There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider.
We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think the users deserve consideration nonetheless.
Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. This is on top of all of the problems that existed before LLMs, like human error and perverse financial incentives. Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people. Real people. Harm is caused in both big and little ways to living, breathing actual people. This “inevitable” slide into generative AI harms every single person it comes into contact with. The devs, the users, the investors, everyone. Those harms may happen at different times and in different ways and the creeping nature of it all might make it easier to ignore, but it’s happening.
“AI” is a blight. You can leave me behind as well.
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world.
I genuinely don't know if that's true and I doubt you do, either. It's all feels right now.
What I do know is I run a couple of personal projects and I can say they are of objectively higher quality now that I'm using AI to build out proper CI pipelines, expand test coverage, produce higher quality architectures, etc.
Why?
Because in the past I didn't have the capacity to invest in that kind of hardening, but with AI, now I do.
Of course you'll probably make the claim that my code is probably crap, the tests suck, etc, because you've already made up your mind. But having been in the industry for 25 years, I can tell you definitively that you'd be wrong about that.
Now, what'll happen to the median codebase? God only knows. Maybe I'm especially diligent.
But given we're really only 6-12 months into the agentic coding era, I think the only conclusion you can make is that the jury is still out.
And I get that compulsion to boil this mess down into a simple good/bad dichotomy.
I absolutely have deeply mixed feelings about these tools, the ethics associated with them, the impact on the industry, on the talent pipeline, etc.
But I also can't deny that they are incredibly powerful tools that are here to stay in one form or another.
And I say that as someone who, a year ago, was absolutely convinced that they were incremental at best and scoffed at everyone who said something like "yeah but they're so much better now!" or "they're only going to get better!"
Well, they were right, they did, and the world has changed. AI generated code is landing in the Linux kernel. 250+ security holes were found and fixed in Firefox. The impact is here and now, and it's mixed and ugly and complicated.
We would need a lot of anecdata. Would we trust a doctor/pilot/engineer of 25 years more with the tried and tested (but now aging) kit of their time, or the acolyte that has been fully absorbed by the latest and greatest and has now more than doubled their productivity?
While code quality may go up on a case by case basis, we should be mindful whether we are comparing it to our own personal baselines, or to the average code quality across the board. I.e. will the baseline regress to the mean, or raise the floor for the average coder?
Even if the jury is still out, I would still say you are both right already.
The amount of slop produced even in company setting is staggering and I don't like it one bit that neither the submitter nor the reviewer of the PR paid due dilligence. And I am only complaining because it then becomes my problem. So, then I have to start nagging people to clean that up. I can say with 100% certainty that the problems I face now would not have happened without LLMs.
That said, used with care, with proper supervision, with dilligence to review what LLMs did, I still think they can be and are beneficial.
I think that we are just not used to getting results of questionable quality from the tools we use. So, I am hopeful that we will learn and it will improve with time but still find myself dreading the age of the vibe coder.
I also think reading and reviewing code is a skill that connected to but very much independent of the writing of code, and the use of coding agents requires us to be far more skilled and diligent at it.
So put another way, people who were good at coding without agents may in fact be a poor fit with them, which means the entire industry is experiencing a dislocation between skills we have and skills we need, leading to extremely bimodal outcomes.
Indeed, however I would also point out that senior engineers have already been expected to be good at reading code: they were expected to evaluate the code quality of other contributors, so they had to be able to do that.
In fact, from my personal experience, going from junior to mid to senior, that was the hardest thing. Reading the code and thinking if what they did was really correct and will not have additional undesired side-effects was hard to become efficient at (it didn't help that we were working in C back then).
So, really, I think that for juniors it's actually much harder because if they want to do due dilligence they have to do the same evaluation but without the years of experience working with that code base. I can understand, even if I don't like it, that they just submit the output of the LLM for the senior to review.
It's a bit weird when the article in question is predominantly about software development in a professional setting and the top comment is about how some people in thread are disregarding this context and opining unrelatedly about their unique solo development or personal project development experiences, to then respond to said comment by insistently going on about how AI is great for your personal projects, when people are unable to assess the value of your AI-assisted personal projects and whether they would concur with the high opinion you have of them. A turd with a CI pipeline is still a turd, I think we can all agree on that. IF someone said AI is great because they can now expand test coverage and build a CI pipeline for their todo app in rust, it wouldn't exactly be the proof you're looking for I don't think.
But I agree fully with your last paragraph, and said something similar in a comment elsewhere where I stated my tangible bar as being a Ladybird like browser built from scratch achieving Chrome parity in six months while doing continuous stable releases with coding agents in tow. Otherwise, as you said, the jury is still out.
I suspect you are right that LLM-generated software will likely negatively impact people's lives. The flip side of this is there is going to be a lot of software generated that would have never been possible before. And for some use cases, some crappy software is better than no software. I think it's hard to predict whether on net this will be a good or bad thing.
>And for some use cases, some crappy software is better than no software
The best use case i've seen for AI is people generating random one shot projects for themselves, which is honestly so cool. You can make some basic app that does something very specific, that would have taken objectively a lot longer to make by hand. This is when 'crappy' software is more than good enough for a specific problem
Similar use cases of useful AI one-shot projects are: demos, proof-of-concept, prototype, exploratory tests, etc... I've AI-generated an HTML/javascript craplet to test how browser security would behave for certain JavaScript API calls. I just wanted to confirm how browser security would behave before I started to spend time hand-coding the non-AI quality software that I wanted to release.
And I say this as somebody who generally has a low opinion of AI generated code and rarely uses it. But it has its place.
Nah, there's no evidence of reduced quality. If anything it's the reverse. I've seen AI code review tools be tremendously effective at catching defects which otherwise would have shipped.
In the DORA group's reporting on AI-assisted software engineering, they indeed state that across industries, quality goes UP with the use of AI assistants like Claude and others.
Moreover, in my experience helping businesses on this topic; They never defined or made measurable what quality meant in the first place. Then when they finally do figure it out, it turns out that the average repository is a total disappointment in terms of absolute quality.
Same for me. I have not yet successfully used an LLM to generate code to produce a feature, though to be fair, it might just be because I don't have the patience to go back and forth with it (will readily admit that I am using it wrong).
Also, while some code review comments are just plain wrong, LLMs did produce some damn good comments, on the same level as a different senior engineer might note had they taken the time to study the code carefully.
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world.
Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unintelligent and I don't understand that. The fact that these "stochastic code extruders" can solve Erdos problems is sort of the proof in the pudding. Next token prediction is profound in that it is _a very simple objective_ yet it is _enough_ to take you to extraordinary heights.
Also I wonder how many folks honestly look in the mirror and think: how does the median programmer differ from an LLM. Do you really think humans are universally better and produce universally higher quality code? Not even universally, I would say _typically_. I would trust an LLM to not write a buffer overflow far more than a junior or a mediocre senior engineer. LLMs have built things in my domain that are non-trivial and impressive and correct.
Not to mention, these systems are following a predictable trend in performance improvement so these worries about quality just won't age well, and it seems to be a head-in-the-sand attitude that pretends like quality and reliability are not getting very very good _already_.
> Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people.
Could not agree more. So why do you think humans are inherently better at this?
> This “inevitable” slide into generative AI harms every single person it comes into contact with.
I just don't quite understand this, is it that: (1) agentic code is inherently inferior to human code and thus (2) shipping agentic code is actively harmful?
> Also I wonder how many folks honestly look in the mirror and think: how does the median programmer differ from an LLM.
Once you step out of pure-software orgs, it becomes clear that most would benefit from having AI write code. There's a huge moat between most people and the point where they can afford/find the effort of someone that can write software.
These people, that only care about practical results rather than somewhat tangential things like "elegance" and "maintainability", are going to benefit tremendously.
It's like people complaining about "poor quality plastic trinkets" that replaced well-made household items. Of course high-quality things can be (and are) made of plastic. The problem is that you can still make a very cheap passable thing out of plastic, that would be uneconomical to make out of metal or wood.
Same with code: by using AI, one can produce passable software trinkets very cheaply, that would be uneconimical to produce by paying poor-quality human developers.
The floor has moved downwards, allowing to produce a flood of new, trash-quality, disposable code very cheaply. It does not mean that we'll have to use only that code. But unfortunately we'll have to live with it, too.
> “It was a really difficult sell to the American public in the post-war period, to inculcate people into a throwaway living,” she says. “That is not what people were used to.”
> A solution companies came up with was emphasizing that plastic was a low-cost, abundant material.
> A 1960 marketing study for Scott Cup said the containers were “almost indestructible,” but that the manufacturer could still convince people to discard them after a few uses. To counter any “pangs of conscience” consumers might feel about throwing them away, the researchers suggested a “direct attack”: Tell people the cups are cheap, they said, and that “there are more where these came from.”
> A few years later, Scott ran an advertisement saying its plastic cups were available at “‘toss-away prices.”
It wasn't plastic itself, and likewise it's not "AI" itself.
We do have an abysmal track record as industrialized nations however, and more recently, in many parts of the software industry.
But we can change it. With so many things, tech people spent so much time and energy debating... like cookies or HTTPS or whatever... we often heard/said that while we care so much about doing the right thing, we can't achieve anything at work because consumers don't care. Well, this time, pretty much all of the world cares a lot. I mean, the Vatican just blogged about it!
Maybe we just "have to live with it", but in that case, there is also no utility in pointing that out, since we literally have to live with it. And of course, it's really about the shape of the "it", and how it's used, not that there is one that will never go away. That is also true about most things: stuff we don't currently use is in the museum or text books. Nothing goes away away, but we no longer drink out of lead cups, even though we still use lead. We don't have x-ray machines in shoe shops, even though we still use x-rays.
I agree, "AI" is being pushed beyond reason, in an attempt to make it look like what it's not, or at least not yet. And yes, people do act irrationally due to that, see all that tkenmaxxing and layoffs. I don't think it will last in this inebriated state forever.
But it's worth noting that there's a new substance enabled by AI, the "slop", that is flushing violently into our world right now. Pretending it's not there, and that we won't see more of it, is perilous.
Why is that a prerequisite? There are entire philosophies about what makes good design for UI's etc. Why can't models figure this out? Why do you feel this is some sort of mystical thing out of reach?
> to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder"
So many excited and insulted LLM adopters on this thread. There is nothing derisive in that comment, it is simply the purest possible definition of how they work. Stochastics is a branch of maths you know.
> can solve Erdos problems is sort of the proof in the pudding
For the non-engineer, non-mathematician it may sound authoritative, but you'd probably be surprised to learn that most of Erdos problems are not at all complex - they are just not very interesting or relevant. So it is a proof in the pudding, provided the pudding is made of shit - the kind of stuff LLMs produce most of the time.
> I just don't quite understand this, is it that: (1) agentic code is inherently inferior to human code and thus (2) shipping agentic code is actively harmful?
