I quit. The clankers won

https://dbushell.com/2026/04/01/i-quit-the-clankers-won/

by domysee • 4 months ago

423 479 4 months ago

cl0ckt0wer• 4 months ago

Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging.

pitched2• 4 months ago

I really like the sentiment and will quote this in the future! My own thoughts line up a bit closer to the article though, with this quote being a good summary of it:

The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates.

ramon1562• 4 months ago

Read the post, it's a gotcha ;P I was scared too

bicx• 4 months ago

When they invented cars (and cars became popular and affordable), people did stop walking everywhere. Jogging wasn’t popularized until the 1970s, when we all realized we needed to be intentional with fitness in our car-based society.

tasuki4• 4 months ago

people did stop walking everywhere.

I didn't. Yesterday I walked 11 km for errands. Today I took a detour when walking to work, a more scenic route with less traffic.

For me walking is not much slower than using public transport (you need to get to it, then from it to the point of your destination), and not much slower than a car (stuck in traffic, finding parking, not to mention the road rage). I'd be faster on a bicycle but I'm not in a hurry and enjoy my walks.

rglynn• 4 months ago

This is a US-centric take, in Europe, particularly in cities, we walk everywhere.

There is perhaps some relevance to the analogy however, because the US is designed in such a way that makes walking difficult to impossible. I am already seeing this pattern in vibe-coded areas where engineers will just use AI because it's too difficult to parse and edit by hand.

guzfip3• 4 months ago

No but everyone has gotten real fat since then.

simgt• 4 months ago

They did make it very hard for people to do anything else but use a car in many, many places though...

OJFord2• 4 months ago

In the US, perhaps, which has had perhaps the bulk of its growth post-automobiles.

jordanb2• 4 months ago

Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging.

They literally made it a crime to walk down the street.

bombcar4• 4 months ago

across the street, no?

It's also a crime to jog on the railroad tracks.

mmustapic3• 4 months ago

The one I like better is: software is great at playing chess, doesn't mean you cannot play too

bjourne• 4 months ago

Fucking hilarius domain name . David is unfortunately not announcing a rewrite of the Linux IPC stack!

bombcar4• 4 months ago

Ha I read it as the DBU Shell but I guess dbus hell is more natural.

CrzyLngPwd• 4 months ago

How did I miss DBUS Hell haha

moron4hire3• 4 months ago

Real PenIsland.com vibes.

gkoenig• 4 months ago

Man I love the design of your site, and that goldfish made my day.

For the article it was nice, but the font is really what got me.

btreecat4• 4 months ago

"No AI" right above a robot voice playback button.

Mixed messages fr

Hot take, folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AI, and wouldn't be difference makers after it either.

I agree with the author, keep writing. It helps hone your ability to communicate effectively which we all need for some time to come (at least until we become batteries).

keybored6• 4 months ago

What does a synthesized audio playback button have to do with AI as commonly and hotly discussed?

btreecat4• 4 months ago

sythansized audio playback

Thats generated audio. It may not be LLM generated but it's not read by a human.

To draw an arbitrary line between _this kind_ of generated content but not _that kind_ is seemingly a matter of perspective and preferences.

pitched2• 4 months ago

folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AI

Anecdotal but I’ve been seeing a lot of the opposite. Some of those leaning in strongly are being propped up by the tools. Holding onto them like a lifeboat when they would have fallen off earlier.

bitmasher9• 4 months ago

Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading.

More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.

cyanydeez2• 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure all this AI is built on top of Silicon valley's technobabble of "permanent underclass" which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology.

But besides that, it's interesting so many people are willing to tailor their entire workflow and product to indeterminate machines and business culture.

I recommend everyone stop using these infernal cloud devices and start with a nice local model that doesn't instantly give you everything, but is quite capabable of removing a select amount of drudgery that is rather relaxing. And as soon as you get too lazy to do enough specifying or real coding, it fucks up your dev environment and you slap yuorself a hundred times wondering why you ever trusted someone else to properly build your artifaces.

There's definitely some philosophy being edged into our spaces that need to be combatted.

guzfip3• 4 months ago

which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology.

You’ve let them in and given them power in many aspects of your life without even a whimper of resistance. Of course you’ll accept them as your lords.

flir3• 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure the -as-a-service stage is only temporary.

The local models are only going to get better, and the improvement curve has to top out eventually. Maybe the cloud models will still give you a few extra percentage points of performance, especially if they're based on data sets that aren't available to the public, but it won't make much difference on most tasks and the local models will have a lot of advantages too.

EdgeNRoots• 4 months ago

I agree on the over-reliance part, but I don’t think it’s AI itself .It’s how people choose to use it.

Most people are outsourcing thinking instead of using it to go deeper. The tools aren’t the problem, the default behavior is.

ramon1562• 4 months ago

I can confidently say that, yes, reading helps a lot. My mental model has shifted a bit that words are cheap (printing -> writing -> typing -> generating) and that we should accept there is something like high quality text.

I haven't really been a reader, but I can definitely notice when a book/text is "hard". I'm currently reading the old testament, and I understand very little (even the oxford one that has a lot of annotations is hard for me). I like this, because its a measurement of what I don't know (if that makes sense).

CoastalCoder• 4 months ago

For the first time in quite a while, I've started reading a challenging, non-computer book ("The New Testament in its World").

I'm trying to decide if my attention span has atrophied, or if I'm just more aware now of my ADD.

Either way, I'm hopeful that my attention span for this kind of reading will grow with practice.

haspok• 4 months ago

I tried reading Proust's In Search Of Lost Time some time ago, in which the first 10-20 pages are about a guy lying in his bed at night and observing his own thoughts (roughly). And I quickly realised how I was reading the words and even sentences, but couldn't grasp the meaning of them - I couldn't produce a "mental model" or image of what it was about. It was a very humbling experience.

I used to be an avid reader as a child, even as a teenager. That was a long time ago. I'm looking forward to that time when I will have the mental capacity to read long prose again.

keybored6• 4 months ago

Do you want a Stairmaster with that elevator? Life is for living, ostensibly. This Inevitabilism drone choir[1] may be correct that it will take my current job and after that maybe there will nothing fruitful in that department left. But I can’t imagine a life situation where I’m both surviving and using thinking-with-my-brain as some retirement home pastime/ “brainrot”-preventer.

Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.

Here’s how the rat race looks in the age of AI and how you can stay ahead.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487774

jpfromlondon2• 4 months ago

hoped for something useful in your link, found drivel.

cfiggers• 4 months ago

we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI.

Here's my advice: if there's someone around you who can teach you, learn from them. But if there isn't anyone around you who can teach you, find someone around you who can learn from you and mentor them. You'll actually grow more from the latter than from the former, if you can believe that.

I think there's a broad blindness in industry to the benefits of mentorship for the mentors. Mentoring has sharpened my thinking and pushed me to articulate why things are true in a way I never would have gone to the effort of otherwise.

If there are no juniors around to teach, seniors will forever be less senior than they might have been had they been getting reps at mentorship along the way.

efromvt• 4 months ago

I haven't heard this benefit for mentors clearly articulated before (probably just missed it), but definitely felt it - I guess it's a deeper version of how writing/other communication forces clarity/organization of thoughts because mentorship conversations are so focused on extracting the why as well as the what.

theshrike793• 4 months ago

A long-standing truth in martial arts circles has been that you can't advance beyond a certain belt before you teach classes.

It's purely because of the fact that if you can't teach something, you really don't understand it.

And the act of having to simplify and break down a skill to explain it to others improves your knowledge of it.

johnathandos• 4 months ago

See one, do one, teach one.

DiscourseFan• 4 months ago

There are many things the AI can't do.

sodapopcan• 4 months ago

Or, you know, writing some code every day.

ikr6783• 4 months ago

Another one is: Don't use GPS in your own city. Try to learn where you live. Read the map in advance if you are going somewhere new and memorise the turns.

A shocking number of my coworkers plot every single trip (even to work!) and claim this helps with traffic or undercover cameras or some other cope. But the traffic will be there regardless, and they shouldnt need Google Maps to remind them not to speed. They'd rather be glued to the screen than pay attention to their surroundings or learn any landmarks.

lostmsu3• 4 months ago

Couldn't tell if the first part was a sarcasm or not.

The second part gave it away though.

mckn1ght• 4 months ago

I love playing lost and found: get yourself lost and then find your way back home without GPS.

theonething• 4 months ago

But the traffic will be there regardless

Isn't the point to use the GPS to avoid the traffic? In my experience, it's pretty effective a lot of times for that.

nurettin• 4 months ago

need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one.

I have never typed and expressed myself so much before I started talking to clankers. Telling them what to do, teaching them skills, giving them architecture decisions and yanking their chain when they weer off course. I type in plain English maybe more than 60 hours a week now.

erelong• 4 months ago

"You can just blog things"

dare944• 4 months ago

"Let them write blogs!"

muskstinks2• 4 months ago

One problem writing does have: we grew up in a massive changing and progressing software writing area. A golden area.

Now i still show clean code videos from bob and other old things to new hires and young collegues.

Java got more features, given but the golden area of discovery is over.

The new big thing is ai and i'm curious to see how it will feel to write real agents for my company specific use cases.

But i'm also seeing people so bad in their daily jobs, that I wish to get their salary as tokens to use. It will change and it changes our field.

