happens, but I think it's pretty uncommon. What's a lot more common is people getting called out for offloading tasks to LLMs in a way that just breaches protocol.

For example, if we're having an argument online and you respond with a chatbot-generated rebuttal to my argument, I'm going to be angry. This is because I'm putting an effort and you're clearly not interested in having that conversation, but you still want to come out ahead for the sake of internet points. Some folks would say it's fair game, but consider the logical conclusion of that pattern: that we both have our chatbots endlessly argue on our behalf. That's pretty stupid, right?

By extension of this, there's plenty of people who use LLMs to "manage" their online footprint: write responses to friends' posts, come up with new content to share, generate memes, produce a cadence of blog posts. Anyone can ask an LLM to do that, so what's the point of generating this content in the first place? It's not yours. It's not you. So what's the game, other than - again - trying to come out on top for internet points?

Another fairly toxic pattern is when people use LLMs to produce work output without the effort to proofread or fact-check it. Over the past year or so, I've gotten so many LLM-generated documents that simply made no sense, and the sender considered their job to be done and left the QA to me.

bill3389• 8 months ago

unfortunately, it will be less and less purely human generated content any more. it will be more and more AI generated or AI assisted content in the future.

We are angry because we grow up in an age that content are generated by human and computer bot are inefficient. however, for newer generation, AI generated content will be a new normal, like how we see people from a big flat box (TV)

aprilthird20212• 8 months ago

I'm looking at code at my tech job right now where someone AI outsourced it, didn't proofread it, and didn't realize a comparison table it built is just running over the same dataset twice causing every comparison to look "identical" even when the data isn't

jimbokun13• 8 months ago

The reason to be angry about the chatbot generated argument is that without sources it’s likely to have hallucinated a few things.

GrantMoyer2• 8 months ago

I largely agree with this, but at the same time, I empathize with the FA's author. I think it's because LLMs feel categorically different from other technological leaps I've been exited about.

The recent results in LLMs and diffusion models are undeniably, incredibly impressive, even if they're not to the point of being universally useful for real work. However they fill me with a feeling of supreme dissapointment, because each is just this big black box we shoved an unreasonable amount of data into and now the black box is the best image processing/natural language processing system we've ever made, and depending on how you look at it, they're either so unimaginably complex that we'll never understand how they really work, or they're so brain-dead simple that there's nothing to really understand at all. It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them.

raincole3• 8 months ago

It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them.

Yeah. This cruel joke even has a name: The Bitter Lesson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson

But think about it: if digital painting were solved not by a machine learning model, but human-readable code, it would be an even more bleak and cruel joke, isn't it?

jlarcombe• 8 months ago

Agree totally. Reminiscent of the Paul Erdös reaction to the proof of the Four Colour Problem.

It's been quite good reading these comments because a lot of them have put into words my own largely negative feelings about the AI ubiquitous hype, which I have found it hard to articulate. Your second paragraph, and someone else's comment about how they are attracted to computer science because they like fiddly detail and so are uninterested in a machine hiding all that, and a third comment about how so-called "busy work" is actually a good way of padding out difficult stuff and so a job of work becomes much less palatable when it is excised entirely.

The other thing I find deeply depressing is the degree to which people are thrilled (genuinely) by dreadful looking AI art and unbearable to read AI prose. Makes me think I've been kidding myself for years that people by and large have a degree of taste. Then again maybe it just means it's not to my taste..

LocalH2• 8 months ago

A good start (albeit the most basic one) would be to encourage budding hackers to read through the Jargon File.

Y_Y• 8 months ago

I think that's going to become like asking a child to read Shakespeare; surely valuable, but requiring a whole parallel text to give modern translation and context.

shadowgovt2• 8 months ago

Hackers in the '80s were taking apart phone hardware and making free long-distance calls because the phone company didn't deserve its monopoly purely for existing before they were born. Hackers in the '90s were bypassing copyright and wiping the hard drive of machines they cobbled together out of broken machines to install an open source OS on it so that Redmond, WA couldn't dictate their computing experience.

I think there's a direct through-line from hacker circles to modern skepticism of the kind of AI discussed in this article: the kind where rules you don't control determine the behavior of the machine and where most of the training and operation of the largest and most successful systems can, currently, only be accessed via the cloud portals of companies with extremely questionable ethics.

... but I don't expect hackers to be anti-AI indefinitely. I expect them to be sorting out how many old laptops with still-serviceable graphics cards you have to glue together to build a training engine that can produce a domain-specific tool that rivals ChatGPT. If that task proves impossible, then I suspect based on history this may be the one place where hackers end up looking a little 'luddite' as it were.

... because "If the machine cannot be tamed it must be destroyed" is very hacker ethos.

k6hkUZtLUM2• 8 months ago

The whole point was to take these things apart, figure out how they work, and make them things we want them to do instead of being bound by arbitrary rules.

Bypassing arbitrary (useless, silly, meaningless, etc) rules has always been a primary motiving factor for some of us :D

ronsor• 8 months ago

The only thing more insufferable than the "AI do everything and replace everyone" crowd is the "AI is completely useless" crowd. It's useful for some things and useless for others, just like any other tool you'll encounter.

musicale5• 8 months ago

The proposition that AI is completely is trivially nullified. For example, it is provably useful for large-scale cheating on course assignments - a non-trivial task that had previously used human-operated "essay mills" and other services.

ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6• 8 months ago

I consider myself progressive and my main issue with the technology is that it was created by stealing from people who have not been compensated in any way.

I wouldn’t blame any artist that is fundamentally against this tech in every way. Good for them.

musicale5• 8 months ago

It's "unauthorized use" rather than "stealing", since the original work is not moved anywhere. It's more like using your creative work to train a software system that generates similar-looking, competing works, for pennies, at industrial scale and speed.

notJim2• 8 months ago

Every artist and creator of anything learned by engaging with other people's work. I see training AI as basically the same thing. Instead of training an organic mind, it's just training a neural network. If it reproduces works that are too similar to the original, that's obviously an issue, but that's the same as human artists.

blackqueeriroh17• 8 months ago

Many of those people have absolutely been compensated, many times over. Should they have a perpetual right to longer than their entire life, to profit off something they did 40 years ago?

anubistheta• 8 months ago

I agree. I think this is what happens when a persons transitions from a progressive mindset to a conservative one, but has made being "progressive" a central tenant of their identity.

Progressiveness is forward looking and a proponent of rapid change. So it is natural that LLM's are popular amongst that crowd. Also, progressivism should be accepting of and encouraging the evolution of concepts and social constructs.

In reality, many people define "progressiveness" as "when things I like happen, not when things I don't like happen." When they lose control of the direction of society, they end up just as reactionary and dismissive as the people they claim to oppose.

AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists.
Craft, expression and skilled labor is what produces value, and that gives us control over ourselves

To me, that sums up the author's biases. You may value skilled labor, but generally people don't. Nor should they. Demand is what produces value. The later half of the piece falls into a diatribe of "Capitalism Bad".

octorian• 8 months ago

Just seeing that sentence fragment about "structures of power and violence" told me so much about the author. Its the sort of language that brings with it a whole host of stereotypes, some of which were immediately confirmed with a little more digging (and others would require way too much effort to confirm, but likely could be).

And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do.

bravetraveler• 8 months ago

In a way, the busy work is padding. If the day becomes entirely difficult, I want more reward or time away.

I understand how LLMs may improve the situation for the employer, personally or with peers: no.

m0002• 8 months ago

I think you're missing that a lot of what we call "learning" would be categorized as "busy work" after the fact. If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords.

As mr Miyagi said: "Wax on. Wax off."

This may turn out very profitable for the pre-AI generations, as the junior to senior pipeline won't churn seniors at the same rate. But following generations are probably on their way to digital serfdom if we don't act.

thewebguyd6• 8 months ago

If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid.

I've seen this same thing said about Google. "If you outsource your memory to Google searching instead, you won't be able to do anything without and you'll become dumber."

Maybe that did happen, but it didn't seem to result in any meaningful change on the whole. Instead, I got to waste less time memorizing things, or spending time leafing through thousand page reference manuals, to find something.

We've been outsourcing parts of our brains to computers for decades now. That's what got me interested and curious about computers when I got my first machine as a kid (this was back in the late 90s/early 00s). "How can I automate as much of the boring stuff as possible to free myself up for more interesting things."

LLMs are the next evolution of that to an extent, but I also think they do come with some harms and that we haven't really figured out best practices yet. But, I can't help but be excited at the prospect of being able to outsource even more to a computer.

tbrownaw3• 8 months ago

Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords.

That doesn't seem exactly likely.

jimbokun13• 8 months ago

Pathway to Idiocracy.

andrei_says_2• 8 months ago

I have only experienced the exact opposite - AI tools being forced on employees left and right, and infinite starry eyed fake enthusiasm amongst a rising ocean of slop poisoning all communication and written human knowledge at scale.

I am yet to see issues caused by restrain.

It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.

blackqueeriroh17• 8 months ago

I have only experienced the exact opposite - AI tools being forced on employees left and right, and infinite starry eyed fake enthusiasm amongst a rising ocean of slop poisoning all communication and written human knowledge at scale. I am yet to see issues caused by restrain.

Again, how is that the fault of the technology?

thewebguyd6• 8 months ago

All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this.

The attitude and push back from this loud minority has always been weird to me. Ever since I got my hands on my first computer as a kid, I've been outsourcing parts of my brain to computing so that I can focus on more interesting things. I no longer have to remember phone numbers, I no longer have to carry a paper notepad, my bookshelf full of reference books that constantly needed to be refreshed became a Google search away instead. Intellisense/code completion meant I didn't have to waste time memorizing every specific syntax and keyword. Hell, IDEs have been generating code for a long time. I was using Visual Studio to automatically generate model classes from my database schema for as long as I can remember, and even generating CRUD pages.

The opportunity to outsource even more of the 'busywork' is great. Isn't this was technology is supposed to do? Automate away the boring stuff?

The only reasoning I can think of is that the most vocal opponents work in careers where that same busywork is actually most of their job, and so they are naturally worried about their future.