Yes and yes - have you not heard of that AWS incident with Kiro when the "agentic" shit deleted an entire infrastructure environment, complete with data, config, etc.?
> Also I wonder how many folks honestly look in the mirror and think: how does the median programmer differ from an LLM
Apart from the obvious absurdity of this statement - I know a lot of you non-engineer types feel "empowered" by the LLMs, in the sense of how they immediately seem a genius when you ask them on a topic you are not expert in, but you may want to read a book on programming first - maybe you'll get a clue then.
> So many excited and insulted LLM adopters on this thread.
neither excited nor insulted.
> There is nothing derisive in that comment, it is simply the purest possible definition of how they work. Stochastics is a branch of maths you know.
Not sure what you mean by stochastics but this is more statistics. They are trained with a next token loss, that doesn't belie "how they work".
> For the non-engineer, non-mathematician it may sound authoritative, but you'd probably be surprised to learn that most of Erdos problems are not at all complex - they are just not very interesting or relevant.
It sounds like you are both an engineer and a mathematician? Can you confirm? These are problems unsolved for many years. You think no good mathematicians have taken a stab at them, even if just to say they have resolved an unsolved Erdos problem? They are "not at all complex" is quite an extraordinary thing to say I'm wondering if you actually do have the pedigree you are trying to make it sound like you have, or if you are just regurgitating the same HN talking points you've heard.
> Yes and yes - have you not heard of that AWS incident with Kiro when the "agentic" shit deleted an entire infrastructure environment, complete with data, config, etc.?
And this means agentic code is inherently inferior to human code? Howso?
> Apart from the obvious absurdity of this statement - I know a lot of you non-engineer types feel "empowered" by the LLMs, in the sense of how they immediately seem a genius when you ask them on a topic you are not expert in, but you may want to read a book on programming first - maybe you'll get a clue then.
in the beginning you mentioned there were a lot of "excited and insulted LLM adopters" and yet...this sounds quite excited and defensive. Believe it or not, I am not a "non-engineer type" and its telling you assume that people who don't seem to share the same opinion as you are somehow less qualified than I assume you think you are? Why is this statement obviously absurd. Maybe you work in a really talented engineering team, which kudos to you I also have worked in teams like this, and I have also seen what is the p50 engineer and they are just as error prone or more than Claude. Thank you for the advice to read a book on programming as if that somehow would have any bearing on this at all?
An engineer with an engineering degree, which as it may still be known to some, requires a fairly stringent mathematical underpinning. So yes, I know a thing or two - read up on Erdos and his problems, I am not here to enlighten every vibecoding PM that shows up.
> And this means agentic code is inherently inferior to human code? Howso?
Again, I am not here to explain the world to some clueless PM. You have your LLMs for that :) But for the sake of bringing you closer, the "agentic" code is often very inferior, implementing happy paths or just bluntly exposing secrets in clear texts, etc. Probably a consequence of it being trained on, as you put it "p50 engineering code".
> Maybe you work in a really talented engineering team,
Running my own company and been paying the LLM-Shit-Generators for my whole team for a long time, in the hope they would bring the advertised benefits. Guess what - for serious use-cases, they bring shit and more shit.
> Thank you for the advice to read a book on programming as if that somehow would have any bearing on this at all?
Oh yeah obviously not, I mean, its not like understanding software development would help you understand how LLMs are not similar to a "p50 engineer" at all:). I'd take the latter over the former every time.
> Why is this statement obviously absurd
Well for one, LLMs are not humans, but it should be obvious to even to most cretinous of the e/acc crowd. It's not like they can think in abstract terms or come up with completely new concepts. But then again, don't mind me - if you can live with below average AI slop - go for it.
Steve Jobs motivated Larry Kenyon, the engineer working on bootup, by saying he is effectively saving lives.
I wonder if we reverse that. When engineers write shitty, slow, buggy code or when they're forced to do that by the company, they are effectively killing people.
After all, if I spend an hour dealing with a preventable bug, that's an hour of my live I am never getting back. Multiple that by the userbase and you get entire lifetimes.
I think history will prove that this is a less nuanced view than is required to accurately describe the situation. Abandoning human agency through the use of generative AI harms us all. Using AI as a force multiplier to implement human agency helps us all. It's possible to recognize that asking AI to do everything results in a poor product and brain rot for the humans. It's not at all clear that this is the case for using AI to build boilerplate, help with tests, etc.
I've always felt we somewhat failed as engineers (I included, of course) when I was doing boilerplate by hand. We should have taken the time to get those autogenerated. But... it takes time and the generator is always more complex than the produced code, sometimes even by a few factors, so it also takes an expert to maintain.
As for tests, I've seen LLMs produce good ones as well as useless ones. I guess it's all about instructions... sorry, prompts... no, sorry, prompt engineering to get it right and done properly.
That said, I am also very concerned with brain rot. Engineers nowadays can commit code they don't understand without a blink of the eye. Slowly, the knowledge may get sparse if we are not careful about it.
My experience programming is so much different than theirs makes me wonder what I missed out on. I have always programmed on my own, and I can't even think about a single time I have talked to a person in depth about programming (both online and in person). It sounds fun and exciting, but unfortunately I have simply never had the opportunities in life to do so.
For me, AI is the first time I have ever been able to get something resembling an opinion on specific problems/situations that I encounter. I can ask it a very specific question about what the best approach is for what I am working on and it can give me an answer that I read over and consider before deciding on what approach to take. I still frequently get answers that are nonsense, but even then it helps me think deeper on how I should approach the problem because I can ask myself "Are the statements made by the AI true?".
Curse you for this ear worm of a song, but also my brain keeps wanting to interpret this as "duck... You're bad at your job and will never amount to anything. Your mother is ashamed of you and you're the reason your father is an alcoholic." hahaha
For the longest time the Android community was super close-knit where people talked about this stuff online and in person constantly, and OP was a pretty active contributor.
Unfortunately Twitter pre-acquisition was probably the focal point and since then, I don't think the community has been the same.
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
You know it's random nonsense, and yet you still take it on faith that it "gives you answers". That's what makes me despair about all the AI nonsense: it's the death of intellect. Not the death of deep thinking, but of common sense.
I can't wait for the day until all these people collectively snap out of it, and go "what the hell were we thinking with these chatbots".
If AI nonsens is doing the work I ask it to and I confirm it works and is useful .. then what exactly should I snap out of it?
It is just a tool and a useful one. Your loss for not making use of it, but .. you seem to live on a different timeline. I am reminded of old Japan, where the Samurais banned gun powder, so they could continue to fight with swords and not change their ways of living.
When I say it gives me an answer I mean an answer purely in the sense of it is a response to a question, whether or not the answer is correct is for me to decide and I put no faith in whether or not the answer will be correct. I treat the output like an opinion that can sometimes give me an idea for how I can better tackle the problem I am trying to solve.
Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked:
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious
Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part
And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels
Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop
And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it
That unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all
Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well.
I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.
Whenever this topic comes up I am reminded of the black and white picture of all the scientist of 19th century together. Each individual in that photo had contributed something to human knowledge. It feels like in 19th century we believed in our scientists and advancing our knowledge. I feel today celebrities are given more importance than our scientists. The best minds of our century are focused on extracting value from rest of the population.
The era of scientists being celebrities is done for the simple reason that it's not possible for a single human to advance our knowledge. Breakthrough papers are published by large groups who build on knowledge created by even larger groups.
Also, science used to directly correlate with improvements in life standards. Nowadays we see advancements in science (AI, psychology) used to actively reduce the standard of life.
I assume you are here talking about political choices, social media influences, life style choices and so on.
While all those are true they are not reflecting the level of intelligence of people: intelligent people take personal stupid decisions because while intelligence is a function of let's say the more "abstract brain", decisions are emotionally driven and influenced by the "ancient, threat focused, pleasure driven brain".
Here is a quick way to think about this: some intelligent people are obease, some others don't exercise, and others don't take their health seriously while also working on the most amazing problems we ever solved. You know what's the biggest paradox here: they all have the capacity to understand fully the impact of their lifestyle on their health but still making a life style change is hard due to not being driven by knowledge and logic.
What do you mean by intelligence? And by your definition of it, can intelligence be improved intentionally or it happens as it happens like for evolution? If it happens by intention then why we have not pushed it at its maximium yet?
Let's start by using strength as an analogy. A human is strong when they develop their physical body to its potential. That means developing muscles, cardio, lung capacity, flexibility, etc. A human is weak when they fail to develop their physical body to its potential (we don't actually care how strong humans are compared to each other, only to themselves). We can then judge human populations based on, say, the strength of the median person.
Intelligence is the same but for mental faculties. A human is intelligent when they develop their critical thinking, memory, focus, logical reasoning, etc. A human is unintelligent when they fail to develop these things to their personal potential. And when I look around me I see a culture of inustrial-strength distraction that has robbed people of their ability to focus, I see encyclopedias in everyone's pockets that have robbed them of any incentive to remember, I see a society of comfortable complacency that has shielded them from any consequence of poor logical reasoning, and with LLMs I see a mass surrender of the need to exercise critical thinking in exchange for the warm embrace of thoughtlessness.
There's no reason that things need to be this way. The human hardware hasn't fundamentally changed in 100,000 years, and we have so many more resources today that it's easy to imagine that we could all be, collectively, more intelligent than ever if we could somehow inspire people to care. Sadly, we don't seem to be able to.
“Pinnacle” just means “highest point” here. They are saying that AI might take human intelligence to a higher point than was previously reached. That’s debatable, of course, but isn’t what you seem to be arguing against.
They know what pinnacle means, their point is intelligence is not knowledge. But I find that rather nitpicky as it's clear the top level comment just used one as a synonym for the other, not actually caring about the difference.
They wrote “I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle.” That can only be the case if the highest point of human intelligence was in the past and they are opining that the current level of human intelligence isn’t anywhere close to that past high point. However, that assessment wouldn’t contradict what OP wrote, so it’s more likely that they take “pinnacle” to mean something else.
Neither intelligence nor knowledge, if you mean us average people.
But that shouldn't be any surprise. We're already at more than a hundred years of deliberate dumbing down of the population through schooling and mass media. These effects are exponential through generations.
> I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber
We are at a peak in absolute terms, though the decline is coming quickly:
> I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber
Just mathematically speaking, collectively we're at peak population levels, so the total collective intelligence (sum of all individual human intelligences) is likely at peak as well, even accounting for individual dumbing down?
Also, I think we (non-scientists) might be overestimating the average historical intelligence - see Flynn Effect [1] - perhaps because of a bias in our perception of the past levels based on who published books and thoughts - basically more intelligent members of our species.
> and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders
May I suggest these historical references [2][3][4][5][6][7] as a counterpoint to AI driving lazy thoughtlessness, which rather seems to be innate to humans as a group.
[2] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.20 — 5th c. BCE Greece. “So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.”