Btw. "Is there anything, in the entire recorded history of human creation, that could have possibly mattered less than the flatulence Sora produced? NFTs had more value." i disagree, video generation has a massive impact on the industry for a lot of people. Don't down play this. NFTs btw. never had any impact besides moving money from a to b

flir3• 4 months ago

But i'm also seeing people so bad in their daily jobs, that I wish to get their salary as tokens to use.

Oof. The modern "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"

sd92• 4 months ago

At least have the grace to show new hires Rich Hickey lectures or something. Uncle bob is nonsense.

muskstinks2• 4 months ago

I'm giving them a lot more but I assumed people know uncle bob. Like the Open Source Architecture Books, Googles SRE Books, 1:1 mentoring every week.

But yeah there is one person made of teflon. Nothing sticks. And i could tell you that teflon person in every company i worked so far.

Spacecosmonaut• 4 months ago

"Generative AI is art. It’s irredeemably shit art; end of conversation."

I think most people cannot destinguish between "genuine" creativity and an artificial almalgamation of training data and human provided context. For one, I do not know what already exsists. Some work created by AI may be an obvious rip off of the style of a particular artist, but I wouldnt know. To me it might look awesome and fresh.

I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.

none2585• 4 months ago

Further I'd argue we KNOW people don't care if you look at the music industry.

Pop music is often composed by dozens of people who specialize in a thin sliver of the track - lyrics, vocals, drums, &c. - and then it's given a pretty face and makes the charts. That's really no different than something like Suno.

I think AI is forcing people who thought that THEIR thing was too nuanced or too complex to be replaced by technology to reckon with what makes them special.

chii• 4 months ago

most people are just utilitarian and do not care for "art" (in the high art sense).

AI is perfect for that. It reveal, perhaps to the dismay of those who revel in high art, that it might be an illusion that art has genuine creativity, if most people find ai to produce acceptable output.

apples_oranges• 4 months ago

The question is how subtle AI can be. I feel like art sometimes seems to communicate A, and the artist intended to communicate A and perhaps some B, but clearly, it also hints at another C (and maybe also D, E, ..), which was not intended by the artist or recognised by many viewers, while to some people it's clearly there. Now where did that come from?

And can or will AI create it?

esafak• 4 months ago

People have been having this debate with popular art forever. Some people do not even believe in taste, and that everyone's artistic opinions have equal merit.

farfatched2• 4 months ago

The AI industry is 99% hype; a billion dollar industrial complex to put a price tag on creation. At this point if you believe AI is ‘just a tool’ you’re wilfully ignoring the harm.
(Regardless, why do I keep being told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I decide not to buy something?)
The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates.

This sort of reasoning is why you might have been called extreme.

It's less extreme to say "many people see and/or get lots of benefit, but it's wrong to use the tool due to the harms it has".

There's nothing wrong with extreme, but since you asked.

xnorswap• 4 months ago

Yes, declaring AI to be 99% hype just turns away people like me from what the author has to say.

I was an AI sceptic for a long time until toward the end of last year when I seriously evaluated them, and came to realise it could add tremendous value.

When someone comes along and declares that it's all hype, it goes against my experience that it's getting things done.

I can also see the harm it does, and I hope the tooling improves to reduce that harm. For example, there's a significant lack of caching in the tooling. It's constantly re-reading the same files every day, and more harmfully, constantly fetching the same help pages and blog-posts from the web.

If it had a generous built in HTTP cache, and instruction to maximise use of the cache, then it could avoid a lot of re-fetching of content, which would help reduce the harms.

Declaring my experience to be invalid and based on nothing but hype doesn't engage people like me at all.

And it's the people like me, the middle-of-the-road developer working on enterprise software, that either need convincing to not use the tools, or for our habits to change to minimise the harm.

Because otherwise we're quietly getting on with using it, potentially destroying forests and lakes as we do.

kasey_junk• 4 months ago

It’s worse than that, in the linked “I’ve done my research” they make the tired claim that ai hallucinates api calls. Which while true has not been a practical problem since tool calling was added.

I think the position that ai is morally troubling enough that the downsides out way the positives is perfectly defensible. But the entire argument becomes a joke when you can’t accurately catalog the positives.

SirHumphrey• 4 months ago

Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

ch4s3• 4 months ago

If it had a generous built in HTTP cache, and instruction to maximise use of the cache, then it could avoid a lot of re-fetching of content, which would help reduce the harms.

While this is a great idea, the harms are somewhat overblown. The big scare number for water consumption includes water used in power generation which itself includes evaporation from hydroelectric power.

zzzeek2• 4 months ago

rants about AI from people who have already decided up front to never actually attempt to use the tools (which seems to be the case here from the post and the other one it links) are not really providing any value to the discourse.

There is nothing new about using machinery to automate boring / repetitive tasks, including the wall of resistance that comes up. But it should be clear that genuinely useful tooling and automation tends to become a normal part of life, from the plow, to the printing press, to the dishwasher, to digital video editing, to autocorrect, and now to large language models.

There's a lot that has to be worked out with LLMs in particular as they are now encroaching heavily upon human creativity and thought. This is an extremely important topic. But rants like these with terms like "the plagarism machine" and "the solution is that we all must vow to never use AI in any shape or form" are not really contributing.

nodra• 4 months ago

Trying to understand why it would matter if their hosting provider used ai or not. Genuine question so I can understand your take.

kasG• 4 months ago

You are a good employee! Python people always shill for their employer's opinions.

gruntbuggly• 4 months ago

We're starting to rethink what an over reliance on plow based tilling has done for soil health. The point being that technologies are tradeoffs and it's helpful to understand the tradeoffs we are making.

zzzeek2• 4 months ago

that's the absolute truth here

bombcar4• 4 months ago

You have to write for yourself. People have said this for years, decades, millennia even - but nobody really believes that writing to an audience of zero (or one, if Mom is still around) is worth it.

Everyone wants to be a famous author, or at least a published/somewhat acknowledged one; few are willing to write their novel and be satisfied with zero or near-zero sales/readings.

But that is exactly what you need to do, especially in the age of AI. Everyone who was "in it to win it" (think linkedinslop which existed before AI) is going to certainly use AI - because they do not give a shit about the quality of themselves - they just want the result.

And you can only become a writer (unpublished, unread, or no) by doing the writing - it takes time (10,000 hours?) that cannot be replaced by AI, just like you can't have the body of a marathon runner without running (yes, yes, the joke). You may be able to get 26 miles and change away, even very fast, but unless you personally do the running of that distance without cheating, you will not get the inherent benefits.

And if you instruct an AI, or another human even, to write for you, you may get some of the results you want, but you won't have changed to become a writer.

We shouldn't celebrate the successful blogs; they're already rewarded enough. It's celebrating the unsuccessful blogs that is needed - even if, frankly, the vast majority of them are sub-AI levels of crap it is still a human changing and progressing behind them.

Babies fall over a lot but unless you take them out of the stroller and let them do so, they'll never progress to crawling, walking, running.

fragmede2• 4 months ago

Do people who journal exist in your world view?

ceplabs• 4 months ago

This might be the coolest personal website theme I've ever seen.

Waterluvian5• 4 months ago

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably a smart one.

Adoption of AI at a FOMO corporate pace doesn't seem to include this consideration. They largely want your skills to atrophy as you instead beep boop the AI machine to do the job (arguably) faster. I think they're wrong and silly and any time they try to justify it, the words don't reconcile into a rational series of statements. But they're the boss and they can do the thing if they want to. At work I either do what they want in exchange for money or I say no thank you and walk away.

Which led me to the conclusion I'm currently at: I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home.

simonw2• 4 months ago

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company

Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.

Waterluvian5• 4 months ago

That’s been my experience, too. But now I get a sort of, “I dunno. Maybe don’t use AI on Fridays?”

There doesn’t seem to be a plan for maintaining that culture.

tonyedgecombe2• 4 months ago

Every company I worked for didn’t give a shit about my skills. They just wanted to solve the problem in front of them and if they couldn’t then they would hire someone in with the right skills. Improving my skills was seen as a risk as I might leave.

01284a7e• 4 months ago

The opposite is true in my case - though 1 organization that had a small budget for things like AWS certs. I remember almost everyone who would get those certificates would never really learn anything from it either. They would just take the exams.

Supermancho4• 4 months ago

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

kajaktum• 4 months ago

You must be lucky then.

jasomill• 4 months ago

Given the rest of the paragraph, I believe the parent is trying to say that merely improving developer skills is not valuable to the company, not that improving developer skills cannot provide value in terms of improved work product, morale, retention, etc.

titzer3• 4 months ago

The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on.

There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is built on. But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us.

God I hope it doesn't all crash at once.

nicksergeant5• 4 months ago

I feel I've upskilled in so many directions (not just "ability to prompt LLMs") since going all in on LLM coding. So many tools, techniques, systems, and new areas of research I'd never have had the time to fully learn in the past.

I have a hard time believing any tenured developer is not actually learning things when using LLMs to build. They make interesting choices that are repeatable (new CLIs I didn't even know existed, writing scripts to churn through tricky data, using specific languages for specific tasks like Go for concurrently working through large numerous tasks, etc.)