Wowfunhappy• 8 months ago

Ever since I got my hands on my first computer as a kid, I've been outsourcing parts of my brain to computing so that I can focus on more interesting things. I no longer have to remember phone numbers, I no longer have to carry a paper notepad, my bookshelf full of reference books that constantly needed to be refreshed became a Google search away instead. Intellisense/code completion meant I didn't have to waste time memorizing every specific syntax and keyword. Hell, IDEs have been generating code for a long time. I was using Visual Studio to automatically generate model classes from my database schema for as long as I can remember, and even generating CRUD pages.

I absolutely agree with you, but I do think there's a difference in kind between a deterministic automation you can learn to use and get better at, and a semi-random coding agent.

The thing I'm really struggling with is that unlike e.g. code completion, there doesn't seem to be a clear class of tasks that LLMs are good at vs bad at. So until the LLMs can do everything, how do I keep myself in the loop enough that I'll have the requisite knowledge to step in when the LLM fails?

You mention how technology means we no longer have to remember phone numbers. But what if all digital contact lists had a very low chance of randomly deleting individual contacts over time? Do you keep memorizing phone numbers? I'm not sure!

jimbokun13• 8 months ago

The marketing for AI is that it will soon replace THE INTERESTING PARTS too. Because it will be better than humans at everything.

For you, what are “the interesting parts”, and why do you believe in principle a machine won’t do those parts better than you?

doug_durham• 8 months ago

Thank you for expressing well what I was thinking. I derive intense joy from coding. Like you my over my 40 year career I've been exploiting more and more ways to outsource work to computers. The space of software is so vast that I've never worried for a second that I'd not have work to do. Coding is a means to solving interesting problems. It is not an end in itself.

trinsic23• 8 months ago

When you off load that stuff to a computer, you loose cognitive abilities. Heck Im even being careful how much I use mapping tools now because I want to know where I am going and how I get there.

FYI: I do not work for any corporations, I provide technical services directly to the public. So there is really concerns about this tech by everyday people that do not have a stake in keeping a job.

kyle-rb• 8 months ago

People assume programmers have the same motivations as luddites but "smashing the autolooms" presumably requires firebombing a whole bunch of datacenters, whereas it's pretty easy to download and run an open-source Chinese autoloom.

MetaWhirledPeas• 8 months ago

Well there's more than just one hacker circle. That was never really the case and it's less and less the case as the earth's technologically-inclined population increases.

Culture is emergent. The more you try to define it, the less it becomes culture and the more it becomes a cult. Instead of focusing on culture I prefer to focus on values. I value craftsmanship, so I'm inclined to appreciate normal coding more than AI-assisted coding, for sure. But there's also a craftsmanship to gluing a bunch of AI technologies together and observing some fantastic output. To willfully ignore that is silly.

The OP's rant comes across as a wistful pining for the days of yore, pinning its demise on capitalists and fascists, as if they had this AI thing planned all along. Focusing on boogeymen isn't going to solve anything. You also can't reverse time by demanding compliance with your values or forming a union. AI is here to stay and we're going to have to figure out how to live with it, like it or not.

LPisGood• 8 months ago

hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality

Richard Stallman has his email printed out on paper for him to read, and he only connects to the internet by using wget to fetch web pages and then has them printed off.

ihaveajob• 8 months ago

You're probably thinking about Donald Knuth, not Stallman.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

zemo• 8 months ago

This is the culture that replaced hacker culture.

Breathless hustlecore tech industry culture is a place where finance bros have turned programmers into dogs that brag to one another about what a good dog they are. We should reject at every turn the idea that such a culture represents the totality of programming. Programming is so much more than that.

JohnBooty3• 8 months ago

This was very insightful. It made me think about how "hacker culture" has changed.

I'm middle-aged. 30 years ago, hacker culture as I experienced it was about making cool stuff. It was also about the identity -- hackers were geeks. Intelligent, and a little (or a lot) different from the rest of society.

Generally speaking, hackers could not avoid writing code. Whether it was shell scripts or HTML or Javascript or full-blown 3D graphics engines. To a large extent, coding became the distinguishing feature of "hackers" in terms of identity.

Nearly anybody could install Linux or build a PC, but writing nontrivial code took a much larger level of commitment.

There are legitimate functional and ethical concerns about AI. But I think a lot of "hackers" are in HUGE amounts of denial about how much of their opposition to AI springs from having their identities threatened.

jimbokun13• 8 months ago

Well there are a lot of us very clear that our identities are being threatened and scared shitless we will lose the ability to pay our rent or buy food because of it.

thewebguyd6• 8 months ago

opposition to AI springs from having their identities threatened.

I think there's definitely some truth to this. I saw similar pushback from the "learn to code" and coding bootcamp era, and you still frequently see it in Linux communities where anytime the prospect of more "normies" using Linux comes up, a not insignificant part of the community is actively hostile to that happening.

The attitude goes all the way back to eternal september.

Perepiska• 8 months ago

There's a simple solution: anyone who posts AI-generated content can label it as "AI-generated" and avoid misleading people.

oytis2• 8 months ago

IDK, to me it looks that hacker culture has always been progressive, it's just definition of what is progressive has changed somewhat.

But hacker culture always sought to empower an individual (especially a smart, tech-savvy individual) against corporations, and rejection of gen AI seems reasonable in this light.