[3] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.2 — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/stasis/2017/honeycutt/aris.... Aristotle treats public persuasion as necessary partly because ordinary audiences cannot easily follow complex chains of reasoning. He says rhetoric addresses deliberative matters before people “who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning.”
[4] Plato, Republic, Book V — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://topostext.org/work/768. Plato distinguishes philosophers from the many “lovers of sights and sounds,” who enjoy appearances but do not apprehend deeper truth. The text says their thought is “incapable” of grasping the underlying form or nature of beauty, and that few attain that deeper vision.
[6] Buddhist tradition, Dhammapada, Appamāda-vagga. https://suttacentral.net/dhp21-32/en/sujato. Dhammapada contrasts heedfulness with heedlessness, treating heedlessness as a central human failing. In one translation: “Heedfulness is the state free of death; heedlessness is the state of death. The heedful do not die, while the heedless are like the dead.”
[7] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, “Idols of the Mind” — 1620. https://history.hanover.edu/texts/bacon/novorg.html. Bacon argues that the “Idols of the Tribe” are rooted in human nature itself, and that human understanding distorts reality like a false mirror.
Is a room with 300 morons and 1 genius more intelligent than a room with 10 morons and 1 genius? In my model, there is negative intelligence, so the 300 morons would actually be less intelligent. We do have more stupidity degrees of freedom, that’s for sure. That is, the domain of human stupidity is greatly expanded. Smart people can be stupid in an ever increasing number of ways. So a very bright person 100 years ago might appear very stupid if they were time machined into the now.
In a mathematical model of collective intelligence I think we need to also include a "productive use" factor. The total brain power of our species might be higher than in the past based on a summation, but how much per-capita intelligence is being utilized for productive/adaptive ends versus being being distracted from such ends? What's our distraction rate offset?
> In a mathematical model of collective intelligence I think we need to also include a "productive use" factor. The total brain power of our species might be higher than in the past based on a summation, but how much per-capita intelligence is being utilized for productive/adaptive ends versus being being distracted from such ends? What's our distraction rate offset?
Excellent question. Global GDP estimates going back to 1 CE are here [1][2]. I would argue that GDP is a good proxy for an estimate of the summation of per-capita intelligence being used for "productive" ends, by definition.
But, the global average GDP per capita is [3] with a similar hockey-stick curve, and it is unclear whether the per-capita intelligence used for "productive" ends has also been increasing similarly, because the confounding factor is the effect of tools as force-multipliers (impact on productivity). The Flynn Effect is the strongest indicator that yes, average intelligence has been rising as measured in certain populations where cultural differences do not wreck the applicability of IQ tests.
Why do we need to promote intelligence? If we are all “intelligent”, what is the difference? At best, we have about 50 healthy years on this rock. I do think myself “intelligent”, relatively, but also that the notion is overrated. I want to be dumb and carefree, I’d rather bike, shoot some arrows at the sky, eat some escargot and die in my sleep when it’s time. Instead, we must toil and research nursing homes.
I think probably actually. The fittest people back then probably weren't as fit as people today with specialized diets and medical science, and surely those findings were a result of better equipment, which were a result of better tooling to manufacture that equipment.
Introducing a machine to a manufacturing role obviously makes the manufacturer less fit, but it enables society to break through fitness barriers in general
If your point is that it's not orders of magnitude fitter, that's a good one. I don't think people will be much more intelligent in the future than they are today but they'll probably just be more specialized and have deeper knowledge
I am no expert, just a guy reading the Internet. And it seems like there are two opposing factors. The increased access to nutritious food has dramatically increased health, shown in the increased average height. The exception to this is the first 50 years, 1830-1880 when widespread dietary deprivation and severe inequality caused a decrease in height (take this as a warning I guess).
The other factor is that we all get significantly less physical activity than before, and obesity is a increasing problem.
And while the first effect is a effect of the machines, it is the latter effect I think most easily maps onto today's situation.
Personally I am quite certain that if you could teleport 100 random 20-year old from 1820 they would be better than 100 random 20-year old today at most physical tests, especially if you gave them food first.
Considering developed societies with access to those specialized diets and medical science, the median person is definitely not stronger than the median person from a pre-industrial society, even taking malnutrition and injury into account. It seems you've never tried to arm-wrestle a farmer before.
A slop fork machine is way different though, I dont know why authors never thought about this but imagine a machine that can detect the features and replicate whatever it sees, show it how to make bread once and it can do it infinitely, make it listen to a song and its able to find why it sounds the way it does and just spam variations, even if it doesnt make anything original it demotivates any attempt to push the boundaries or make anything new
I argue the opposite, that originality will actually become more valuable.
Think about it: everyone has characterized AI slop, as slop. Which means that we negatively value it in terms of originality. Combine that with the fact that there will be a lot of it, this means that original work will 1. stand out or be very distinct from slop, and 2. have its value amplified as a result of this polarization.
basically, we value originality more AND are able to identify it more readily.
related is also the fact that originality will literally be valuable as training data for future models
I can prod at a model as much as I want to produce something I find more original than average, but there are plenty of people out there that will say it doesn't count because of the fact an AI made it. "Slop" doesn't just mean "it sucks because it's bad", it often means "it's sucks because it's AI". They'd argue that if you were creative enough to produce something so original you wouldn't rely on an AI to make it for you. It's tainted by association, all the way back to the multi-billion-dollar enterprises that originally trained the models for their own ends.
Also there have been dozens of HN submissions and comments where the poster didn't even bother to remove the em dashes. Most people just don't care. The people who continue to post like this wouldn't have been as visible had they not discovered AI and pounced on it, but they were always there. The idea of posting with an AI voice, em-dashes and all, would likely have still appealed to them if you'd asked 5-10 years ago. Nowadays it takes hardly any energy for them to have a persistent voice.
I also define "slop" in a similar way. However, I specifically define it as creations that lack soul or originality. And can actually have a high degree of quality in some aspects, as you can see with some AI generated art and music. Because of this, I'm tempted to adopt a different term since "slop" feels too negative
Slop has always been around. AI has cheapened its creation.
Depends on how good the slop fork machine is, the act of true original creation is a messy and long process if it can be replicated to death immediately basically for free its not viable anymore
then it isn't a slop fork machine anymore is it? i was under the impression that the best the SFM would get is generating... how do I say this? high quality low quality work. Basically, the ability to cheaply produce quality work, characterized by its lack of soul/originality. think amazing looking advertisement graphics. not to say that it can't do better than that. just meant it as an extreme example for illustrative purposes
If something is able to generate things with soul and true originality... we're talking about something incredible, a new intelligent species potentially
It doesnt have to able to generate original things, its enough to be able to detect what makes it original and replicate the original thing with enough variations in different contexts to be able to be destructive and render the true original thing completely useless
think about how in music, when an artist comes out with something original and awesome, and then everyone starts copying it and creating their own derivative works, like Jimi Hendrix or something.
Did Hendrix become useless? Did everyone end up thinking he sucks or something? No, he is even more revered, as the originator of a new type of sound that probably created multiple genres
The same thing applies here. Originality will be valued and even empowered as extrapolation and development off of it can increase in speed and quality in the case you mention
> then it isn't a slop fork machine anymore is it?
True, but some nuance is that a LOT of artist/creative types lean exclusively on the mechanical skill needed to create, without anything really much to say. They also very frequently copy other's styles, etc.
I'm not defending AI pumping out crap, but this also shows a lot of folks don't have much to offer beyond the mechanical aspects and we shouldn't glorify churning out stuff by hand as high art either.
This honestly makes me feel ambivalent, as on the one hand, it is awesome that it is pushing creatives to be more original, but on the other hand it does threaten these types of creatives who have invested time into making this their livelihood :/
Really? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now.
For example, I want to make:
- A mini OS on top of SeL4
- A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust.
- My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends
- A local first data store, built on top of CRDTs
- My own programming language
And lots more.
Each of these projects on their own would take months of time. If LLMs can speed up development, that's great! I don't care if nobody else uses what I make. I want a personal computer full of my own software.
I feel the same way as you. But was unfortunately not surprised to see the replies you are getting here.
There are a ton of opportunities available right now to make new things. And make them better, more customizable, and more sovereign.
To the replies: be the change you want to see in the world, guys. That may be trite but focusing only on the negative will just make your own life shitty.
I'm glad that you find achievement in the personal challenge. At home, I'm just getting things done. Small things, bigger things, and best of all I get to pet the dog more while it works in the background.
Everything I want to make is new. I don't understand the objection.
For example, the photo backup system I want to make will let me manage my ~400gb photo library. I want my library backed up on a couple devices, running linux and freebsd. I want my mac and iphone to have a local mirror of all the favorited photos, and when I'm at home, I want to be able to browse all photos from those devices by streaming them over the local network. I want native macos & ios app interfaces to view and manage all that.
I don't know any existing software that meets my requirements. I don't think any such software exists. Apple, Dropbox and Google will solve this problem for me if I store all my photos in their cloud and pay them an ongoing subscription for the privilege. I'd much rather make something myself, and back up my photos on my own hard drives.
Making something like this is simple enough, but very time consuming. If claude can take the drudgery out of it, well, I think that's just delightful.
What's your time and life worth? You pay Apple to deal with it (which I do) and get to live a peaceful life and go out and take photos and have experiences. Or do you spend weeks implementing your own solution with Claude. The latter is considerably higher cost in time and money.
AI is seen as a way out of drudgery but you're just trading one problem for another.
In any activity you can take shortcuts that makes it easier. It's up to you how many (if any) you want.
Take woodworking for example. When I build a kitchen cabinet, I can get lumber that's already smooth and treated, I can buy drawer tracks, I can use power tools instead of a handsaw and a screwdriver, I can use a pocket hole jig to make joints easier. I still have to do more planning and assembling than with the Ikea cabinet, which also takes more work than having a contractor do everything for me.
I'm doing it my way because it's fun for me. Other people might enjoy other parts of the process - or different things altogether.
There's a whole spectrum between doing everything from scratch and paying someone to have it done for you.
I don't understand the question. For one thing I use local models mainly, but even if I didn't, I'd be buying the tokens from cloud model providers, not the prepackaged, fully complete software itself. I buy the tokens to make what I want.
It's actually quite similar to buying the services of a programmer off Upwork to build something for me, only with LLMs it's way cheaper and faster, with a shorter feedback loop.
I think their point is that you aren't really doing the implementing, Claude (or any model really) is. If you genuinely find prompting LLMs to be fun, then by all means go for it.
Interesting that you think coding is writing down code. Code is just a language where the problem is specified in fine detail; the biggest value proposition of an LLM is being able to hand-wave and let some other tool take care of guessing at detail, where you can't be bothered to specify it in full.
Architecture certainly isn't building, and neither is interior design. Civil engineers calculate and specify the loads in excruciating detail, because if they didn't, people would die.