Anyone not learning things via LLM coding right now either doesn't care at all about the underlying code/systems, or they had no foundational knowledge or interest in programming to begin with (which is also a valid way to use these tools, but they don't work very well without guidance for too long [yet]).

kingkawn2• 4 months ago

If a catastrophic failure occurs we will have to return to first principles and re-derive the solutions. Not so bad, probably enlivening even to get to spin up the mind again after a break.

hnthrow02873453• 4 months ago

But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us.

That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. People will tinker with those things as hobbies and they'll broadcast that out too. Worst case we hobble along until we get better at it. And if we have to hobble along and it's important, someone's going to be paying well for learning all of that stuff from zero, so the motivation will be there.

Why do people worry about a potential, temporary loss of skill?

tuvang• 4 months ago

There is a deadly game of chicken going on. Junior recruiting already stopped for the most part. Only way this doesn’t end in a catastrophe is if AI becomes genuinely as good as the most skilled developers before we run out of them. Which I doubt very much but don’t find completely impossible.

turlockmike• 4 months ago

How many kernel devs does the world need? A dozen or two?

It will be the same with software. AI will be writing and consuming most software. We will be utilizing experiences built on top of that, probably generated in real time for hyper personalization. Every app on your phone will be replaced by one app. (Except maybe games, at least for a short while longer).

Everyone's treating writing code as this reverent thing. No one wrote code 100 years ago. Very few today write assembly. It will become lost because the economic neccesity is gone.

It's the end of an era, but also the beginning of a new one. Building agentic systems is really hard, a hard enough problem that we need a ton of people building those systems. AI hardware devices have barely been registered, we need engineers who can build and integrate all sorts of systems.

Engineering as a discipline will be the last job to be automated, since who do you think is going to build all the worlds automation?

qsera9• 4 months ago

Trust me. All those people do it for the love of doing it, so I don't think they will outsource the jobs to some automation....

I have been coding long before internet and before there were huge demand for software devs..and I would be coding even after there is no demand for the same.

anon291• 4 months ago

I mean there should be. But there's not. Despite the millions of CS grads produced many people could not reasonably be expected to produce many 'standard' parts of a software stack

joegibbs• 4 months ago

"What if the AI goes away" seems to be a common argument but it's just not ever going to happen without, say, a solar flare wiping out all electronics, which will be an issue which skilled programmers can't help anyway. The same thing happened when high-level languages came around, not many people can hand-write assembly anymore or work with punch cards but society hasn't collapsed.

stingraycharles• 4 months ago

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company.

Yet every company does it, except the worst sweatshops.

qsera9• 4 months ago

I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending.

Frankly I don't think so. The AI using LLMs is the perpetual motion mechanism scam of our time. But it is cloaked in unimaginable complexity, and thus it is the perfect scam. But even the most elaborately hidden power source in a perpetual motion machine cannot fool nature and should come to a complete stop as it runs out.

Waterluvian5• 4 months ago

I love the perpetual motion machine / thermodynamics analogy.

It kind of feels like companies are being fooled into outsourcing/offshoring their jr. developer level work. Then the companies depend on it because operational inertia is powerful, and will pay as the price keeps going up to cover the perpetual motion lie. Then they look back and realize they're just paying Microsoft for 20 jr. developers but are getting zero benefit from in-house skill development.

colechristensen4• 4 months ago

This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself. I am still necessary 1% of the time for debug, design, and direction and those of not at all a shallow skill. I have some graduate algebra texts on the way my math friend is guiding me through because I have found a publishable result and need to shore up my background before writing the paper...

It's not perpetual motion, it's very real capability, you just have to be able to learn how to use it.

catlifeonmars5• 4 months ago

Maybe I’m just getting extremely lucky, but I don’t use AI to code at work and I’m still keeping up with my peers who are all Clauded up. I do a lot of green field network appliance design and implementation and have not felt really felt the pressure in that space.

I do use Claude code at home maybe a couple hours a week, mostly for code base exploration. Still haven’t figured out how to fully vibe code: the generated code just annoys me and the agents are too chatty. (Insert old man shaking fist at cloud).

jmmv• 4 months ago

the generated code just annoys me and the agents are too chatty

I’ve eyerolled way less with Codex CLI and the GPT models than with Claude.

lioeters• 4 months ago

We're witnessing a divergence between Coders and Clauders, with the latter dominating the market at a lower cost of labor + subscription fee to the almighty AI providers. Coders may be called in, hopefully with better renumeration, to review and debug the massive amount of code being generated. Either that or they will also be replaced by specially trained/prompted language models doing the review.

Bridged77562• 4 months ago

In the future Claude will keep a tight ship on dissenters. If your monthly quota doesn't exceed the 10k worth of tokens your employer will be notified and you will be flagged as a "dissenter". Your lease will be cancelled, because who would trust someone ignorant enough to not use LLMs in their daily life, and you'll be vetoed from the field for life, for clanker companies will proclaim that anyone who doesn't use LLM-assisted coding should be culled and so they'll run a tight ship.

And executives will get millions in bonuses for figuring it out, and the remaining programmers, probably one or two, will raise their necks over who's the best prompter and how everyone else was dumber than them for not figuring it out.

bigstrat20033• 4 months ago

Yeah, the AI productivity gains are a myth in my experience.

pfisherman• 4 months ago

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents?

I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won” and using them effectively required development and acquisition of some new domain knowledge and best practices. And the kids are ok. The people who scoffed at neural nets and never got up to speed not so much.

Edit: as an aside, I have learned plenty from reviewing coding agent generated implementations of various algorithms or methods.

mcdeltat2• 4 months ago

I think your argument is predicated on LLM coding tools providing significant benefit when used effectively. Personally I still think the answer is "not really" if you're doing any kind of interesting work that's not mostly boilerplate code writing all day.

MrDarcy• 4 months ago

Not sure why this would catch heat rationally speaking. It is quite clear in a professional setting effective use of coding agents is the most important skill to develop as an individual developer.

It’s also the most important capability engineering orgs can be working on developing right now.

Software Engineering itself is being disrupted.

mxkopy2• 4 months ago

I don’t think it could be the most important skill to have. The most common, and the most standardized one for sure, but if coding agents are doing fundamental R&D or running ops then nobody needs skills anyway.

As it turns out, neural nets “won”
The people who scoffed at neural nets and never got up to speed not so much.

I get the feeling you don’t know what you’re talking about. LLMs are impressive but what have they “won” exactly? They require millions of dollars of infrastructure to run coming around a decade after their debut, and we’re really having trouble using them for anything all that serious. Now I’m sure in a few decades’ time this comment will read like a silly cynic but I bet that will only be after those old school machine learning losers come back around and start making improvements again.

tonyedgecombe2• 4 months ago

Using a coding agent seems quite low skill to me. It’s hard to see it becoming a differentiator. Just look at the number of people who couldn’t code before and are suddenly churning out work to confirm that.

dspillett3• 4 months ago

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents?

If it does go as far that way as many seem to expect (or, indeed, want), then most people will be able to do it, there will be a dearth of jobs and many people wanting them so it'll be a race to the bottom for all but the lucky few: development will become a minimum wage job or so close to that it'll make no odds. If I'm earning minimum wage it isn't going to be sat on my own doing someone else's prompting, I'll find a job that involves not sitting along in front of a screen and reclaim programming for hobby time (or just stop doing it at all, I have other hobbies to divide my time between). I dislike (effectively) being a remote worker already, but put up with it for the salary, if the salary goes because “AI” turns it into a race-to-the-bottom job then I'm off.

Conversely: if that doesn't happen then I can continue to do what I want, which is program and not instruct someone else (be it a person I manage or an artificial construct) to program. I'm happy to accept the aid of tools for automation and such, I've written a few of my own, but there is a line past which my interest will just vanish.

windward• 4 months ago

Many of those skills have temporary value before they're incorporated into the models/harnesses

MetaWhirledPeas• 4 months ago

what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents?

Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel.

What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one:

- Able to review the output of coding agents

- Able to guide the architecture of an application

- Able to guide the architecture of a system

- Able to minimize vulnerabilities

- Able to ensure test quality

- Able to interpret business needs

- Able to communicate with stakeholders

anticorporate• 4 months ago

I'd offer an edit that the most important skill may be knowing when the agent is wrong.

There's so much hand wringing about people not understanding how LLMs work and not nearly enough hand wringing about people not understanding how computer systems work.

rekrsiv• 4 months ago

The endgame in programming is reducing complexity before the codebase becomes impossible to reason about. This is not a solved problem, and most codebases the LLMs were trained on are either just before that phase transition or well past it.

Complexity is not just a matter of reducing the complexity of the code, it's also a matter of reducing the complexity of the problem. A programmer can do the former alone with the code, but the latter can only be done during a frank discussion with stakeholders.

A vibe coder using an LLM to generate complexity will not be able to tell which complexity to get rid of, and we don't have enough training data of well-curated complexity for LLMs to figure it out yet.

ozozozd• 4 months ago

There was a moment we thought JS had won. And then crypto. I personally believed low-level development was done.

bonoboTP• 4 months ago

I also remember a similar wave around 10-15 years ago regarding ML tooling and libraries becoming more accessible, more open source releases etc. People whose value add was knowing MATLAB toolboxes and keeping their code private got very afraid when Python numpy, scikit learn and Theano etc came to the forefront. And people started releasing the code with research papers on github. Anyone could just get that working code and start tweaking the equations put different tools and techniques together even if you didn't work in one of those few companies or didn't do an internship at a lab who were in the know.