If hacker culture wasn't luddite, it's because of the widespread belief that the new digital technology does empower the individual. It's very hard to believe the same about LLMs, unless your salary depends on it

portana77• 8 months ago

Why do you have to reject LLMs? Wouldn’t a real hacker grab a local model and fiddle with it? Who are you people?

johnnyanmac6• 8 months ago

All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this.

And the dangerous part is that we are so hasty to remove that "busy work" that we fail to make sure it's done right. That willful ignorance seems counter to hacker culture which should encourage curiosity and a deeper understanding.

It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people.

In my experience, it's often is Ai generated more often than not. And yes, it is worth calling out. If you can't engage with the public, why do you expect them to engage with you?

It's like being mad about being passed on the current round of a game, all while you clearly have a phone to your ear.

ghtbircshotbe• 8 months ago

Hacker culture is the desire to understand complex technical fields. Outsourcing that to AI isn't quite the same thing.

trashb4• 8 months ago

In general using natural language to feed into AI to generate code to compile to runnable software seems like the long way around to designing a more usable programming language.

It seems that most people preferring natural language over programming languages don't want to learn the required programming language and ending up reinventing their own worse one.

There is a reason why we invented programming languages as an interface to instruct the machine and there is a reason why we don't use natural language.

rbongers• 8 months ago

I view current LLMs as new kinds of search engines. Ones where you have to re-verify their responses, but on the other hand can answer long and vague queries.

I really don't see the harm in using them this way that can't also be said about traditional search engines. Search engines already use algorithms, it's just swapping out the algorithm and interface. Search engines can bias our understanding of anything as much as any LLM, assuming you attempt to actually verify information you get from an LLM.

I'm of the opinion that if you think LLMs are bad without exception, you should either question how we use technology at all or question this idea that they are impossible to use responsibly. However I do acknowledge that people criticize LLMs while justifying their usage, and I could just be doing the same thing.

tylershuster• 8 months ago

Exactly. Using them to actually “generate content” is a sure fire way to turn your brain into garbage, along with whatever you “produce” - but they do seem to have fulfilled Google’s dream of making the Star Trek computer reality.

the__alchemist• 8 months ago

I am getting tilted by both corp AI hype and the luddites like this. If you don't think that term is appropriate, then I am not sure if it's ever appropriate to use it in the general sense. The "I know you will say you use it appropriately but others don't" pre-emption is something I have seen before, and it isn't convincing.

This article lacks nuance, and could be summarized as "LLMs are bad" Later, I suspect this author (and others of this archetype) will moderate and lament "What I really meant was: I don't like corporations lying about LLMs, or using them maliciously; I didn't imply they don't have uses". The words in the article do not support this.

I believe this pattern is rooted in social-justice-oriented (Is that still the term?) USA left politics. I offer no explanation for this conflation, but an observation.

atleastoptimal5• 8 months ago

HN loves this "le old school" coder "fighting the good fight" speak but it seems sillier and sillier the better and better LLM's get. Maybe in the GPT 4 era this made sense but Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 are substantively different, and anyone who can extrapolate a few years out sees the writing on the wall.

A year ago, no reasonable person would use AI for anything but small-scoped autocomplete. Now it can author entire projects without oversight. Inevitably every failure case for LLM's is corrected, everything people said LLM's "could never do" they start doing within 6 months of that prognostication.

AlexandrB5• 8 months ago

Where are these LLM-authored projects though? I was expecting to see a fresh flood of cheap shovelware in the App Store after LLMs appeared.

atleastoptimal5• 8 months ago

Most "low hanging fruits" have been taken. The thing with AI is that it gets worse in proportion to how new of a domain it is working in (not that this is any different than humans). However the scale of apps made that utilize AI have exploded in usefulness. What is funny is that some of the ones making a big dent are horrible uses of AI and overpromise its utility (like cal.ai)

cyral2• 8 months ago

Great comment. I'll add that despite being a bit less powerful, the Composer 1 model in Cursor is also extremely fast - to the point where things that Claude would take 10+ minutes of tool calls now takes 30 seconds. That's the difference between deciding to write it yourself, or throwing a few sentences in Cursor and having it done right away. A year ago I'd never ask AI to do tasks without being very specific about which files and methodologies I want it to use, but codebase search has improved a ton and it can gather this info on it's own, often better than I can (if I haven't worked on particular feature or domain in a few months and need to re-familiarize myself with how it's structured). The bar for what AI can do today is a LOT higher than the average AI skeptic here thinks. As someone who has been using this since the GPT4 era, I'd say that I find a prompt about once a week that I figured LLMs would choke on and screw up - but they actually nail it. Whatever free model is running in Github Copilot is not going to do as well, which is probably where a lot of frustration comes from if that is all someone has experienced.

atleastoptimal5• 8 months ago

Yeah the thing about having principles is that if the principle depends on a qualitative assessment, then the principle has to be flexible as the quality that you are assessing changes. If AI was still at 2023 levels and was improving very gradually every few years like versions of Windows then I'd understand the general sentiment on here, but the rate of improvement in AI models is alarmingly fast, and assumptions about what AI "is good for" have 6-month max expiration dates.

ciconia• 8 months ago

Where's the popcorn? I don't really care either way about so-called AI. I find the talk about AGI quite ridiculous, but I can imagine LLMs have their utility just like anything else. I don't vibe code because I don't find it useful. I'm fine coding by myself thank you very much.