You can accomplish most of that by installing Syncthing.
But the objection is that you’re not really building anything new even if you think it’s a new idea. By your definition you’re building for yourself and not sharing…so what good are your little projects. Reading your original list it just seems like you want to build and run software without having to do any research, even if a solution already exists.
The issue is maintenance. If you want to use these projects for important things, you need to maintain them. If you don't want to maintain them, I can't see myself using them for anything important.
I actually want less software for myself. Less things to maintain. I've become a "digital minimalist" in that I use very few software, only ones maintained by others who can afford and are willing to keep them working.
I support this take especially since you added the "I don't care if nobody else uses what I make", but you should at least acknowledge what you're talking about is pretty unrelated to the article, as the author's entire context seems to be making something for other people to use and building it together with other people.
Since you said you want to make those things that you list, I assume none of these things have been built yet. If so, I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build. But even if the maintainence cycle won't be as exciting, since you are the sole user you have the advantage of being able to proceed at a leisurely pace even while doing maintainence work.
In a professional setting, the dopamine hit of being able to build something quickly that works in an area that you have little to no knowledge in makes you more dependent on the AI in the maintaince cycle as you want to chase that dopamine high by maintaining the same development speed. This in turn leads to a bigger burnout crash after that peak dopamine hit. Maintainence is a phase of diminishing returns even without AI, but when your coding agents are introducing new bugs at record pace with their bugfixes with no new features to write home about you are in a special place in Hell.
I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow.
If something like the Ladybird browser, or any browser that is "built by scratch", achieved Chrome parity in six months and consistently maintained the same level of stability with continuous releases then I would see that as proof that this approach has become professionaly sustainable.
The reason people are getting away with so much using AI is because of the open secret in most enterprise engineering practices: the customer cares more about the response time for fixes they report than they do about overall or longterm product quality.
Couldn't even monetize? DeepSeek and Alibaba with Qwen are doing quite well, no table scraps required. I am making things, I don't have to physically type letters on a keyboard to make things as long as the output of what I want exists.
>this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
Between the endless slop, loneliness and depression epidemics, record low reading comprehension, attention shortage, we're not in any pinnacle today. We're in a regression from a few decades ago, getting worse.
> Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
How? It's undermining what the human intellicence is made from, learning.
Hasn't all automation up to this point been same input equals same output though? Automation using LLMs feels different to anything before and I don't think there's a comparative time in history to point at and say "look it happened before and we are now better off"
I think we all been fooled by the sentence: "It's yet another automation, it's like horses were replaced by cars". It is not. Industrialization and automation is about manual labor. LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking. And while I'll give two thumbs up for using ML(there is not 'I' in 'AI') as a technology for some tasks, outsourcing thinking is an evolutionary dead-end.
Its advertised as outsourcing thinking, but I doubt many serious people making serious things actually outsourced their thinking very much. I definitely outsource my typing, search, and LSP interaction!
No it isn't. I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.
If you also outsource thinking to it, that's your choice though. Or the company's choice. But ultimately the free market will deiced with products made using LLMs outcompete those made without.
It shouldn't be used for that either. The problem is our programming languages and tools are shit so we made another expensive tool to drive them.
I've said this elsewhere before but I single-handedly produced more actual tangible business value with Microsoft Access than anything else since. What was an hour's work is now a procurement process and thousands of lines of tedious configuration and boilerplate that involves pipelines and tens of services all coordinated and hosted by someone who has created a moat to extract money out of me.
All I want is a fucking report.
The LLM makes us blind to the gigantic fucking shit show we built.
Recently, I had some data for which I wanted some graphs. I uploaded the .jsonl file, and prompted "make a html page and graph this data using plotly". I wanted a report, and got a report, quicker than I could have made it myself.
> I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.
Do you really though?
Here's a question: how many times do you visit claude.ai or open Claude Code (or whatever harness you use) (or use whatever model you prefer) to help you solve a problem, ask it a question, etc.?
One thing I've noticed, which seems to go completely unmentioned, is how these LLM tools are like drugs. It can pump out thousands of lines of code ---> it can write my entire program for me ---> I've written quite a few programs with it and I don't write a single line anymore ---> I go to it for what would normally be things I could do on my own. The problem is that this isn't some immediate thing: like a drug, it sneaks up on you and you don't even realize it until it's far, far too late. I've been programming since I was 13 and I've just now started to notice the deskilling that's been happening to me. I've just now started noticing how often I'll visit Claude Web for something I should be able to do on my own. Nobody really seems to mention this, or it's repharsed as a good thing. And I don't get it: how is undergoing cognitive surrender a "good" thing by any metric other than the metric a beancounter would use? What worries me is that I fear this is happening to way, way more people than those who actually bring it up, potentially yourself included, and you just haven't yet realized it because you haven't really thought about it. That is ultimately what this "AI revolution" is going to bring. It's what the billionaires want, and what they want is usually what they get because the systems we've built are set up to not constrain them.
Moreover, historical events and processes are unique, even if there are some similarities. Nothing that happened in the past can give us certainty on what will happen now.
It’s worse— it’s seeking to replace every single aspect of what it means to be YOU in the world. Some people are literally trying to “fire themselves” and be replaced with digital twins. Perhaps those people are independently wealthy and also have no need of human connection? For the rest of us, it is a sickening prospect.
AI is automated irresponsibility, and it is nothing like any earlier transition.
When a technology trend means people literally won’t be able to tell if you are living or dead, and also stop caring about the difference— that’s unprecedented in the history of humans.
The automation at least built unimaginable amounts of wealth for the rich people while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
>while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
How can people say false things like this with a straight face?
Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to death, cars, planes, MRI machines, helicopter ambulances, vaccines, personal heating and air conditioning, OZEMPIC, etc
Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Meanwhile the cool homeless guy outside my building has 3 hot meals a day and a daily shower in the homeless shelter nearby, warm clean sleeping bag for winter, shades for summer, a bicycle for moving around town, a smartphone which he uses to watch youtube all day in his sleeping bag, plus access to medical care that kings of kings never had. All this with no job, and no care in the world.
Because most of the poor people in the world (majority of the population of the planet actually) have no access to clean water, food or medical care or education and that is the same as it was hundreds of years ago.
They get food, water infrastructure and medical aid from foreign aid. And then a local warlord steals the food and destroys the water infrastructure, to enslave them, just like hundreds of years ago. If you lack the foundational values to self organize as a functioning society, then it's just gonna be like that for a long time.
Mainly all due to what is the spiritual successor to slave labor, not industrialization.
You can thank people dying in Chinese and African mines to extract the resources to build your planes and MRI machines.
You can thank the people working tirelessly until their hands are crippled in bengladesh to make the cheap clothes that make it seem to your western eyes that a poor person here can live a life of luxury. Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
hit them and kills a thousand under your total westoid apathy.
You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet. They have suicide prevention nets so that their precious slave labor doesn't die from jumping from their buildings. How amazing.
>the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Indeed, the wealth that kings couldn't dream of hundreds of years ago, because kings back then didn't have the power a billionaire can wield today to pollute, enslave and ruin millions of lives at a scale that makes things like the Napoleon wars look like a footnote to history.
>All this with no job, and no care in the world.
This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people. You are blind to the reality of the humans you are exploiting.
>Mainly all due to what is the spiritual successor to slave labor, not industrialization.
Firstly, industrialization is what led to the abolishment of slavery in the west, because owning machines was making you more money than slaves, and it was the west who fought the seas to stop slavery internationally, to the disappointment of slave owners in Africa who were enslaving their own people before the western slave trade began. So you can stop blaming the west for slavery now. The age of English and Dutch slave trade boats is long gone, we don't have MRI machines because of slaves.
>Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
100% nobody cares because they have their own government who is accountable to them. What should other countries do about it when it's their own government killing them. I also don't expect other countries to care about the deaths and issues in my country since our politicians are to blame, not foreigners. People care about their immediate family members, they don't care about random people on the other side of the planet dying in some domestic accident. It's just how it is.
>You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet.
Just a couple of days ago there was a post here on the front page of shipping a used Macbook from Australia to a student in Ghana. It's precisely because western investments in technology and Chinese mines and sweatshop factories that people in countries like Ghana can have cheap laptops and cheap smartphones to access the internet and gain higher education for well paying IT jobs on the international market. So thank you and you're welcome.
>This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people.
Humans were always divided into classes of people ever since human species existed, they were never equal and they never will be equal, this is a human trait, not something billionaires created, they were just the best today at rising to the top within this human inequality system that has always existed and will always exist.
Need I remind you communism also existed based on the ideals of equalizing everyone, and so everyone was equally poor except of course the ruling elites, while also having no MRI machines.
"Humans were always divided into classes of people ever since human species existed, they were never equal and they never will be equal, this is a human trait, not something billionaires created, they were just the best today at rising to the top within this human inequality system that has always existed and will always exist."
Woah the air is thick with BS.
Just because someone is rich doesn't mean they're better smarter hard working or anything more than anyone else. They've just had particular circumstances in their lives. Most societies are not truly meritocratic where the most competent and skilled people would succeed. This is not the determining factor. Education is a great example of this when in many countries not everyone has equal access to education. People do not have equal access to resources or networks or support structures to become entrepreneurs. To start a business or to study or to become whatever they could be.
Eventually People may not be equal or have equal skills and talents and that's fine but everyone should have an equal opportunity.
> Did they teach history where you're from? Humans were always divided into classes of people ever since human species existed, they were never equal and they never will be equal, this is a human trait, not something billionaires created, they were just the best at rising to the top within this human inequality system that has always existed.
If anyone could use a history or anthropology lesson, it is you.
What you stated is simply not true, and we have plenty of ethnographical and archeological evidence for that.
You simply repeat ideology of the current times.
Last but not least, your parent speaks of dividing whole countries into classes. I don't know what billionaires have to do with it.
Also, how nice of you to ignore my entire argument on how the poor today are NOT as poor as they were hundreds of years ago, and instead sidetrack the conversation one offtopic tangent for a cheap jab in the name of scoring some emotional virtue signaling brownie points.
> Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.
> Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Wealth has no intrinsic value, only relative one. You are only wealthy relatively to other members of the society. Doesn't matter if pharaohs had less comfortable lives than me. What matters is that a gap between pharaoh and a worker working on pyramids was way smaller than between Jeff Bezos and person working at the Amazon distribution center.
Also, most sweet fruits of progress that its prophets like to enumerate are not direct consequences of technological changes, but they came only after political struggle that has arisen exactly because the direct consequences were very dire for most people. If people pushing today for AI could decide on these things, they would be very happy to take away these hot meals from homeless people and let them starve to death.
>Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.
You don't have to participate in globalism, you can be a hermit state that doesn't trade with the evil imperial capitalists, like Cuba and North Korea. Everyone wants to live there because the QoL is so good.