Or other people who just kept their research dataset private and milked it for years training incrementally better ML models on the same data. Then similar datasets appeared openly and they threw a hissy fit.

Usually there are a million little tricks and oral culture around how to use various datasets, configurations, hyperparameters etc and papers often only gave the high level ideas and math away. But when the code started to become open it freaked out many who felt they won't be able to keep up and just wanted to keep on until retirement by simply guarding their knowledge and skill from getting too known. Many of them were convinced it's going to go away. "Python is just a silly, free language. Serious engineers use Matlab, after all, that's a serious paid product. All the kiddies stacking layers in Theano will just go away, it's just a fad and we will all go back to SVM which has real math backing it up from VC theory." (The Vapnik-Chervonenkis kind, not the venture capital kind.)

I don't want to be too dismissive though. People build up an identity, like the blacksmith of the village back in the day, and just want to keep doing it and build a life on a skill they learn in their youth and then just do it 9 to 5 and focus on family etc. I get it. But wishing it won't make it so.

Talented, skilled people with good intuition and judgements will be needed for a long time but that will still require adapting to changing tools and workflows. But the bulk of the workforce is not that.

shmerl• 4 months ago

I'd say viewing it as most important is pretty unprofessional. But isn't it the point of this extreme AI push? To replace professional skills with dummy parrots.

nunez8• 4 months ago

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents?

Doing so will effectively force a (potentially unwanted) career change for many people and will lead to the end of software engineering (and software as a career), assuming AI continues to improve.

"Effectively" using agents means that you're writing specs and reading code (in batches through change diffs) instead of writing code directly. This requires the ability to write well (or well enough to get what you want from the agent) and clearly communicate intent (in your language of choice, not code; very different IMO).

The way that you read code is different with agents as well. Agents can produce a smattering of tests alongside implementation in a single turn. This is usually a lot of code. Thus, instead of red-green-refactor'ing a single change that you can cumulatively map in your head, you're prompt-build-executing entire features all at once and focusing on the result.

Code itself loses its importance as a result. See also: projects that are moving towards agentic-first development using agents for maintenance and PR review. Some maintainers don't even read their codebases anymore. They have no idea what the software is actually doing. Need security? Have an agent that does nothing but security look at it. DevOps? Use a DevOps agent.

This isn't too far off from what I was doing as a business analyst a little over 20 years ago (and what some technical product managers do now for spikes/prototypes). I wrote FRDs [^0] describing what the software should do. Architects would create TRDs [^1] from those FRDs. These got sent off to developers to get developed, then to QA to get bugs hammered out, then back to my team for UAT.

If agents existed back then, there would've been way fewer developers/QA in the middle. Architects would probably do a lot of what they would've done. I foresee that this is the direction we're heading in, but with agents powered by staff engineers/Enterprise Architects in the middle.

Edit: as an aside, I have learned plenty from reviewing coding agent generated implementations of various algorithms or methods.

People learn differently. I (and others) learn from doing. Typing code from Stack Overflow/Expertsexchange/etc instead of pasting it, then modifying it is how I learned to code. Some can learn from reading alone.

[^0]: https://www.modernanalyst.com/Resources/Articles/tabid/115/I...

veidr• 4 months ago

It absolutely is, but the fundamental misunderstanding around this seems to be that "effectively using coding agents" is a superset of the 2023-era general understanding of "Senior Software Engineer".

At least when you're talking about shipping software customers pay for, or debugging it, etc. Research, narrow specializations, etc may be a different category and some will indeed be obsoleted.

dogleash• 4 months ago

This is going to catch some heat [...]

It does seem like a roundabout way of saying "but what if full sending on AI didn't have downsides, tho?"

Just phrased in a way that can put the onus on the other party with a perfect weasel word qualifier like "most important".

coldtea8• 4 months ago

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company

What's valuable to a company is not necessarily what's valuable to the customers or even more so, to a civilization at large.

clvx• 4 months ago

There's a catch. Do not break customer trust. Many people are just tinkering with solving the problem but the indirect effects have not been tackled either by the tool, processes or just some human thinking.

v3xro• 4 months ago

I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home.

It could hardly have been a hobby if people were willing to pay you for it (and good rates too)?

I will rephrase it like this - the market has shifted away from providing value to the customers of said companies to pumping itself instead and it does not need to employ people for that. Simple as.

KronisLV• 4 months ago

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem.

Doesn't credentialism kinda throw a spanner in that - where it's not enough to have people with a good track record of solving issues, but then someone along the way says "Yeah, we'd also like the devs who'll work on the project to have Java certs." (I've done those certs, they're orthogonal to one's ability to produce good software)

Might just be govt. projects or particular orgs where such requirements are drawn up by dinosaurs, go figure (as much as I'd love software development to be "real" engineering with best practices spanning decades, it's still the Wild West in many respects). Then again, the same thing more or less applies to security, a lot of it seems like posturing and checklists (how some years back the status quo was that you'll change your password every 30-90 days because IT said so) instead of the stuff that actually matters.

Not to detract from the point too much, but I've very much seen people not care about solving problems and shipping fast as stuff like that, or covering their own asses by paying for Oracle support or whatever (even when it gets in the way of actually shipping, like ADF and WebLogic and the horror that is JDeveloper).

But yeah, I think many companies out there don't care that much about the individual growth of their employees that much, unless they have the ability to actually look further into the future - which most don't, given how they prefer not to train junior devs into mid/senior ones over years.

bluecheese452• 4 months ago

What about a company with high security reqs that do bot alloellms? Like gov type work.

TomasBM3• 4 months ago

I agree with the sentiment, but I think the problem is much wider.

Managers at companies are just doing what they've optimized their careers for: maintaining some edge over some competition, at some cost. What is pure FOMO to you or me, is good strategy to anyone trying to win [1]. In other words, FOMO was always the strategy.

This self-reinforcing loop is also not going away. There hasn't been any real evidence that any part of knowledge work, including coding, cannot be automated [2]. Even if human-level quality or cost-effectiveness takes 10 more years, all tasks are functionally solved or about to be. I don't like it, but it's true.

The big problem is that the people who are removed from this loop, who have the time to understand its effects and the power to make changes, are doing fuck-all.

So, whether the loop stops for a while or speeds up even more, we're fucked until we figure out how to detach full-time employment from survival.

[1] I believe this is called meta in PvP games; even if you want to subvert the meta, you gotta know it well first.

[2] Although it could just be my impression, and I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.

ModernMech3• 4 months ago

The evidence that software development cannot be automated is we already tried to do it in the 90s with OOP, UML, and outsourcing. It didn’t work out for the same reasons vibe coding isn’t working out — because building the system is the same as specifying it, and that is a creative iterative process.

We are at the point where sure ai can write code, but we could always do that; lack of code writing ability was not what killed the OOP automation efforts. There was plenty ability to code back then as well. The distinction of whether it’s an offshore team in India or Claude writing the code doesn’t change things as far as the larger picture of building the software.

lopsotronic• 4 months ago

Pour yourself a drink, as I have a longish story that might be a useful metaphor.

Back in the day, there were more or less two consumer flight sims: MS Flight Simulator and XPlane. MSFS was and has always been the much prettier one, much easier to work with; xplane is kludgy, very old-school *NIX, and chonky in terms of resource usage. I was doing some work integrating flight systems data (FDAU/FDR outputs) into a cheaper flight re-creation tool, since the aircraft OEM's tool cost more than my annual salary. Hmm, actually, ten years of my salary.

So why use xplane at all, then?

The difference was that MSFS flight dynamics was driven from a model using table-based lookup that reproduced performance characteristics for a given airframe, whereas xplane (as you might be able to tell from the company name, Laminar Research) does fluid and gas simulation over the actual skin of the airframe, and then does the physics for the forces and masses and such.

I caught some flack for going with xplane: "Why not MSFS!? It's so much prettier!"

Unless the airframe is in a state that is near-equivalent with tabular lookup model, the actual flight is not going to be actually re-created. A plane in distress is very often in a boundary state- at best. OR you might be flying a plane that doesn't really have a model, like, say, a brand new planform (like the company was trying to develop). Without the aerodynamic fundamentals, the further away you get from the model represented by the tabular lookups, the greater the risk gets.

And how does this relate?

Those fundamentals- aerodynamic or mathematical or electrical- will be able to deal with a much broader range than models trained on existing data, regardless of whether or not they are LLMs or tabular lookups. If we rely on LLMs for aerodynamics, for chemistry, for electrical engineering, we are setting ourselves up for something like the 2008 Econopalypse except now it affects ALL the physical sciences; a Black Swan event that breaks reality.

I am genuinely worried we're working outselves into just such an event, where the fundamentals are all but forgotten, and a new phenomenon simply breaks the nuts and bolts of the applied sciences.

As for my xplane selection, it helped in other ways. Because often the FDR data is just plain wrong, but with xplane you could actually tell, because a control surface sticking out one way, while the flight instruments say another, lights up a "YOU GOT PROBLEMS" light in the cockpit as the aircraft inexplicably lurches to the right.

SpaceNoodled• 4 months ago

Ah, but it's no longer "inexplicably!"

malwrar2• 4 months ago

I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore.

Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, now it’s a bunch of omniscient robots and maybe half of those original people are using the robots instead.

philipwhiuk• 4 months ago

I think the immediate term action is to viciously block all crawlers.

Writing a blog yes, feeding the beast no.

ArcHound• 4 months ago

This sounds like a nice principled stance, but you won't get any traffic with this approach. That's demotivating - to me blogging is a tight balance of exploration, learning, improving and feedback. I'm not able to write without considering how this impacts the reader - removing all readers breaks the process for me.

lstodd• 4 months ago

Yeah, everyone went on "blocking all crawlers" end result being half of internet inaccessible over vpns. Good job, people.

niek_pas2• 4 months ago

This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it.

I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?

TeMPOraL2• 4 months ago

Dog in the Manger.

I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person, whether that's some intentional contribution or a random brain fart that happened in the vicinity of someone else doing something useful - and then become resentful they're not "getting their share".

There's hardly any other way to read all the proclamations of quitting to do anything because "cognitive dark forest" (itself a butchering of the original idea of "dark forest" across so many orthogonal dimensions in parallel, that it starts to look like a latent space of a transformer model).

malwrar2• 4 months ago

There’s definitely a fear of repercussions (I’ve been commenting on this site for over a decade now! Who knows what’s in my history...) but importantly I actually take some pride in many of the comments I write. What drew me to this site originally was how high quality everyone’s perspectives and articulation was, and I suppose I view the writing voice I’ve nurtured here as unique and special to me. It’s not about compensation, I’d just hate to see some future chatbot sound 1/1,000,000th like me I guess? Hard feeling to describe, but I’d rather just not be globbed in and instead express myself in ways that aren’t profitable or feasible to copy.

martin-t6• 4 months ago

I see this take a lot and I think it's harmful in ways you might not realize.

Even if it's true and you genuinely have nothing to hide, have nothing to lose from being profiled, there are people who absolutely do.

Look at the radicalization happening in countries around the world, including the USA. It might be OK to be part of a minority or to have an uncommon opinion. A few years pass and suddenly the same person is considered an undesirable, a foreign agent, a terrorist or a deviant.

I've posted a lot of shit online which can be connected to my person and which could label me as any of the groups above. But that's a decision I make for myself. I would never dare make it for others or claim that they should not care about surveillance and take the same risks I do.

I know a guy from russia who lost his job because he expressed an antiwar opinion. The same thing can happen in the US or and other country you consider civilized. The US proto-dictator is already sending death-threats to people who only expressed the opinion that soldiers can refuse illegal orders. Neither you or me can know what will happen next.

simianwords6• 4 months ago

HN always offered the data to anyone, what changes now? How does it matter if it is LLM's that is consuming your data. What a strange attitude.

satvikpendem4• 4 months ago

HN comments have always been public, I don't really understand this thought process. The robots also aren't going to care about some individual user, it'd be more of an agglomeration of everyone's comments.

progbits• 4 months ago

I've heard it phrased as: Would you rather LLM trained on your comments, or one trained on facebook comments.

Obviously that's a false dichotomy and a pretty defeatist attitude. But it does have a point.

titzer3• 4 months ago

I laugh jollily in the face of AI. I know the coming shit pile, its nature isn't going to be surprising, only the speed and utter surrender of the vast majority of humanity to mediocrity.

What AI represents to me is a teacher! I have so long lacked a music teacher and musical tools. I spent my entire career doing invisible software at the lowest levels and now I can finally build cool tools that help me learn and practice and enjoy playing music! Screw all the haters; if you're curious about a wide range of topics and already have some knowledge, you can galavant across a vast space and learn a lot along the way.

AI is a bit of a bullshitter but don't take its bullshit as truth, like you should never take anything your teacher says as gospel. How do we know what's true? The truth of the universe and the world is that underneath it all, it is self consistent, and we keep making measurement errors. The AI is an enormous pot of magic that it's up to you to organize with...your own skills.

You have to actively resist deskilling by doing things. AI should challenge you and reward you, not make you passive.

Use AI to teach yourself by asking lots of questions and constantly testing the results against reality.

For me right now, that's the fretboard.

rtpg• 4 months ago

Old web stuff is still around. RSS feeds are out there. Some parts of masto are generally chill and filled with people having interesting convos.

You don't have to give up on everything to participate, but it can be a space to go to if you're tired of every social interaction being mediated by (I'm being glib) hustlers

OJFord2• 4 months ago

Paha, I thought this domain was 'D-Bus Hell' until I clicked in. (It's D. Bushell's blog.)

sdevonoes2• 4 months ago

Can’t we just sabotage AI? We have the means for sure (speed light communication across the globe). Like, at least for once in the history of software engineering we should get together like other professionals do. Sadly our high salaries and perks won’t make the task easy for many

- spend tons of tokens on useless stuff at work (so your boss knows it’s not worth it)

- be very picky about AI generated PRs: add tons of comments, slow down the merge, etc.

bendmorris• 4 months ago

I think you should be very picky about generated PRs not as an act of sabotage but because very obviously generated ones tend to balloon complexity of the code in ways that makes it difficult for both humans and agents, and because superficial plausibility is really good at masking problems. It's a rational thing to do.

Eventually you are faced with company culture that sees review as a bottleneck stopping you from going 100x faster rather than a process of quality assurance and knowledge sharing, and I worry we'll just be mandated to stop doing them.

zozbot2345• 4 months ago

be very picky about AI generated PRs: add tons of comments, slow down the merge, etc.

But that's the opposite of sabotage, you're actually helping your boss use AI effectively!

spend tons of tokens on useless stuff at work (so your boss knows it’s not worth it)

Yes, but the "useless" stuff should be things like "carefully document how this codebase works" or "ruthlessly critique this 10k-lines AI slop pull request, and propose ways to improve it". So that you at least get something nice out of it long-term, even if it's "useless" to a clueless AI-pilled PHB.

xyzal• 4 months ago

Generate hundreds repos of plain old spaghetti code and put it on github. Easiest thing you can do.

doctorwho424• 4 months ago

It really is the albatross around the neck of software and software adjacent professionals... How you don't see the value of collective action is wild to me. Most of you are still working class, you can't survive that many years unemployed...

But the Kool aid has been drunk, and the philosophy of silicon valley cemented in your field. It will take a lot of pain or work to get it to change.

kstenerud5• 4 months ago

The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms.

Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?

Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere.

You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfangled automobiles.

sdevonoes2• 4 months ago

Progress is good. But why on earth should we support Anthropic/OpenAI/etc? What the planet needs is less multibillion corporations, not more

kstenerud5• 4 months ago

You don't have to. Just like you don't have to support Amazon for web services and file stores.

Or Oracle for databases.

Or Microsoft for operating systems.

Or DEC for computers.

There are perfectly good open source LLMs and agents out there, which are getting better by the day (especially after the recent leak!)

farfatched2• 4 months ago

I want to support local models and compute over SaaS models.

I want to support RISC V over Intel.

I want other things too, and on balance, Intel+Anthropic is most compliant with my various preferences, even if they're not perfect.

mmustapic3• 4 months ago

No, the free software movement wants that the source code of the software you use be available to you to modify it if you wish. AI does not necessarily do that.

kstenerud5• 4 months ago

AI makes the entirety of the software engineering profession available to you. All you have to do is ask the right way, and you can build in days what once took months or years.

Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied.

Closed source is no longer the moat it was, and so keeping the source code to yourself is only going to hurt you as people pass you over for companies who realize this, and strive to make it easier for your LLM to figure their systems out.

lmm• 4 months ago

Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?

Available to all yes. Not available to the giant corpos while the lone hobbyist still fears getting sued to oblivion. In fact that's pretty much the opposite of what the free software movement wanted.

Also the other thing the free software movement wanted was to be able to fix bugs in the code they had to use, which AI is pulling us further and further away from.

thedevilslawyer5• 4 months ago

What is the FUD? Which hobbyist is fearing being sued? Any credible citations?

probably_wrong2• 4 months ago

Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?

But this is not that. The current situations is closer to "what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine".

I have been releasing my writings under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license which requires attribution and that anything built upon the material to be distributed "under the same license as the original". And yet I have no access to OpenAI's built-upon material (I know for a fact they scrape my posts) while they get my data for free. This is so far legal, but it's probably not ethical and definitely not what the free software movement wanted.

joquarky5• 4 months ago

What should be the maximum allowable cyclomatic complexity of license conditions?

lostmsu3• 4 months ago

You can download Qwen 3.5 under Apache 2.0

thedevilslawyer5• 4 months ago

not what the free software movement wanted

Sorry, you don't speak for the movement. Plenty of us want this world.

toofy• 4 months ago

i can say with a pretty high confidence level that few people in the free software movement want the closed off black boxes these companies are locking away.

they’re not free in any sense of the word. from price to openness of the models. would openai cry if every bit of their models were wide open for us to use however we see fit? if so, then it’s not free, again, in any definition of the word.

joquarky5• 4 months ago

Every time Walmart does something evil, I cry myself to sleep when I realize I can never go to Walmart again.

Local models are a thing.

Havoc2• 4 months ago

The only winning move is not to play.

Alas I think tech crowd have collectively painted humanity into a corner where not playing is not an option anymore.