When the AI hype is over and the bubble has burst, I'll still be here, writing quality software using my brain and my fingers, and getting paid to do it.

yathaid• 8 months ago

> No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress.

Without an explanation of what they author is calling out as flaws, it is hard to take this article seriously.

I know engineers I respect a ton who have gotten a bunch of productivity upgrades using "AI". My own learning curve has been to see Claude say "okay, these integration tests aren't working. Let me write unit tests instead" and go on when it wasn't able to fix a jest issue.

layer83• 8 months ago

The entire rest of the article consists of describing the problems. The problems aren’t about the technical abilities of AI.

constantcrying• 8 months ago

I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles.

This is such a bizarre sentiment for any person interested in technology. AI is, without any doubt, the most fascinating and important technology I have seen developed in my lifetime. A decade ago the idea of a computer not only holding a reasonable conversation with a human, but being able to talk with a human on deep and complex subjects seemed far out of reach.

No doubt there are many deep running problems with it, any technology with such a radical breakthrough will have them. But none of that takes away from how monumental of an achievement it is.

Looking down at people for using it or being excited about it is such an extreme position. Also the insinuation that the only reason anybody uses it because they are forced into it, is completely bizarre.

Atlas667• 8 months ago

Luddism is a reaction to the current situation as it pertains to labor. Marx had this to say about it:

"It took both time and experience before the workers learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."

- Karl Marx. Das Kapital Vol 1 Ch 15: Machinery and Modern Industry, 1867

Tech can always be good, how its used is what makes it bad, or not.

pneumic• 8 months ago

For me LLMs have been an incredible relief when it comes to software planning—quickly navigating the paralyzing quantity of choices when it comes to infrastructure, deployment, architecture and so on. Of course, this only highlights how crushingly complex it all is now, and I get a sinking feeling that instead of people solving technical complexity where it needs solving, these tools will be an abstraction layer over ever-rolling balls of mud that no one bothers to clean up anymore.

tasty_freeze• 8 months ago

I learned to code in the late 70s on computers using BASIC, then got into Z80 assembly language. Sure, the games were wrote back then were nothing like today's 10GB, $100M+ multi-year projects, but they were still extremely exciting because expectations were much lower back then.

Anyway, the point I'm getting to was it was glorious to understand what every bit of every register and every I/O register did. There were NO interposing layers of software that you didn't write yourself or didn't understand completely. I even wrote a disassembler for the BASIC ROM and spend many hours studying it so I could take advantage of useful subroutines. People even published books that had that all mapped out for you (something like "Secrets of the TRS-80 ROM Decoded").

Recently I have been helping a couple teenagers in my neighborhood learn Python a couple hours a week. After installing Python and going through the foundational syntax, you bet I had them write many of those same games. Even though it was ASCII monsters chasing their character on the screen, they loved it.

It was similar to this, except it was real-time with a larger playfield:

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/1g6sd5q/way_ba...

miningape4• 8 months ago

I'm currently coding a Gameboy (which kinda has a Z80) emulator and it's so much fun! (I'm in my mid-20s for context)

I've never really worked on such a low level, the closest I've gotten before is bytecode - which while satisfying - just isn't as satisfying as having to imagine the binary moving around the CPU and registers (and busses too).

I'm even finding myself looking at computers in a totally different way, it's a similar feeling to learning a declarative, or functional language (coming from a procedural language) - except with this amazing hardware component too.

Hats off to you though, I'm not sure I'd have had the patience to code under those conditions!

TechDebtDevin• 8 months ago

First accurate article with AI in the name I've seen on this site a long time.

nathias• 8 months ago

every important technology produces its own amish

periodjet• 8 months ago

The todsacerdoti rule continues to hold.

geldedus• 8 months ago

Cope bettter, Luddite.

shadowgovt2• 8 months ago

I think the author makes some very good points, but it's perhaps worth noting that they are the current status quo. I do find myself wondering if the author re-evaluates in a future where the technology gets cheaper, the executable AI engine fits on a standalone Raspberry Pi, and retraining the engine is done by volunteer co-ops.

... but, it is definitely worth considering whether the status quo is tolerable and whether we as technical creatives are willing to work with tools that live within it.

spot5010• 8 months ago

"I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment."

Any software engineer who shares this sentiment is doing their career a disservice. LLMs have their pitfalls, and I have been skeptical of their capabilities, but nevertheless I have tried them out earnestly. The progress of AI coding assistants over the past year has been remarkable, and now they are a routine part of my workflow. It does take some getting used to, and effectively using an AI coding assistant is a skill in and of itself that is worth mastering.

jtrn• 8 months ago

I feel AI now is good enough to follow the same pattern as with internet usage. The quality ranges from useless to awesome based on how you use it. Blanked statements that “it is terrible and uesless” reveals more about the person than the tech at this point.

swaits• 8 months ago

It’s some mixture of luddites, denial, ignorance, and I don’t know what else.

I’m not sure what these people are NOT seeing. Maybe I’m somehow fortunate with visibility into what AI can do today, and what it will do tomorrow. But I’m not doing anything special. Just paying attention and keeping an open mind.