>because west extracted wealth and materials from all around the world places
If those "around the world places" had all the valuable resources that enabled modern civilisation when the west came and took them, why weren't they the ones to first make use of them to build computers, vaccines, MR machines and moon rockets, or at least clean drinking water and indoor sanitation facilities for their people?
Or why didn't those "around the world places" then go and extract wealth and materials from the west instead? What stopped them? Surely it wasn't their moral values, since war, slavery and genocide even cannibalism, of their neighboring tribes and nations, was the norm of the day over there.
>and still extracts through globalisation
Correction: "pays for it through globalisation". That's how countries like India and China got so many people out of poverty after globalisation.
No, because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.
Machinists and lathe operators became CNC operators, they didn't lose their jobs, just that instead of turning the inputs by hand, they punch numbers in a machine, but the advent of CNC didn't mean anyone off the street can now punch numbers in the machine and replace the machinists since you still need the years of training and experience.
SW devs will be the new CNC operators, about knowing what data to input and how to wrangle the slop machine to get the desired output faster and better than your competition.
> No because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.
For now. Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?
If you're a programmer, your skills have been devalued significantly in the last 12 months. What makes you think the remaining value you offer will be required 12 months from now?
> What are your plans if you truly think that that's the future?
I don't have any - thinking is the only non-cattle job left for humans to do; if we outsource thinking for all of humanity, we're an evolutionary dead-end.
I don't have a crystal ball. In 4 years whoever is US president might start another war and fuck the whole planet back to the stone age. Nobody will know what will happen in 4 years so why worry about it?
This article was very eye-opening for me. I think I understand the author's pain and I could certainly feel it while reading the article. The fact that it was "the people" that made the difference kind of surprised me, and then I realized it was because I have seldom had the experiences he's had and that this might have a major impact on the way I (and others) view the technology.
For me, building software has often been a solitary process in which I was far more obsessed with it than those around me. I'm not in a tech-heavy area and I don't have a ton of well-informed people to talk to about programming, software engineering, or AI. I have had experiences like the author in which I needed to learn a new technology or a new language but ended up doing so on my own at home, not with the assistance of a much more knowledgeable developer with significantly more experience.
To me LLMs have left us in a situation where the following things are true and moving forward lies somewhere in figuring out how to reconcile / resolve these things:
- You can use LLMs and learn things or not learn things; this is a result of the approach, desire, and willpower of the user.
- There is a level of skill associated with using LLMs much like nearly everything else in existence. The user's skill level impacts their perception of the technology and also affects the way those around them view the technology. Unskilled users will generate more negative sentiment.
- Some people love to do the things the machine is good at and do not want the machine to do them, while others hate to do the things the machine is good at and want the machine to do them. I realized at some point this year that I don't love programming anywhere near as much as I love building and designing systems and solving problems.
- Software development is many things wrapped up in one and talking about it as a single thing makes it more confusing. Some people like to think through the logic of the application and have an LLM write the code while others want the LLM to think up the solution, implement it, and test it. These are two very different people with likely different goals and different desires.
- When someone else looks at Claude or ChatGPT they might see something completely different than what you see.
Very well said. And I'm in the same camp. I've very rarely had someone with whom I could interact, bounce off ideas, brainstorm regarding the nitty gritty of code. Most of the time, I've had to dig through books, online articles and create my own mental framework of how things work.
And this has held me up in good stead.
Now with AI, I've found a tool from which I can learn, show me the right way to do things, and explain in detail what has been done. I can ask questions, point out mistakes, go back and forth on different implementations and at the end of it, come out a better programmer.
As many commentators have mentioned, AI means different things to different people. For me, it has been empowering, enlightening, and humbling.
There have always been so many things to learn, but never enough time. Now, it doesn't quite feel that way.
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
I'm all for open models, open source agents, etc. I don't want to give more power to the big corps, though. Imagine what software engineering could become in 5 years if all thse big corporations gain even more power over us. It's a terrifying scenario (e.g., pay more so we don't show you ads in between claude code prompts; pay more so that the produced code doesn't incrust ads in your app...). Do you really want the same shitty experience we have now in the global internet, but deeply ingrained in your software engineering workflows?
There were lots of proprietary database companies in the 70s-90s when they first came out (Oracle, IBM, Sybase, SQL Server), but these days open source databases are the default. Everyone's making so many wild predictions based off the current state of LLMs. We don't know how the market will unfold.
Even in regards to programming competency and the culture of vibecoding, it's similar to the early stages of electric cars where they fill some roles better than ICE engines, but it's still a decade away from doing the same job. And the whole time there was people trashing electric cars as a novelty/impractical/expensive/dangerous/etc because the infrastructure wasn't there yet and the technology was immature.
The only real moat pattern we see is datacenters being hotly in demand but even those will scale up and commoditize, RAM manufacturing will catch up etc.
It seems to me that the article is creating a false dichotomy where either you don't use AI at all, or you delegate every aspect of the work to AI. This simply isn't how it works in practice. You get to choose how much of the work you delegate to AI. There's still an enormous amount of space for human expertise, community, and enthusiasm for technology.
The public debate around AI makes me think of the cognitive distortions discussed in cognitive behavioral therapy. In particular, all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing. These are often symptoms of anxiety or psychosis. I sometimes wonder whether entire societies can experience these symptoms.
> This simply isn't how it works in practice. You get to choose how much of the work you delegate to AI. There's still an enormous amount of space for human expertise, community, and enthusiasm for technology.
I agree, especially with my own projects. Except you don't always get to choose in the workplace. Now that teams are being measured by PR throughput and token usage, you will look "worse" next to the person who is totally vibecoding. My fear is that if I don't vibecode, I'll be passed up for promotion.
The indicators that vibecoding may be bad, are lagging. What I mean is that issues that come up from vibecoding whether its performance, service degradation, massive data migrations etc. will always show up later.
I think this post is either LLM-written, or written in a standard blogpost style of today which is increasingly becoming LLM-like. Sam Kriss had a good recent post pointing out some of the "tells": https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...
Most humans derive their purpose and meaning from their work. Has always been that way. What do you think happens when you remove meaning from people’s lives at scale? It won’t be pretty.
It's not about removing meaning. A normal thoughtful person can surely come up with things to do and occopy their lives with. In fact for most of people work just gets in the way of that.
What's it about is once you remove the paycheck that all proletariats need when things get "interesting".
I hear this all the time but where is the explosion in people learning art, music, increased time with friends and family, etc… instead it’s all the opposite. We’re using all our extra free time to doomscroll.
What extra free time? Have we gotten more of that in the last years? From what I can see, everyone is still working full time jobs, needing to make more money than ever in recent history to survive.
I am a senior php dev, and I was recently transferred to a Ruby on Rails project. It's completely foreign to me. Our client has advised us to use LLMs as much as possible. The problem is that it's virtually impossible to learn a codebase when you're using AI to do the coding. You never see more than a few lines of code at a time unless you purposefully dig in, but you might not have the time given velocity demands. And yes, it also results in nobody on the team really knowing any area of the code inside-out. It's very very different from my previous 25 years of coding, and I do enjoy it less, but...
>>It (software development) is sincerely an art form; A craft that takes
>>dedication, perseverance and especially, a strong community to endure.
>>Software was built by humans, for humans.
100 years ago, you could only buy furniture made by crafts people. Real artisans.
Now you have a choice: IKEA or hand made
Most people choose IKEA because they don't care how it was made, as long as it does the job
There are still those who prefer hand made furniture, and they pay a pretty penny for it.
I think that's where this is heading, and I agree it's unfortunate.
Software development will become a hobby (many people do wood working in their spare time). There will be a few real experts left, who largely do consulting. Maybe they create training data? Maybe they design frameworks for the AI to master. I don't know.
But things sure are going to be different from here on out, and not entirely for the better.
>>If it’s not built by humans, then who is it being built for?
Right now it's built by AI for humans (and sometimes other AI).
Very soon it'll be built by AI for other AI (and sometimes humans).
Later it'll be built by AI primarily for AI (rarely humans).
By the way, where I live you can still buy furniture from crafts people. I bought by bed from a local shop, it was not expensive at all and I was pretty happy about it.
Perhaps check in your country if that isn’t true as well, people automatically assume IKEA killed all local shops, but there are many out there if you search for them.
I can relate to this article. My reaction to what is happening is also: "Leave me behind".
However, missing the joy of the old-school way of growing as a developer is not only the wrong reason, but also very dangerous according to Darwin.
Our customers don't care about how it is made after all, but they do care about long-term support, costs, and predictability, etc.
But I'm not sure whether we can say we made a real net positive progress in the industry. The whole thing is a big mess. In many cases, AI moves us in the same direction in turbo mode, making it not only messier and more expensive but also dangerous.
I tell them, "Leave me alone", as I see this mess as an opportunity if you think the right way, starting from the first principles.
This really resonates with me, and reminds me of all that I've missed in the years since COVID and going full remote. There's magic in a room when a mob programming session results in a breakthrough that just can't ever be replicated remotely. Not sure I'd jump to sign up for a daily commute again, especially where I live now, an hour away from a major city without traffic, but I do miss that.
Just do it the way you want to do it and have fun [1] (I've recently started doing streams where I showcase a mix of AI + manual coding and why I think that's best).
The "powers that be" would prefer if you sideline yourself. Instead, pop a bird and say "thank you kind sir, but no."
One of the things I really don’t understand about the “learn or youll be left behind” sentiment is it also comes from people saying “we’re building PhDs in a box!” It cannot both be the case that AI is something challenging enough to use that a current software engineer can’t learn how to use it and that the promises of these tools are fulfilled.
You won't be left behind because you don't know how to use them - as you say, it doesn't take that much time to be at useful proficiency - but you will be left behind if you refuse to engage with them at all.
> “If you don’t learn how to use AI, you’re going to be left behind.”
I don't subscribe to that even to begin with. Learning "how to use AI" in a a dev workflow takes less than a month, just by practice. Assuming "how to use AI" refers to using agents, rather than just a more advanced auto complete, once you've made the couple of mistakes you can make a couple of times (mainly, leave the coding agent to do something too big for too long), you're caught up. Maybe it take a little more time to get the habits into your workflow.
Leveraging a LLM for coding is orders of magnitude simpler than the code it's writing, and the skills you need to review said code.
I don't think AI changed anything at all to the possibility of communicating between humans. This is a job that you've always been able to do alone in your cave.
Really? How do you learn how to code with out communicating with another human? Which man pages in a general Linux install will teach you all you need to know? Without communication you get no books, no StackOverflow, no-LLMs even. You were allowed to do it alone but we can't pretend humans communicating isn't how most of the available knowledge for your perusal came to be.
Like the artisans/craftsmen in many places (especially Japan), hand craft will always carry enduring meaning — machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. But historically at least, they can replace over 99.9% of it.