The combination of having subverted copyright and enabled cheap machine replication kills large swaths of creativity. At least as a viable living. One can still do many things on an artisanal level certainly and as excited as I am about AI it’s hard not to see it as a big L for humanity’s creative output

niek_pas2• 4 months ago

Interestingly, Ireland just launched a Basic Income for the Arts scheme. Many caveats (I think it's only like 300 euros a month, for a small group of people, etc.) but an interesting development nonetheless.

doctorwho424• 4 months ago

The problem is worse than that though, yes you can do most things on an artisanal level... But who is going to pay for that? What happens when head count drops, you get less capital in the hands of working class... And no matter your opinions on the wealthy, they don't have the need or desire for 5% of the population doing artisanal level work for them at a living wage.

Havoc2• 4 months ago

yes you can do most things on an artisanal level... But who is going to pay for that?

Nobody. When I said artisanal I meant that there is no mainstream market for it.

oompydoompy744• 4 months ago

Good lord I’m going to have to figure out some way to filter Hacker News. I’m so tired of this same sort of article (and the opposite) being posted every day. AI isn’t going away. AI is better than you think it is. AI is probably also worse than you think it is. The world has nuance, so can we please all chill?

jdefr89• 4 months ago

Sort of hard to do because AI it shoved down your throat in one form or another virtually everywhere you go. I also think a lot of us Hackers are mourning the fact we spent many years mastering machines and programming just to have the skill devalued (at least from the publics perspective) nearly over night. I personally think it is more important now more than ever to understand technology. To be able to write code, understand how a CPU works etc. Tech literacy will help prevent doom scenarios. A future where virtually everyone depends on AI and Computers but lacks people who actually understand them from a low level perspective seems bleak. I know thinking itself seems to have gone out of fashion and its given rise to misinformation and/or political nonsense like the rise of fascism etc... I think a lot of us just feel "empty" and are trying to express it.

oompydoompy744• 4 months ago

I get it. I’ve been doing this for 11 years. I use agents everyday at work now and deal with all the benefits and problems of that. The craft is certainly changing and it will take years for everything to shake out and settle. I understand the desire to publicly wax poetic, but nobody actually knows shit about where we will land, so it gets a bit tiresome to see over and over.

mchaver3• 4 months ago

I agree that humans should continue to value various forms of literacy even in the face of AIs that can do everything better than us. I too will continue to dig deeper into tech literacy. There was a Terence Tao paper recently that mentioned we are in a shift similar to the end of heliocentrism. It made clear that Earth is not the center of the universe, but Earth is still deeply valuable and important for humans. Much the same way that AI may supersede our understanding and intellect and make the are limitations more apparent, but our human intellect is still important to humans. Plus, what are you going to do when the price of LLM tokens are through the roof or you get messages like "burn an extra 1,000,000 tokens for a better implementation!".

mchaver3• 4 months ago

These conversations can add to the nuance. Anyway, you can just vibe code the filter you want and be done with it.

oompydoompy744• 4 months ago

I disagree that this adds anything new to the conversation, but fair enough.

Thanemate• 4 months ago

Funnily enough I saw this post as I was placing my HN account on hiatus, because I'm tired pretending that the quality of discourse is on par with what I've been used to read and participate in.

We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone who cares how readable and easy to extend the code is.

I can only assume this is done on hopeful purpose, with the hope that the LLM's will "only keep improving linearly" to the point where readability and extendability is not my problem by it's "tomorrow's LLM" problem.

inanutshellus2• 4 months ago

Ok but if you're a person that likes HN discourse but thinks "eternal september" has happened ... what's your plan?

You'll still come here, read the comments, see something engaging and want to reply and... feel sad because shakes fist at [datacenter] clouds it's all just bots talking to each other anyway.

Seems lame. Keep talking anyway.

7777332215• 4 months ago

I thought the same as the person you replied to. For me, the solution is to stop coming here as often and instead read traditional literature.

Soon to remove my access entirely to this website.

latexr• 4 months ago

You’re making a lot of assumptions. They could just stop visiting HN. They don’t even need a “plan” or an alternative, they can just stop.

moron4hire3• 4 months ago

There is a lot more "yngmi" and "have fun being poor"-style attitude around here regarding LLM boosterism.

trollbridge5• 4 months ago

That attitude is particularly galling. Along with the "lock in now or become part of the permanent underclass".

ryandrake3• 4 months ago

The thing I can't stand is the absolute certainty of the boosters. It's almost religious.

AI is the future. AI will do this. AI will cause that. It is inevitable. Everything is obviously changing.

They leave no room left for debate. No openness to pushback. And no evidence or proof. It just is because it is, and if you don't believe it, you're simply wrong. We saw the same sort of attitudes with blockchain and NFTs.

tempodox• 4 months ago

You're either someone who cares for the output or someone who cares how readable and easy to extend the code is.

Which of course is a lie propagated by those who want to cast the disbelievers as mentally defective. Why the hell would you care how readable and easy to extend the code is if you weren’t interested in the result?

Lerc• 4 months ago

Blog posts are an interesting case, they are a very good example of something where abundance of supply outstrips any demand so much that it cannot be realistic to expect a median level contribution to receive any significant attention.

Setting aside the self delusion that makes a considerable number to erroneously rate themselves above average, the reason you create blog posts should not be for the attention you might gain, there simply are not the eyeballs. You create as a form of self expression, to organise your thoughts, to create a record of them.

AI can never challenge in those areas because it is, as it has always been, the act of creation is the goal.

staminade• 4 months ago

Anti-AI articles like this seem to be the new "Doing my part to resist big tech: Why I'm switching back from Chrome to Firefox" genre that popped up on HN for a decade or so. If it makes you feel better, great, but don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society.

dmix• 4 months ago

Plus many of these articles seem maximized to attract attention on social media, which is its own machine.

Posting your most provocative and strong opinions in reaction to the latest controversy-of-the-week is what fuels the internet and culture more than anything these days. The attention economy demands hot takes mixed with preaching about every new thing.

simianwords6• 4 months ago

see: purity spiral politics

beej71• 4 months ago

I love it if it would affect the trajectory, but I don't think it will. I do think it will affect my trajectory, though.

raincole2• 4 months ago

This genre has always been very prevalent on HN. Move from cloud to on-premise. Move away from US-based services. Move away from Gmail. Move away from Github.

simianwords6• 4 months ago

Was there one for memory managed languages like C# vs self managed like C/C++?

BeetleB• 4 months ago

While it's relevant to the particular submission, this type of comment is thrown around way too often.

Me boycotting some company's product due to bad practices (slavery, etc).

Response: You know your boycotting isn't going to change anything, right?

Me: Yes, and ....? I'm not trying to change the world.

I don't use FF as some form of protest. It's just a browser I like more.

I'm not anti-AI the way much of HN is, but let's pretend I am. If I ban AI generated content on my site[1], I'm not trying to change the world. Just controlling my site.

Getting more to your sentiment: The world/Internet is a vast place. If even 1000 people think like me, it's more than enough. For a number of years I had valuable online interactions via BBS's with a population < 1000. As long as I get 1000 people, let the rest of the world burn!

It's like the constant "Emacs is dying" threads we used to have on HN, because the percentage of SO users using it kept dropping. When in reality, the absolute numbers kept increasing. Who cares if the world has moved on to VS Code? Emacs as an ecosystem was/is thriving!

[1] Assuming I live in a fantasy world where I can classify content accurately...

simianwords6• 4 months ago

I think much of current day neuroticism can be attributed to insincere comparisons of genuinely normal trade offs (like AI) to slavery in the past.

I think people are so afraid to do a hecking racism that they start comparing any normal thing to racism. I also think there’s an incentive here: by comparing to racism they potentially gain some social status points like - I’m more morally superior to you because I didn’t do a hecking racism like you.

But it can backfire, like with your comment. People are catching up to how ridiculous this comparison is

DavidPiper• 4 months ago

don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society

How large does a group have to be (absolute number or percentage of population) for you to change your mind on this?

Serious question - genuinely curious. My answer is about 10% provided they are organised in some way. 5% if you're particularly good at collective action.

alfanick• 4 months ago

I quit. The clankers won.

I don't see any proof that software development is not dead. Software engineering is not, and it's much more than writing code, and it can be fun. But writing code is dead, there is no point of doing it if an LLM can output the same code 100x faster. Of course, architecture and operations stays in our hands (for now?).

Initially I was very sceptic, first versions of ChatGPT or Claude were rather bad. I kept holding to a thought that it cannot get good. Then I've spend a few months evaluating them, if you know how to code, there is no point of coding anymore, just instruct an LLM to do something, verify, merge, repeat. It's an editor of some sorts, an editor where you enter a thought and get code as an output. Changes the whole scene.

zozbot2345• 4 months ago

LLM's don't really output the same code quality as a human, even on the smallest scale. It's not even close. Maybe you can guide them to refactor their slop up to human-written quality, but then you're still coding. You're just doing it by asking the computer to write something, instead of physically typing the whole thing out with a keyboard.

mcdeltat2• 4 months ago

Yeah I also keep thinking this. I don't see LLMs reliably producing code that is up to my standards. Granted I have high standards because I do take pride in producing high quality code (in all manner of metrics). A lot of the time the code works, unfortunately only for the most naive, mechanical definition of "works".

phpnode2• 4 months ago

This just isn’t true at all, with guidance and guard rails they produce much better code than the average developer does. They are only going to get better.

draxil3• 4 months ago

Useful tool, and if you're just scratching a small itch it's great.