I’ve been at this for 40 years, working professionally for more than 30. I’ve seen lots.

One pattern I’ve seen repeating is folks who seem to stop leaning at some point. I don’t understand this, because for me learning everyday is what fuels me. And those folks eventually die on the vine, or they become the last few greybeards working on COBOL.

We are alive at a very interesting time in tech. I am excited about that. I am here for it.

em-bee2• 8 months ago

some of us learn from the bad experience of others, like this sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061520

it already tells me enough to stay away from using AI tools for coding. and that's just one reason, if i consider all the others, then that's more than enough.

rf15• 8 months ago

I've used AI assitance in coding for a year before I quit. The hardest part was a day when the services where unexpectedly down, and working felt like I was amputated in some way. Nothing works, my usual movement does not produce code. That day I realised these AI integrations take away my knowledge and skill of the matter and is just maximising the easiest and fastest part of software development: writing code.

fancyfredbot3• 8 months ago

I feel like in a sci-fi world with robots, teleportation and holodecks these people would decide to stay at home and hand wash the dishes.

If an amazing world changing technology like LLMs shows up on your doorstep and your response is to ignore it and write blog posts about how you don't care about it then you aren't curious and you aren't really a hacker.

IshKebab• 8 months ago

I don't touch dishwashers with a stick. No matter how well they work. I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the dishwasher brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive cleaning circles.

Edit: Ha I see you edited "empty the dishwasher" to "hand wash the dishes". My thoughts exactly.

There's no hope for these people.

alcasa3• 8 months ago

Tbf there are a lot of dishwashers, where I have had to essentially prewash all the dishes to make sure the dishes actually come out clean.

fancyfredbot3• 8 months ago

lol, sorry for the edit. I realised such people would surely be disgusted with a dishwasher and had to change it.

alcasa3• 8 months ago

I feel like the hacker response would be to roll your own models and move away from commercial offerings. Stuff like eleuther.ai is pretty inspirational, but that movements seems to have died down a bit. At least we still have a couple companies believing in doing open-weight stuff.

adrr• 8 months ago

Dishwasher use is correlated to allergies in children.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25713281/

fancyfredbot3• 8 months ago

Recent research demonstrates that when epidemiologists find an association between cleaning the home and health problems such as allergies, this is often not caused by the removal of organisms, but rather by exposure of the lungs to cleaning products that cause a type of damage that encourages the development of allergic responses.

https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A...

phplovesong• 8 months ago

We will have decades of AI slop that needs to be cleaned up. Many startups will fail hard when the AI code bugs all creep up when a certain scale is reached. There will be massive dataloss, lots of hacking attempts that will succeed because of poor AI code no one understands. I dont see a dev staying in the same place for many years when its just soulless AI day in day out.

Either way its a lost cause.

wowamit• 8 months ago

AI is not one solution to all the problems in the world. But neither is it worthless. There's a proper balance to be had in knowing how useful AI is to an individual.

Sure, it can be overdone. But at the same time, it shouldn't be undersold.

gradus_ad• 8 months ago

Maybe because I came into software not from an interest in software itself but from wanting to build things, I can't relate to the anti-LLM attitude. The danger in becoming a "crafter" rather than a "builder" is you lose the forest for the trees. You become more interested in the craft for the craft's sake than for its ability to get you from point A to point B in the best way.

Not that there's anything wrong with crafting, but for those of us who just care about building things, LLM's are an absolute asset.

thuuuomas• 8 months ago

Glad we agree that the “builder” without craft is just looking for the nearest exit.

1dom• 8 months ago

I think we can all agree AI is a bubble, and is over-hyped. I think we can ignore any pieces that say "AI is all bad" or "AI is all good" or "I've never used AI but...".

It's nuanced, can be abused, but can be beneficial when used responsibly in certain ways. It's a tool. It's a powerful tool, so treat it like a powerful tool: learn about it enough to safely use it in a way to improve your life and those around you.

Avoiding it completely whilst confidently berating it without experience is a position formed from fear, rather than knowledge or experience. I'm genuinely very surprised this article has so many points here.

wltr2• 8 months ago

Commenting on the internet points (this article is having), I realised I was reading most of the popular things here for some time, months, and it was such a huge and careless waste of my time…

So I’m not even surprised it’s having so many internet points. As if they were the sign of quality, then the opposite. Bored not very smart people thinking the more useless junk they consume, the better off they’ll become. Doesn’t work that way.

micromacrofoot• 8 months ago

Personally I use AI for most of my work, launder it a bit to adhere to my own personal style, and don't tell anyone most of the time.

In the end? no one cares. I get just as much done (maybe more), while doing less work. Maybe some of my skills will atrophy, but I'll strengthen others.

I'm still auditing everything for quality as I would my own code before pushing it. At the end of the day, it usually makes fewer typos than I would. It certainly searches the codebase better than I do.

All this hype on both ends will fade away, and the people using the tools they have to get things done will remain.

Aeroi• 8 months ago

Unbelievably stale take. You can criticize the future effects of LLM's on critical thinking skills and cognitive degradation of N number metrics, but this is an incredibly jaded and emotional take on what is a freight train of technology.

d_burfoot• 8 months ago

AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists.