I don't have a quantitative way to argue this, but my intuition says that for humans to build something that matches human capability across every dimension would require a breakthrough at the physical level — and such a breakthrough may itself be bounded by the limits of humans as observers.
That said, this goal might itself be a non-goal. AI is going to be — or already is — more powerful than any individual human in many ways. But what my intuition points to is that humans will still have plenty of interesting work to do, like the author's example of handwriting code: it shifts from being scalable value creation into a form of craftsmanship.
I absolutely understand this sentiment. I've been working in tech since the late 90s and I have had MORE than my share of let-me-off-this-ride moments.
But this post (and the many I see like it) feels like giving up. And now's not the time for empathetic people to give up.
Technology is how we expand human capability. We are well within our rights to pick and choose how we interact with that capability. But it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out. Billionaires are doing a remarkable job at making their vision of the future seem inevitable. Don't fall for it.
If more people aren't willing to help us steer this capability towards a better future, then we all know how this ends.
> it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out
Maybe it's just that the capability is bad. Adtech, for example, isn't something that anyone uses for good. They blow a lot of smoke about it--looking at you, Apple--but despite the "good-washing" it's all just the same extractive, invasive, dehumanizing business. Bad people will naturally concentrate around this capability. I know because I've worked with a few of them.
AI coding tools seem like they're engineered to undermine cautious, rigorous, and pragmatic engineering discipline. Of course the bosses want that, they see a short term path to massive output increases and nothing sounds better. They'll be cashed out by the time the mess needs to be cleaned up, that's someone else's problem. People who are predisposed to this kind of antisocial behavior are the ones who concentrate around AI tools. Rigorous, careful engineers who care about building maintainable systems that will outlast their tenure find less value in them.
I think it's more nuanced than
> Technology is how we expand human capability.
I think as a general statement about technology as a whole it's true. But do all technologies expand human capabilities? I don't think so.
In my mind, I would separate technology from its application.
Advertising tech and AI coding tools are applications of technology stacks that could have been used to create what you and I might agree to be "better" tools. I don't need to tell you why ad tech got created instead of something that is a net societal benefit.
At the same time, I would say that, yes, those applications do indeed expand human capabilities. The important nuance here is whose capability, and to what end.
All I am saying is that opting out of this, in whatever form that takes, hands your agency over to those who would use it to enrich themselves at the cost of others. I sincerely feel that decades of this type of capitulation is exactly how we got to where we are today.
Could adtech really be used for something better? The capability is to precisely model users' emotional reward centers and then bombard them with content that targets those reward centers. Is there any way you can imagine this being used for good? Even if you do it in the least bad, privacy preserving way possible you're still messing with people's minds on a massive scale. Sure, that's a capability alright! I can't imagine a decent use of that capability, though. In my view it's one that should be prevented via regulation and treaties, much like weapons of mass destruction.
Unlike weapons of mass destruction, though, there's nothing to be gained by working on adtech. Let me unpack that a bit--a "good guy" can justify working on nuclear weapons because if he doesn't his country will be unable to defend itself when the treaties break down. There's no similar existential threat with adtech. If I choose to not work on that poison, I'm not leaving any advantage on the table. My agency in this situation is worthless. At least that conclusion is why I don't do adtech anymore.
I broadly agree with your bigger point though. To the extent that AI coding tools are useful it's important to explore their use, and evaluate whether they're any good. But if I'm in a company that's forcing their use, or putting up token use leaderboards, or any of the other horror stories we've been hearing about, you can be damn sure I'd get myself fired or quit. At that point the inmates are running the asylum, and there's no reason to stay.
Nice read, and agreed, leave me behind. I have been telling people that I am running a John Henry experiment with LLMs. I don't use them just so I can prove the human is better than the machine, even if it leaves me in the dirt like John.
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics
Yeah yeah back to Reddit
For real though: you can keep doing artisanal hand-written code as a hobby. Just like you can still write a web server in assembly if you really want to. But that’s just not how professional software development is done anymore. Just a new tool, I don’t think it’s as deep as the author is making it out to be.
The lack of humanity or ability to empathize with someone else’s feelings displayed in these comments, instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
It also is a great example of why AI has such a PR problem among normal people.
Frustratingly, these attitudes have been around long before LLMs, and they'll continue to exist long after. To those individuals who have staunchly refused to broaden their horizons or empathize with their fellow man, these posts are direct threats to the wagons they've hitched themselves to, a challenge to their own narrow passions because they exist in a zero-sum environment where if even one person doesn't think and act like them, then clearly they're in the obvious wrong.
Conflating a preference for manual creation with opposition to the existence of a tool should be the single biggest signal flare that they are someone who will not argue with you in good faith. They're the ones who barnstorm every single one of these posts to denigrate the author rather than even attempt to empathize with their plight or evaluate the validity of their arguments. Surely the current cohort of HN commenters have seen this repeatedly in just the past five years as technical circles have jumped from cryptocurrency to blockchain to NFTs to LLMs to GenAI; every single one is a "must have", every single one something we "must learn or be left behind forever", and every single one refused to be evaluated on its merits in favor of simply embracing something new for its novelty.
I have given up debating with these people, because they do not wish for debate, they wish for dominance. I have better things to do with my time - as do you, as do all of us - than to give a moment of consideration to a viewpoint that relies on pithy quotes out of context and a reductionist narrative of history to justify their own superiority over others, in lieu of nuanced discourse.
Remember that it is not the obligation of the status quo to defend itself, rather the obligation belongs to those advocating changes to justify and defend their position and its benefits. In that regard, the pro-AI camp continues to come up hollow and empty.
Wonderfully put, thank you. Ultimately, we’re supposed to be “engineers,” and that means (for our jobs) assessing tools and practices in terms of their net benefit on the products we create: there is no free lunch, and a thing’s downside is often proportional to its upside, so it seems wise to approach these things with caution and to have the kind of nuanced discussions that you note have been lacking.
I’d also hope, though, that as humans, we can recognize that tools do not exist in a vacuum, and that their effect on ourselves and society at large can be net negative even if they have a net positive effect on our work (whether due to something fundamental to the tool or due to the way it is being applied at scale). We can’t responsibly leave these discussions out of our analysis of the tool itself and its fitness for purpose, because we are members of society, and our adoption/use of the tool helps to determine that societal impact.
> instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
I’ll be the devil’s advocate and suggest that it might not be AI usage, but the technology attracting vilest scum of the Earth. It’s just they were staying mostly silent before, or wasted someone else’s time in different circles.
people need to reframe coding agent usage. i see a lot of framing in zero-sum terms where it's either all dev or all agent, and then people start dooming and glooming over the latter. in reality it's like that one post on here a few days ago about it being like an iron man suit. it is a glowing, bright white power that can be incredible when wielded properly. unfortunately, people characterize it as an adversarial power that can and will take over your soul.
how about some true synergy instead of boring zero-sum people? smh. the true poetry here is that zero-sum thinking will become more of a thing of the past so there is some natural comedy with this title
This is some anecdata, but I'll share it nonetheless as I have a pretty wide network of software and security engineer friends from which I've heard the following.
Almost no one I know wants agent usage to be a zero-sum activity. There are a few oddballs who obviously only got into software for the money, so any means to that end is acceptable. That does not stop those with say-so over things like employment (and, if you're in the USA, the associated healthcare), from treating it as a zero-sum activity.
When engineers are being told to maximize token usage, are constantly being brought into meetings where they're expected to reveal their latest and greatest use of LLMs, and not using enough tokens in your role is seen as a negative, then the pressure starts to creep in. Yes, I know this is silly to most people who read this site, and I agree. It's bonkers. But there is certainly something to the idea of "AI psychosis" in upper management that is making agent use zero-sum company-wide.
That's good to know, because all I really go off of is what I see posted online which is most likely skewed towards the polarizing takes (been unemployed for a while). Sounds like some positive news though, and I hope that these tools can help empower people to the point where they don't feel shackled by their jobs by doing something like lowering the barrier and manpower needed to succeed at entrepreneurship.
That shit with upper management sounds stupid af and I've heard the same type of shit from people I know who are in other fields. I'm guessing it's happening from a combination of ignorance, FOMO, investment, etc etc. But that is more of a systemic issue than anything to do with these tools imo.
I'm in a position right now where I'm trying to decide if staying in my own field of information security is worth it to me. I have an entire project plan built out for using local models to do some crazy augmentation of my own skill set, e.g. malware development pipelines and vulnerability research.
My biggest problem as an independent contractor is marketing and notoriety. Security has been a race to the bottom for over a decade now, but it's gotten exponentially worse. LLMs can't just do my job, but there are enough people with checkbooks who believe that it can and enough companies out there with an incentive to confirm that belief that it's getting harder for me to find work organically.
This psychosis you keep referring to will only end up punishing the ones who subscribe to it wouldn't it? Since it's out of touch with reality.
If that's indeed the case, then it sounds like an opportunity to get ahead of them since you know they will trip and fall at some point.
That's what I make of what you're describing, while sleep deprived and having given it some light thought LOL. So take that with a lot of salt. But it's kind of what I've been thinking these days anyways. Add to that that entrepreneurship is most likely getting empowered, and I think investing in yourself is the move these days. It will probably characterize the coming years strongly.
I would like to think they'll be the only ones punished, should punishment come. And as a disclaimer for what I'm about to say, I'm neither a Wall Street banker nor an AI company executive, so I don't want to accidentally make a specious connection between the two, but...
The 2008 housing crisis affected everyone. Bubbles that get too big pop across the population, whether they're complicit or not. As a little guy in a big world, with no expertise to truly know if there's a meaningful difference, I have a bit of anxiety about it all. I just don't want to catch collateral.
Per learning from others after encountering an unfamiliar problem, I think there are rose-tinted glasses here. 90%+ of the time, either someone else had already provided the relevant answer at Stack Overflow or I could find it on a documentation page, a blog. There is no social engagement then. Just search. That also hasn't gone away, as LLMs can also provide sources to justify their answers.
Per the human element, the author is in part relaying about formative experiences from youth that you won't easily repeat, and also experiences that are not decoupled from the work as it still exists, unless you are entirely remote, which is not a LLM-specific problem.
All of which to say, the emotional element behind it is valid, but the diagnosis is off the mark. I think the human element, should it be jeopardized, is in part through the complacent convenience of remote work and disinterest in community participation. But, communities still exist, and tech communities historically were always niche. As it stands they're probably bigger now than they ever were.
There are still new frontiers with software where LLMs will be less effective. Yes, there is less friction than before for learning technologies, but all this does is move the goalpost as we can accomplish more with our time.
Instead of hacking things out through trial and error on mature stacks (with or without others), you'll be closer to the cutting edge and have different problems. Many of which will still be technological in nature.
Its classic HN to dismiss the emotional cost of change as sunk cost stages of grief. A person is allowed to love their work and miss deep understanding, and allowed to be nostalgic for a preferred way of working. It's human and everything they have shared in this post is unequivocally true about software dev and moving into a career, arguably even before LLMs took over.