For any serious system you still need to understand and guide the code, and unless you do some of the coding.. You won't. It's just novelty right now is skewing our reasoning.

therealdrag0• 4 months ago

It’s still faster to use AI to generate code while reading and guiding the code. Hell even long before LLms I would write python scripts to generate boilerplate code etc. LLM can be used similarly as a productivity boost in serious systems.

catlifeonmars5• 4 months ago

I think it’s really context dependent. I haven’t found LLMs to increase my productivity in coding in my field because the quality of the output matters much more than the quantity. I don’t think it’s the same across the board though, and there are plenty of domains where code generation is a force multiplier. Sometimes you need a chainsaw and sometimes you need a scalpel and in my own experience I have found that using coding agents as scalpels is not a very efficient use of my time. shrug

chasd00• 4 months ago

i think these are great for people who already are senior developers with years of coding experience. I can use claudecode and then walk through the output and spot fix small mistakes or notice when it's going in the wrong direction and prompt it to fix. I think people without years of development experience using these tools can really screw themselves. The problem is every new grad is going to use claudecode right from the start without a decade of hand coding to develop that wisdom.

on the other hand, i can't help but think about ASM coders lamenting C and especially C++. Also, god help you if you tell an embedded developer you use micropython instead of C. Maybe a current chapter is closing and a new one is beginning and my part was in the last chapter just like them.

i'll end with saying i really like using AI for code, it's got me excited about technology again. So many projects that were out of reach due to time ( i have a family + stressful career ) are now back on the table like when i was in college with nothing but time on my hands.

yuye• 4 months ago

Also, god help you if you tell an embedded developer you use micropython instead of C.

I will never not hate on Micropython.

This doesn't come from a position of gatekeeping embedded software engineering.

I just hate Python.

Anamon2• 4 months ago

If you're not just working on throw-away tools, revisit this sentiment every few months.

Verifying generated code and writing code are not equivalent at all. You're replacing a builder's mindset with a supervisor's mindset, and the supervisor's workers are dumb. You're bound to end up with the same class of problems we always had when programmers were reviewing their own code or testing their own features. Blind spots.

Fine for personal hobby tools or quick scripts. Not acceptable for business-critical software.

The LLM hype seems to have made an entire profession forget the painfully learned lessons of the last 70 years.

marknutter• 4 months ago

I’m not protective over the word “art”. Generative AI is art. It’s irredeemably shit art; end of conversation. A child’s crayon doodle is also lacking refined artistry but we hang it on our fridge because a human made it and that matters.

More pretentious gatekeeping from luddites who like to yell at clouds. This is someone who would love a piece of artwork created using ai tools right up until someone told them it was created using ai tools.

Anamon2• 4 months ago

Or "someone who would read a news article and be shocked/excited/moved by it right up until someone told them it was fake GenAI slop."

Apart from the fact that, yes, GenAI art is overwhelmingly shit and by definition derivative, it's also not unreasonable to not want to be lied to. People look for human connection. They like being lied to about human expression in a piece of art about as much as they like being catfished.

deadbabe• 4 months ago

I’ve decided the only way I’ll adopt a full automated agentic AI workflow the way companies want, is if I am allowed to hold multiple jobs at multiple companies.

Imagine having 6 software engineering jobs, each paying maybe $150k a year, all being done by agents.

Hell, I might even do this secretly without their consent. If I can hold just 10 jobs for about 3 or 4 years, I can retire and leave the industry before it all comes crumbling down in 2030.

The problem of course, is securing that many jobs. But maybe agents can help with applying for jobs.

LunicLynx• 4 months ago

This feels weird somehow. It feels like: Damn we can’t train our AI any better as everything regurgitated slop now. How can we get people to create new content for us, hopefully with new ideas …

Might be just me though, but I definitely don’t get why blogging should be the solution.

juleiie• 4 months ago

Yeah well I just don’t care about „AI dark forest”

You seriously need to go outside and touch grass if you are so defeated by another chess winning machine

Nobody wants to Watch AI play chess, nobody wants to read ai blogposts

AI makes human writing more valuable, not less.

I will pay good money for pure human made books certified as made without a single word auto generated whether in original or during process of Translation.

butlike• 4 months ago

A non-sequitur, but I really like the style of the blog. Good job.

coldtea8• 4 months ago

It’s never been more important to blog. There has never been a better time to blog. I will tell you why. We’re being starved for human conversation and authentic voices

The supposedly starved don't seem to care much for such food. Blogs are kind of a wasteland.

zetanor• 4 months ago

One upside of this looming economic and intellectual depression is that the media is beginning to recognise gate keepers are no longer the hand that feeds them.

In what world is "the media" not an integral, tightly-bound part of the ratchet mechanism that seeks to suppress all distinction?

randallsquared• 4 months ago

to put a price tag on creation.

I mean, to put a price tag on enabling vastly more creation than would otherwise have occurred!

__s• 4 months ago

misleading title. MODS?

keiferski2• 4 months ago

I think it's probably accurate to say that the vast majority of writers throughout history were writing for an extremely tiny or nonexistent audience. My favorite example of this is Nietzsche, who basically had zero readership during most of his life, beyond a few close friends, and even had to personally pay to get his books published. He only posthumously became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.

So while I do worry about AI's impact on blogging/writing/etc., I do think to some extent, you either love the process or you don't. If you only write in order to have readers, you're in the wrong game.

justonceokay3• 4 months ago

There are a lot of arts that were funded for a short time in our recent history that previously were absolutely not funded at all under almost any circumstance. Centralized media created centralized stars with centralized incomes

For the vast majority of history it was all community theater, carnies, and “that guy in the square guy who knows the lute”.

Fun fact, in medieval Europe acting was considered a sin so great you could not get a Christian burial, as you were channeling the spirit of others. Realpolitik it was probably because actors were mostly queer in the cities and Roma in the countryside. What’s old is new…

savory_pancake• 4 months ago

This is interesting to me: for some reason I had in my mind that Nietzsche may have been in poor health but was at least somewhat well known in his time.

There’s always Van Gogh and Starry Night to think about as well.

keiferski2• 4 months ago

He became reasonably well known amongst the German intellectual class, but only after he was already “insane.” There are some interesting anecdotes of this, especially one I came across in Harry Kessler’s diary. During Nietzsche’s conscious life he was basically only read by his friends.

rickcarlino• 4 months ago

LLMs can produce text information but they cannot have experiences. Writing about authentic experience is still a worth while endeavor. Expression of a preference is also an experience when framed correctly.

justonceokay3• 4 months ago

I think about Irish and British writing of dialogue, where is is extremely common for characters to only just now realize the importance of something their interlocutor said, and backtrack the conversation. Often this is done for humor. (Think about characters correcting each other with the use of “exacerbate” in Shaun of the Dead)

The only way to write like that is to have a real theory of mind for the two characters and understand that they are four processing speeds: that of both speakers, that of the narrator, and that of the reader.

giancarlostoro2• 4 months ago

I find it funny how clanker took off and everyone uses it. It was edited in a video where someone was otherwise saying something extremely racist (the more offensive version of the n-word). For those curious it involves a burger king hat, schizophrenia and an airplane, someone edited the n-word out and put clanker with AI (because why not insult AI by using AI?). I do wonder if the AI uprising will involve robots killing anyone who used clanker in a derogatory way and sparing everyone else.

Also, yes, I know the origin is Star Wars, but it went viral recently a very specific way.

The power of edgelord memes.

damnitbuilds• 4 months ago

Years until we are forbidden from writing Clanker and have to write C***r: 3

giancarlostoro2• 4 months ago

I had Claude write me some lyrics about Clankers after that one guy had an AI write a hit piece about him over denying his PR.

danesparza• 4 months ago

I just chased a few interesting rabbit holes because of the links to other articles in this article. Thank you for that. ;-)

code_for_monkey6• 4 months ago

I work for a bank and Im basically just an ai user now. Honestly its like pulling teeth to get anyone to look at your code here. Im just on hackernews lol

rglover3• 4 months ago

Major or regional? This is alarming beyond words.

code_for_monkey6• 4 months ago

Major, big big major, not just me either. How is it alarming beyond words? If I said "Im an emt and I just ask the AI everything" now that would be alarming beyond words.

aaa_aaa• 4 months ago

On the copyright stuff, I say good riddance.

abeppu• 4 months ago

I think the "Leave them Behind" section at the end sort of ignores the whole "they will ruthlessly copy your material, and put aggressive extra load on your server while repeatedly stealing your work" dimension.

You can try to avoid consuming AI-generated material, but of course part-way through a lot of things you may wonder whether it is partly AI-generated, and we don't yet have a credible "human-authored" stamp. But you can't really keep them from using your work to make cheap copies of you, or at least reducing your audience by including information or insights from your work in the chat sessions of people who otherwise might have read your work.

pklausler2• 4 months ago

First let’s accept the realities. The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Mass surveillance and tracking are a feature, privacy is a bug. Everything is an “algorithm” optimised to exploit.