Persuasion tip: if you write comments like this, you are going to immediately alienate a large portion of your audience who might otherwise agree with you.

yosefk• 8 months ago

"AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence."

I still can barely believe a human being could write this, though we have all read this sort of sentence countless times. Which "structure of power and violence" replicated itself into the brains of people, making them think like this? Everything "exists to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence" with these people, and they will not rest until there's anything left to attack and destroy

jhack• 8 months ago

"I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain."

Then why should I care about your opinions of them if you have zero experience using them?

dzikimarian2• 8 months ago

I look at these people with fascination. We had digital nomads, guess now we have digital Amishes :-)

ahaferburg• 8 months ago

  The AImish

tacitusarc• 8 months ago

AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists.

I… what…?

LudwigNagasena• 8 months ago

I couldn't care less about that pseudo-Marxist mumbo-jumbo about fascists redefining truth. I feel happier and less alienated (to speak in author's terms) due to LLMs. And no rhetoric about control and power can change the fact that lots of software engineering tasks are outright boring for many people.

For example, I spent a bunch of dollars to let Claude figure out how to setup a VSCode workspace with a multi-environment uv monorepo with a single root namespace and an okayish VSCode linting support (we still failed to figure out how to enable a different python interpreter for each folder for Ruff, but that seems to be a Ruff extension limitation).

exizt88• 8 months ago

Marc Maron has coined the perfect description for sanctimonious posts like these: "annoying Americans into fascism".

karmakaze• 8 months ago

I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment.
[...] making it increasingly hard to learn things [...]

I find chatting with AI and drilling it for details is often more effective than other means of searching for the same information, or even asking random co-workers. It's all about how you use it.

No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress. I’d even go as far and say they are intentional.
AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.

WTF? There's nothing for me to learn from this post.

jrm44• 8 months ago

"Hacker" of course, has overwhelmingly mostly lost the plot. Especially here, but elsewhere too.

"Hacker" was a recognition that there existed a crusty old entrenched system (mostly not through any fault of any individual) and that it is good to poke and chip away at it, though exploring the limits of new technology.

Whatever we're doing now here, it's emphatically not that.

edfletcher_t137• 8 months ago

Those folks who are trying these tools are going to make it through this period. If you're not yet, you won't. Period, end of story.

Those hackers you're so lamenting are gonna make it, but you aren't.

pessimizer• 8 months ago

I vaguely agree with the fake conclusions at the end, which are vapid and do not arise from the arguments. "Be kind to babies, brush your teeth twice a day, always tip the waitstaff, blah blah blah whatever Bernie said, etc..."

The real conclusion is:

No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress.

which you can tell from the title. There are zero arguments made to support this. It's just faux-radical rambling. I'm amazed how people are impressed by this privileged middle-class babble. This is an absolutely empty-headed article that AI could spit out dozens of versions of.

I care how well your AI works. I also care how it works, like I care about how transistors work. I do not want to build my own transistors*, although I like to speculate about how different ones could be built, just like I like to think about different machine learning architectures. The skills that I learned when I learned computers put me in an ideal position to understand, implement, and use machine learning.

The reason I care about how well your AI works is because I am going to use it to accomplish my own goals. I am not going to fetishize being a technician in an art most people don't know, I am not a middle-class profession worshiper. I get it, your knowledge of a rare art guarantees that you eat. If your art becomes obviated by technology (like the art of doing math by hand, which you could once live very well on from birth to death), you have to learn something else.

But I care how well your AI works because I am trying to accomplish things in the world, not build an identity. I think AI is bad, and I'm a bit happy that it's bad, because it means that I can use it to bridge myself to the next place before it gets good enough not to need me. The fact that I know how computers work means that I can make the AI do what I want in a way that somebody who didn't have my background couldn't. The first people that were dealing with computers were people who were good at math.

Life is not going to be good for the type of this year's MBP js programmer who learned it because the web was paying, refused to learn anything else so only gradually became a programmer after node came around, and only used the trendy frameworks that it seemed they were hiring for, who still has no idea how a computer works. AI is actually going to give everything back to the nerds, because AI assistance might eventually mean you're only limited by your imagination (within the context of computers.) Nerds are imaginative. The kind of imagination that has been actively discouraged in tech for a long time, since it became a profession for marketers and middlemen.

I almost guarantee this call for craftsmen against AI is coming from someone who builds CRUD apps for a living. To not be excited about what AI can do for the things that you already wanted to create, the things you dream of and couldn't find enough people with enough skills to dream with you to get it done; to me that's a sign that you're just not into computers.

My fears of AI is that it will be nerfed, made so sycophantic that it sucks down credits and gets distracted so often that it makes it impossible to work, be used to extract my ideas and give them to someone with more capital and manpower who can jump in front of me (the Amazon problem), that governments will be bribed into making it impossible to run them locally, that governments will be bribed into letting corporations install them on all our computers so they can join in on the surveillance and control. I'm worried about the speakwrite. I'm worried about how it will make dreams possible for evil men. I am not worried about losing my identity. I'm not insecure like that.