What I mean is that the thrilling buddy system coding starts to happen less frequently over a career, and the time for deep exploring and side projects is organically maximized early and during school.
While LLMs have forced that divide to be more stark, the human connection and sense of wonder has always required maintenance, and it's best to get into the habit of maintaining it before your 36th JIRA triage meeting in a week completely destroyed your love of the industry.
Well before LLMs I went through exactly what TFA describes when I had to adapt from grad school labs to industrial labs, then to project management or task leadership (even just filling in for my boss), and each new job has required me to say goodbye to great friends and colleagues and make new ones.
Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft, we all could probably write this post for our own reasons.
> Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft
This is not some kind of universal truth. I can see how being stuck in an unfulfilling job could lead you to say this. But for the last 20+ years I love the craft of writing efficient, dependable, understandable code more with every new insight from every hard-won experience.
This will inevitably lead to tired discussion of “there are two types of developers, those who care about the craft and those who want to get things” done. I believe that to be a false dichotomy, and will link to someone else’s comment in another thread who makes the argument that caring about the craft is part of caring about the product.
More specifically to the submission, I’ll say I agree with the author. This “being left behind” fear mongering is an exhausting uncritical talking point. Life isn’t about rushing through the end and killing yourself to be “productive”. “Being left behind” is only bad if what’s “ahead” is an improvement to your situation, and that’s not a given. Humans aren’t built to be pushed to 11 without rest. Stopping to smell the roses is good. Immediatelly thinking “how can I kill these to package the smell to sell to others at a profit” is not.
These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics,
Always a shame to see good meaning, smart humans let their anxieties and fears drive them into empirical falsehoods.
Anyone still have some hope for humanity? Or yourselves as a person? Asking for a friend who thinks that the dark horizon has already swallowed all but our eyes, leaving us the brief observers of our oblivion
AI is repulsive. You either feel it, maybe not immediately, or don't. When you feel it, you'll rationalize it one way or another. The rationalization does not matter that much. It's essentially arbitrary and is a product of whatever experience you've accumulated so far. (E.g. could be a Communist rationalization of alienation under capitalism.) Yet the underlying feeling is true. Stick to it.
The funniest thing about this post is that Java Android programming circa 2014 is somehow romanticized as "real programming." 2014 Android code has got to be peak corpo-slop with the most inane abstractions, unintuitive paradigms, and copy-paste boilerplate syndrome. Ironically, exactly why we need AI these days, since like 90% of the code you wrote didn't technically do anything.
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics, trained on the years and years of dedication by brave engineers willing to learn and build in the open. Building in the open meant we were not gatekeeping technology, but creating tangible examples for young engineers to explore, understand, and learn from.
Another grief-post with people unable to cope with the fact that the whole structure of learning and work is going to change so they resort to pseudo nostalgia and romanticism. Not to mention that "They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics" is basically incorrect and belongs in 2024.
Not gonna pretend that this is anything other than the author's personal gripe with this whole thing, but this is really just the sunk cost fallacy with extra steps.
Even by trying to reassure (the reader? Himself?) that LLMs are just a tool for humans, he asserts in the final paragraph that software is no longer made by humans. Something something linotype operators.
You mean on his writing? My take is that most of the text is him grandiosely talking about the skillset he built is... somehow nullified with the appearance of AI and is taking the path of graphic artists that are focusing their no-AI work as craft.
He believes that AI is making him redundant and soul-less, and at the same time tries to minimize it by reminding everyone that LLMs are a tool - yet he argues that software can now be created without humans so his perception of AI is inconsistent at best.
This is the writing of a person with an existential crisis, which will be obviously egocentric by nature, and I wish the author the best. His approach is not too different of Japanese woodcarvers, Linotype experts switching to computers... there is no real mention about "AI creep" so the extent of AI usage is inconsequential. He has realized he mastered a craft that, as all types of crafts, are subject to technological advancement. At a personal level, it's a hard pill to swallow
For me it's incomprehensible how a tool that allows you to be 100 times more productive is derided as something we should never use for the sake of craftmanship. Same as shoemakers or horseback messengers 100 years ago. Those who fund the next Nike or FedEx will be the winners of this new race. AI is a tool, an exceptional tool for providing solutions.
But what does "100x more productive" mean for code quality and employment? Are we all going to adopt it as just another tool? Are 99% of the engineers going to get fired? Do all engineers need to become managers now?
"100 times more productive" is such a wild exaggeration. Do you understand that productivity is not equal to lines of code written? Yeah, AI can write many lines of code very quickly. Productivity is about making something economically valuable. Are you producing 100 times more value with AI than you were without AI? Is your business making 100 times more money? Are you being paid 100 times as much?
The factories that replaced shoemakers actually produced physical shoes that real humans wore. What is your AI producing, other than garbage bug-filled software that no one wants or needs? What real-life human problems is it solving?
So so much this. Also: what does 100x even mean? What is the baseline? I can write a program in 5 minutes that will spit out 10 billion lines of code. As such, does that somehow mean I'm 1000000x more productive?
There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider.
We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think the users deserve consideration nonetheless.
Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. This is on top of all of the problems that existed before LLMs, like human error and perverse financial incentives. Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people. Real people. Harm is caused in both big and little ways to living, breathing actual people. This “inevitable” slide into generative AI harms every single person it comes into contact with. The devs, the users, the investors, everyone. Those harms may happen at different times and in different ways and the creeping nature of it all might make it easier to ignore, but it’s happening.
“AI” is a blight. You can leave me behind as well.
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world.
I genuinely don't know if that's true and I doubt you do, either. It's all feels right now.
What I do know is I run a couple of personal projects and I can say they are of objectively higher quality now that I'm using AI to build out proper CI pipelines, expand test coverage, produce higher quality architectures, etc.
Why?
Because in the past I didn't have the capacity to invest in that kind of hardening, but with AI, now I do.
Of course you'll probably make the claim that my code is probably crap, the tests suck, etc, because you've already made up your mind. But having been in the industry for 25 years, I can tell you definitively that you'd be wrong about that.
Now, what'll happen to the median codebase? God only knows. Maybe I'm especially diligent.
But given we're really only 6-12 months into the agentic coding era, I think the only conclusion you can make is that the jury is still out.
Well said. People love to make everything black and white / good and bad. But things are rarely that simple.
And I get that compulsion to boil this mess down into a simple good/bad dichotomy.
I absolutely have deeply mixed feelings about these tools, the ethics associated with them, the impact on the industry, on the talent pipeline, etc.
But I also can't deny that they are incredibly powerful tools that are here to stay in one form or another.
And I say that as someone who, a year ago, was absolutely convinced that they were incremental at best and scoffed at everyone who said something like "yeah but they're so much better now!" or "they're only going to get better!"
Well, they were right, they did, and the world has changed. AI generated code is landing in the Linux kernel. 250+ security holes were found and fixed in Firefox. The impact is here and now, and it's mixed and ugly and complicated.
We would need a lot of anecdata. Would we trust a doctor/pilot/engineer of 25 years more with the tried and tested (but now aging) kit of their time, or the acolyte that has been fully absorbed by the latest and greatest and has now more than doubled their productivity?
While code quality may go up on a case by case basis, we should be mindful whether we are comparing it to our own personal baselines, or to the average code quality across the board. I.e. will the baseline regress to the mean, or raise the floor for the average coder?
Even if the jury is still out, I would still say you are both right already.
The amount of slop produced even in company setting is staggering and I don't like it one bit that neither the submitter nor the reviewer of the PR paid due dilligence. And I am only complaining because it then becomes my problem. So, then I have to start nagging people to clean that up. I can say with 100% certainty that the problems I face now would not have happened without LLMs.
That said, used with care, with proper supervision, with dilligence to review what LLMs did, I still think they can be and are beneficial.
I think that we are just not used to getting results of questionable quality from the tools we use. So, I am hopeful that we will learn and it will improve with time but still find myself dreading the age of the vibe coder.
Very well said.
I also think reading and reviewing code is a skill that connected to but very much independent of the writing of code, and the use of coding agents requires us to be far more skilled and diligent at it.
So put another way, people who were good at coding without agents may in fact be a poor fit with them, which means the entire industry is experiencing a dislocation between skills we have and skills we need, leading to extremely bimodal outcomes.
Indeed, however I would also point out that senior engineers have already been expected to be good at reading code: they were expected to evaluate the code quality of other contributors, so they had to be able to do that.
In fact, from my personal experience, going from junior to mid to senior, that was the hardest thing. Reading the code and thinking if what they did was really correct and will not have additional undesired side-effects was hard to become efficient at (it didn't help that we were working in C back then).
So, really, I think that for juniors it's actually much harder because if they want to do due dilligence they have to do the same evaluation but without the years of experience working with that code base. I can understand, even if I don't like it, that they just submit the output of the LLM for the senior to review.
It's a bit weird when the article in question is predominantly about software development in a professional setting and the top comment is about how some people in thread are disregarding this context and opining unrelatedly about their unique solo development or personal project development experiences, to then respond to said comment by insistently going on about how AI is great for your personal projects, when people are unable to assess the value of your AI-assisted personal projects and whether they would concur with the high opinion you have of them. A turd with a CI pipeline is still a turd, I think we can all agree on that. IF someone said AI is great because they can now expand test coverage and build a CI pipeline for their todo app in rust, it wouldn't exactly be the proof you're looking for I don't think.
But I agree fully with your last paragraph, and said something similar in a comment elsewhere where I stated my tangible bar as being a Ladybird like browser built from scratch achieving Chrome parity in six months while doing continuous stable releases with coding agents in tow. Otherwise, as you said, the jury is still out.
I suspect you are right that LLM-generated software will likely negatively impact people's lives. The flip side of this is there is going to be a lot of software generated that would have never been possible before. And for some use cases, some crappy software is better than no software. I think it's hard to predict whether on net this will be a good or bad thing.
>And for some use cases, some crappy software is better than no software
The best use case i've seen for AI is people generating random one shot projects for themselves, which is honestly so cool. You can make some basic app that does something very specific, that would have taken objectively a lot longer to make by hand. This is when 'crappy' software is more than good enough for a specific problem
Similar use cases of useful AI one-shot projects are: demos, proof-of-concept, prototype, exploratory tests, etc... I've AI-generated an HTML/javascript craplet to test how browser security would behave for certain JavaScript API calls. I just wanted to confirm how browser security would behave before I started to spend time hand-coding the non-AI quality software that I wanted to release.
And I say this as somebody who generally has a low opinion of AI generated code and rarely uses it. But it has its place.
Nah, there's no evidence of reduced quality. If anything it's the reverse. I've seen AI code review tools be tremendously effective at catching defects which otherwise would have shipped.
In the DORA group's reporting on AI-assisted software engineering, they indeed state that across industries, quality goes UP with the use of AI assistants like Claude and others.