Suppose that I have discovered a novel algorithm that solves an important basic problem much more efficiently than current techniques do. How do I hide it from the web scrapers that will steal it if I put it on GitHub or elsewhere? Should I just write it up as a paper and be content with citations and minor glory? Or should I capture AI search results today for "write me code that does X", put my new code up under a restrictive license, capture search results a day later, demonstrate that an AI scraper has acquired the algorithm in violation of the license, and seek damages?

saulpw3• 4 months ago

Isaac Newton tried to keep his Calculus secret and almost got scooped by Leibniz. IMO trying to hoard knowledge is not a great look; we all (mostly) have a sense that knowledge belongs to humanity as a whole.

keeda3• 4 months ago

I think what you're looking for is patents. I've said it before, but I think patents are the only protection left for innovative software and "the little guy." It always was, really, but it's blindingly apparent today.

Unfortunately, that would be considered heresy on forums like HN, and people will continue to rail against AI and whatever it's causing and patents, instead of realizing that one is the only available leverage against the other.

pklausler2• 4 months ago

I have a few patents, including one for a novel machine instruction, and I recall the attorney telling me that one cannot patent mathematics, only methods and systems.

prplfsh3• 4 months ago

I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.

tenahu• 4 months ago

That has been my feeling too. I have completed soo many personal projects (or improvements) that were collecting dust on my 'mental shelf'.

Without AI I would probably never get to them because realistically, I do not have dozens, or hundreds of personal hours to devote to fun, but unnecessary projects.

glouwbug• 4 months ago

Some of us work on critical systems

drchickensalad• 4 months ago

You do know that there's many different personalities that people can have right? A lot of people love writing code and don't care about those things at all.

nunez8• 4 months ago

I've been using Claude for a side project I've been trying to write for some time. Seeing it generate features at a much faster clip than I can (that actually compiles) has definitely been addictive. However, the joy I used to get from seeing something that I wrote work is all but gone, and it sucks big time to lose that.

The back and forth is more annoying now as well. Instead of trying different approaches to code to produce an outcome, I'm prompting "this is broken; can you fix it?" or "this almost works! can you do $x instead" and doing stuff in another window while Claude churns. This isn't fun or stimulating at all for me. It's like carrying a dog to a ball instead of making them run for it.

Using it also reminds me that a big part of the experience I've spent years accumulating is (or feels) no longer useful. That everyone can "write" (produce) code now is a good thing, but SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY was spent on putting writing and understanding code on a pedestal (especially on this site), and seeing that get torn down while gaslighting us into thinking that this never happened has been affecting my psyche for sure.

There's also the dirty feeling I get from abdicating more and more of my skills to a big company that is probably salivating at the idea of developers not being able to write code without Claude Code anymore.

I have a handful of projects I'd like to work on, but I'd rather leave them on the shelf until I can hand-write them than use agents to finish them and, in doing so, create a codebase that I'm less likely to be able to maintain without agents.

I guess I can turn the question back at you: how aren't you not losing your mind at becoming a glorified spec writer?

prplfsh3• 4 months ago

I get to spend more time working on the things I enjoy. For example, data modeling and workflow orchestration, and building product to solve customer problems. And really, that comes down to spending a lot of my time just thinking really hard - because once I have a clear plan, it's actually not that hard to build it. Not only that, but I can build something, react to it, rebuild it, react to it, and come up with something I think is much better than I would have been able to build myself. Not to mention much faster.

DrinkyBird• 4 months ago

Because some of us actually enjoy programming. For some people those side projects aren't about the destination, but the journey of learning how something works by making it with your bare hands.

thedevilslawyer5• 4 months ago

but that is still possible, so what makes you sad? is it that others can build theirs without bare hands? or you are no longer rewarded for bare hand programming? if the latter was it really the "journey"?

bravetraveler• 4 months ago

Same reason I've passed along offers for management roles and continue to ignore "fiverr.com". It's less having done "The Thing" and more asking for it/a substitute. With an LLM/freelancers, the muscle memory, skills, or whatever I might develop (along with the thing) have been, well, outsourced.

What's more, I can already explore five ideas at once. There is no backlog formed by incapability, lol.

I don't understand the eagerness for "productivity as a service", celebrating quotas, and lot of other conjecture I could get twisted up with... but I'll skip it this time. Rarely pays off :)

Bridged77562• 4 months ago

I just don't see it. What's truly sad is that a field allegedly filled with technically proficient people is filled with trend chasing and FOTM trends. To this day, people with nuanced takes are far and between and most people either go full force into LLM evangelism or LLM denial, the first more annoying, by far.

I'm really getting tired of the programming obituaries. As if LLMs didn't fail at any complex task, as if they didn't vomit shit code and as if they didn't just copy patterns surrounding the new code, and as if they didn't hallucinate and downright write wrong code or made up libraries. Yet for some reason, every time you bring it up, someone will come along and say "You're not using it right then.", Is it that, or is it just that they're only doing toy projects? I'm led to believe the latter.

At this point I don't know what's organic and what's not. Reddit is filled with astroturfing for big LLM. Maybe this place is too? Even if that was not the case, I'm led to believe that it isn't uncommon for people to swallow up all of the big LLM propaganda and fall into despair, or fall into unrealistic expectations, and just parrot it everywhere else. One thing is for certain, LLM evangelism has all the money of the world, and LLM denial doesn't. It's only natural to think that the balance is tilted in terms of media presence.

Even at the best, or worst, LLMs can't do anything you couldn't do yourself better with a scaffolding prompt + manual editing, and at the end of the day, you still need the cognitive energy to review, veto, come up with, the implementation. What does this exactly do anyways other than saving you a bunch of keypresses? I wonder if the people touting it to be all that really didn't think before LLMs, of just switched their brain off on them.

I used to really like this site, but I think that just consuming the RSS feed is enough for me. I think that lobster.rs has less "trend chasing" point of views these days, and I do wonder if it might be on here there's larger amounts of non technical people jumpy to call for the funeral of things.

littlexsparkee• 4 months ago

for those confused, lobster.rs is a Serbian language learning school, parent meant lobste.rs

simianwords6• 4 months ago

This person gives me the vibe that they are so attached to their craft that they can't seem to do anything about LLM's ubiquity rising but scold and vaguely sloganeer.

Was this how other professionals dealt with their grief? Like a translator in the advent of ML based translations? Like a lift man?

justonceokay3• 4 months ago

I’m reminded of the Douglas Adams quote

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

A lot of the dissonance on this forum is probably age based.

jjk7• 4 months ago

"I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too." - Abe Simpson

yabutlivnWoods• 4 months ago

Such a bizarre sentiment the web and internet as we know/knew them is some bastion of freedom and future for humanity.

According to the author AI is 99% hype.

That 1% of AI utility can unlock more for humanity than 99.999% of blogs; static text hosted from a laptop in a closet.

Odd ball position that cheap publishing via the web is a path to The Next Generation for humanity is 100% hype.

Other than feeding dopamine addiction humanity has not improved greatly since we read all those insipid posts on GeoCities no one remembers today.

It's all been 99%+ hype to feed Wall Street. Young GenX and older Millennials with tech jobs were temporary political pawns and gonna end up bag holders like may older GenXers and Boomers who lived through the car boom, the housing boom, the retail boom.

Same old human shit, different hype.

okokwhatever• 4 months ago

When will we understand that not everybody works in a FAANG? Assuming that the way to put some food in the table for all software developers is always a matter of creating a new magical algor. in a mystical programming language deployed in an unicorn architecture is so childish. 99% of all software development today is simply creating a crud or refactoring a codebase because React guys decided to change everything again.

throwaway743• 4 months ago

The footer rules

cynicalpeace• 4 months ago

People don't care what bots have to say

Therefore, things like writing, film, sales, etc are less productively scalable by bots

And things like code, where people don't care how the sausage is made as long as it "works" are more productively scalable by bots

And even in the situation of code, the job description leans more on defining what "works" which requires the human touch

sublinear• 4 months ago

If writing code was the only value your employer ever saw in you, it's for the best that you're forced to find a better job now. You would have eventually hit this point in your career anyway regardless of "AI".

The broader corporate world has never wanted code monkeys. They want "boring" reliability and pay a reasonable wage for it. On the other hand, they also won't tolerate contrarians who can't deliver, so maybe some of the fear from people posting this sort of thing really is justified.

runningmike• 4 months ago

Love the one-armed code bandit on the home page of this blog! Nice UX experience! See: https://dbushell.com/

archagon• 4 months ago

So many insecure AI boosters in the comments slandering and mocking the author. And yet the upvotes clearly indicate that the sentiment in the article resonates widely with the community.

Well, there’s not much of a point leaving a comment saying “yes, this, exactly this,” so I’ll leave one here on behalf of my fellow lurkers.

The more AI gets shoved down my throat, the less I’m inclined to use it for anything, and the more I’m inspired to write my own writing, make my own art, and create my own code — with great creative joy and burning anger. Enjoy your 1000x productivity gains and your inevitable burnout as you downskill to a glorified inference loop.

Context_Engine• 4 months ago

the tools of today are pretty great!

mtrifonov• 4 months ago

I'm building in the opposite direction. An AI that participates in group conversations but knows when to shut up. The hardest part is making it not talk when humans are handling it. Turns out coding social awareness into an AI is way harder than coding productivity. I get why people feel replaced by the productivity tools. The social side is nowhere close to replacing anyone.

mimd• 4 months ago

Considering that the rant is using photos from Star Trek and Oliver Twist to make their points, copyrighted material with no indication of permission, they're less "creative" than a stochastic parrot.

I quit. The clankers won

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