* although I have of course, in school, by stringing a bunch of NANDs together. I was a pioneer of the WAS-gate, which is when you turn on the power and a puff of smoke comes out of one of your transistors.

Vaslo• 8 months ago

Once I saw the use of “FaCiSm” and “capitalist corporate control” I tuned out. I wouldn’t trust this persons opinion on trimming my nails let alone future tech.

jsh1• 8 months ago

Most of this debate misses the real shift. AI isn't replacing programmers, it's replacing the parts of programming that were never craft in the first place. In the future, most people will prompt code they barely understand while a small minority who keep real depth will end up owning the hard problems. If anything collapses the culture, it won't be AI but our willingness to trade mastery for convenience.

k6hkUZtLUM2• 8 months ago

I'm really excited that the current AI tools will help lots of people build small and useful projects. Normal people who would otherwise be subject to their OS. Subject to vendor options. Help desk, HR, or finance folks will be able to compose and build tools to help them do their jobs (or hobbies) better. Just like we do.

I think of it like frozen dinners. Frozen dinners are not the same as home cooked meals. There is a place for frozen dinners, fast foods, home cooked meals, and nice restaurants. Plus, many of us spend extra time and money making specialty food that may be as good as anything. Frozen dinners don't take away from that.

I think it's the same for coding and AI use. It might eventually enhance coding overall and help bring an appreciation to what engineers are doing.

Hobby or incidental coders have vastly expanded capabilities. Think of the security guy that needs one program to parse through files for a single project. Those tasks are reasonably attainable today without buying and studying the sed/awk guide. (Of course, we should all do that)

Professionals might also find value using AI tools like they would use a spell checker or auto-complete that can also lookup code specs or refer to other project files for you.

The most amazing and useful software, the software that wows us and moves us or inspires us, is going to be crafted and not vibed. The important software will be guided by the hands of an engineer with care and competence to the end.

puchatek• 8 months ago

How can you have an opinion string enough for a blog post about something when you have decided not to go near it?

iepathos• 8 months ago

These hyper paranoid statements like "I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain", are fairly worrisome for a technical person who claims to have any understanding of AI and undermines the credibility of the critique. There is some truth in here but it's beneath a lot of paranoia that's hard to sift through.

MattyRad• 8 months ago

I think this was a really good article up until `on power`, where it became whiny, vindictive, and aimless.

quercus• 8 months ago

I was interested until I got to the "fascist" line where the author reveals his motives for avoiding AI. Bummer, I was hoping for a level headed technical argument. This post doesn't belong on the front page.

alcasa3• 8 months ago

I think there might be a culture divide here. That person is very likely from Germany/Berlin based on their attitudes and descriptions and I feel like the hacker/tech scene is very different from bay area vibes.

FAANG is not really a thing here and people are much more tech-luddite, privacy paranoid.

tsoukase• 8 months ago

In graphics there is the uncanny valley effect: when the object approaches reality the experience degrades. A similar mode holds for AI: the more the agent resembles human thinking, feeling and (in the future) touch, the more distress creates. Because it is not and probably never be real.

sershe• 8 months ago

One day long time ago, I decided that hex grid coordinates lovingly described by redblobgames and used by every developer delivering actual games are inelegant. I wanted to store them in a rectangular array, and also store all edges and vertices in rectangular arrays with simple numerical addressing for the usual algos (distance, neighbors etc) between all 3. I messed around with it and a map generator for a few weeks. Needless to say it was as elegant as a glass hammer, 3 simple arrays beautiful to look at. I didn't finish anything close to a game. But it was a great fun.

If I ever want to deliver a game I might outsource my hex grid to AI. But back in those days I could have probably used a library.

Is hacking about messing around with things? You can still do it, ignore AI, ignore prior art. You can reimplement STL because std vector is "not fast enough". Is hacking about making things? Then again, AI boilerplate is little different than stitching together libraries in practice.

enbugger• 8 months ago

Wow, author is such a cool kid. So rebelish. I want to be her

wltr2• 8 months ago

I don’t care what an internet rando with two posts think either, thank you very much.

mdrzn• 8 months ago

"I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick."

I immediately disregard the rest of the article. You are not using the tools, you cannot comment on the tools.

frgturpwd• 8 months ago

The argument assumes a naïve pre-hermeneutic subject who could maintain a pure unmediated "self" if only they avoided LLMs. The author is nostalgic for a world that never really existed. Photography ruined painting, digital ruined film, typewriters ruined writing, audiobooks ruined literacy etc etc! This is the same lament lodged by every craft-class when industrialization hits their domain. Programmers aren't special. AI is not a fascist project simply due to the fact that different actors are bound to weaponize it differently, so this take is.. kinda tired and full of blindspots. I could have used my prejudice in figuring that out as soon as it implied that abstinence is superior, but I wanted to give it a fair shot. It ending with self-helpesque advice is just so funny.

Hoasi• 8 months ago

Not that their craft would die out, but it would be mutilated

This is spot on, exactly how it felt for illustrators/designers.

With disruptive technologies, the correct response is to use the tools in unintended ways. And thus reappropriate them.

smoody07• 8 months ago

Glad to see the purity tests shifting to human vs AI. The future is bright!

I don't care how well your "AI" works

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