Moreover, in my experience helping businesses on this topic; They never defined or made measurable what quality meant in the first place. Then when they finally do figure it out, it turns out that the average repository is a total disappointment in terms of absolute quality.
Same for me. I have not yet successfully used an LLM to generate code to produce a feature, though to be fair, it might just be because I don't have the patience to go back and forth with it (will readily admit that I am using it wrong).
Also, while some code review comments are just plain wrong, LLMs did produce some damn good comments, on the same level as a different senior engineer might note had they taken the time to study the code carefully.
Same here, it's been catching a lot of bugs that would have been very hard to trace or discover, often just in the process of doing something else.
> Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people. Real people.
I couldn't agree more. If you're using AI tools to produce worse software, faster, you should rethink how you are using them.
If we're not delivering better software with this stuff then what are we using it for?
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world.
Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unintelligent and I don't understand that. The fact that these "stochastic code extruders" can solve Erdos problems is sort of the proof in the pudding. Next token prediction is profound in that it is _a very simple objective_ yet it is _enough_ to take you to extraordinary heights.
Also I wonder how many folks honestly look in the mirror and think: how does the median programmer differ from an LLM. Do you really think humans are universally better and produce universally higher quality code? Not even universally, I would say _typically_. I would trust an LLM to not write a buffer overflow far more than a junior or a mediocre senior engineer. LLMs have built things in my domain that are non-trivial and impressive and correct.
Not to mention, these systems are following a predictable trend in performance improvement so these worries about quality just won't age well, and it seems to be a head-in-the-sand attitude that pretends like quality and reliability are not getting very very good _already_.
> Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people.
Could not agree more. So why do you think humans are inherently better at this?
> This “inevitable” slide into generative AI harms every single person it comes into contact with.
I just don't quite understand this, is it that: (1) agentic code is inherently inferior to human code and thus (2) shipping agentic code is actively harmful?
> Also I wonder how many folks honestly look in the mirror and think: how does the median programmer differ from an LLM.
Once you step out of pure-software orgs, it becomes clear that most would benefit from having AI write code. There's a huge moat between most people and the point where they can afford/find the effort of someone that can write software.
These people, that only care about practical results rather than somewhat tangential things like "elegance" and "maintainability", are going to benefit tremendously.
It's like people complaining about "poor quality plastic trinkets" that replaced well-made household items. Of course high-quality things can be (and are) made of plastic. The problem is that you can still make a very cheap passable thing out of plastic, that would be uneconomical to make out of metal or wood.
Same with code: by using AI, one can produce passable software trinkets very cheaply, that would be uneconimical to produce by paying poor-quality human developers.
The floor has moved downwards, allowing to produce a flood of new, trash-quality, disposable code very cheaply. It does not mean that we'll have to use only that code. But unfortunately we'll have to live with it, too.
> It's like people complaining about "poor quality plastic trinkets" that replaced well-made household items.
Actually, people had to be made to see it as cheap so they would throw away and re-buy more.
https://desis.osu.edu/seniorthesis/index.php/2024/09/15/crea...
> “It was a really difficult sell to the American public in the post-war period, to inculcate people into a throwaway living,” she says. “That is not what people were used to.”
> A solution companies came up with was emphasizing that plastic was a low-cost, abundant material.
> A 1960 marketing study for Scott Cup said the containers were “almost indestructible,” but that the manufacturer could still convince people to discard them after a few uses. To counter any “pangs of conscience” consumers might feel about throwing them away, the researchers suggested a “direct attack”: Tell people the cups are cheap, they said, and that “there are more where these came from.”
> A few years later, Scott ran an advertisement saying its plastic cups were available at “‘toss-away prices.”
It wasn't plastic itself, and likewise it's not "AI" itself.
We do have an abysmal track record as industrialized nations however, and more recently, in many parts of the software industry.
But we can change it. With so many things, tech people spent so much time and energy debating... like cookies or HTTPS or whatever... we often heard/said that while we care so much about doing the right thing, we can't achieve anything at work because consumers don't care. Well, this time, pretty much all of the world cares a lot. I mean, the Vatican just blogged about it!
Maybe we just "have to live with it", but in that case, there is also no utility in pointing that out, since we literally have to live with it. And of course, it's really about the shape of the "it", and how it's used, not that there is one that will never go away. That is also true about most things: stuff we don't currently use is in the museum or text books. Nothing goes away away, but we no longer drink out of lead cups, even though we still use lead. We don't have x-ray machines in shoe shops, even though we still use x-rays.
I agree, "AI" is being pushed beyond reason, in an attempt to make it look like what it's not, or at least not yet. And yes, people do act irrationally due to that, see all that tkenmaxxing and layoffs. I don't think it will last in this inebriated state forever.
But it's worth noting that there's a new substance enabled by AI, the "slop", that is flushing violently into our world right now. Pretending it's not there, and that we won't see more of it, is perilous.
>> Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people.
> Could not agree more. So why do you think humans are inherently better at this?
Because humans are capable of empathy
Why is that a prerequisite? There are entire philosophies about what makes good design for UI's etc. Why can't models figure this out? Why do you feel this is some sort of mystical thing out of reach?
Given the UIs I've experienced over the years, I'd dispute that assumption...
> to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder"
So many excited and insulted LLM adopters on this thread. There is nothing derisive in that comment, it is simply the purest possible definition of how they work. Stochastics is a branch of maths you know.
> can solve Erdos problems is sort of the proof in the pudding
For the non-engineer, non-mathematician it may sound authoritative, but you'd probably be surprised to learn that most of Erdos problems are not at all complex - they are just not very interesting or relevant. So it is a proof in the pudding, provided the pudding is made of shit - the kind of stuff LLMs produce most of the time.
> I just don't quite understand this, is it that: (1) agentic code is inherently inferior to human code and thus (2) shipping agentic code is actively harmful?
Yes and yes - have you not heard of that AWS incident with Kiro when the "agentic" shit deleted an entire infrastructure environment, complete with data, config, etc.?
> Also I wonder how many folks honestly look in the mirror and think: how does the median programmer differ from an LLM
Apart from the obvious absurdity of this statement - I know a lot of you non-engineer types feel "empowered" by the LLMs, in the sense of how they immediately seem a genius when you ask them on a topic you are not expert in, but you may want to read a book on programming first - maybe you'll get a clue then.
> So many excited and insulted LLM adopters on this thread.
neither excited nor insulted.
> There is nothing derisive in that comment, it is simply the purest possible definition of how they work. Stochastics is a branch of maths you know.
Not sure what you mean by stochastics but this is more statistics. They are trained with a next token loss, that doesn't belie "how they work".
> For the non-engineer, non-mathematician it may sound authoritative, but you'd probably be surprised to learn that most of Erdos problems are not at all complex - they are just not very interesting or relevant.
It sounds like you are both an engineer and a mathematician? Can you confirm? These are problems unsolved for many years. You think no good mathematicians have taken a stab at them, even if just to say they have resolved an unsolved Erdos problem? They are "not at all complex" is quite an extraordinary thing to say I'm wondering if you actually do have the pedigree you are trying to make it sound like you have, or if you are just regurgitating the same HN talking points you've heard.
> Yes and yes - have you not heard of that AWS incident with Kiro when the "agentic" shit deleted an entire infrastructure environment, complete with data, config, etc.?
And this means agentic code is inherently inferior to human code? Howso?
> Apart from the obvious absurdity of this statement - I know a lot of you non-engineer types feel "empowered" by the LLMs, in the sense of how they immediately seem a genius when you ask them on a topic you are not expert in, but you may want to read a book on programming first - maybe you'll get a clue then.
in the beginning you mentioned there were a lot of "excited and insulted LLM adopters" and yet...this sounds quite excited and defensive. Believe it or not, I am not a "non-engineer type" and its telling you assume that people who don't seem to share the same opinion as you are somehow less qualified than I assume you think you are? Why is this statement obviously absurd. Maybe you work in a really talented engineering team, which kudos to you I also have worked in teams like this, and I have also seen what is the p50 engineer and they are just as error prone or more than Claude. Thank you for the advice to read a book on programming as if that somehow would have any bearing on this at all?
> an engineer and a mathematician
An engineer with an engineering degree, which as it may still be known to some, requires a fairly stringent mathematical underpinning. So yes, I know a thing or two - read up on Erdos and his problems, I am not here to enlighten every vibecoding PM that shows up.
> And this means agentic code is inherently inferior to human code? Howso?
Again, I am not here to explain the world to some clueless PM. You have your LLMs for that :) But for the sake of bringing you closer, the "agentic" code is often very inferior, implementing happy paths or just bluntly exposing secrets in clear texts, etc. Probably a consequence of it being trained on, as you put it "p50 engineering code".
> Maybe you work in a really talented engineering team,
Running my own company and been paying the LLM-Shit-Generators for my whole team for a long time, in the hope they would bring the advertised benefits. Guess what - for serious use-cases, they bring shit and more shit.
> Thank you for the advice to read a book on programming as if that somehow would have any bearing on this at all?
Oh yeah obviously not, I mean, its not like understanding software development would help you understand how LLMs are not similar to a "p50 engineer" at all:). I'd take the latter over the former every time.
> Why is this statement obviously absurd
Well for one, LLMs are not humans, but it should be obvious to even to most cretinous of the e/acc crowd. It's not like they can think in abstract terms or come up with completely new concepts. But then again, don't mind me - if you can live with below average AI slop - go for it.
Steve Jobs motivated Larry Kenyon, the engineer working on bootup, by saying he is effectively saving lives.
I wonder if we reverse that. When engineers write shitty, slow, buggy code or when they're forced to do that by the company, they are effectively killing people.
After all, if I spend an hour dealing with a preventable bug, that's an hour of my live I am never getting back. Multiple that by the userbase and you get entire lifetimes.
[0]: https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
I think history will prove that this is a less nuanced view than is required to accurately describe the situation. Abandoning human agency through the use of generative AI harms us all. Using AI as a force multiplier to implement human agency helps us all. It's possible to recognize that asking AI to do everything results in a poor product and brain rot for the humans. It's not at all clear that this is the case for using AI to build boilerplate, help with tests, etc.
I've always felt we somewhat failed as engineers (I included, of course) when I was doing boilerplate by hand. We should have taken the time to get those autogenerated. But... it takes time and the generator is always more complex than the produced code, sometimes even by a few factors, so it also takes an expert to maintain.
As for tests, I've seen LLMs produce good ones as well as useless ones. I guess it's all about instructions... sorry, prompts... no, sorry, prompt engineering to get it right and done properly.
That said, I am also very concerned with brain rot. Engineers nowadays can commit code they don't understand without a blink of the eye. Slowly, the knowledge may get sparse if we are not careful about it.
My experience programming is so much different than theirs makes me wonder what I missed out on. I have always programmed on my own, and I can't even think about a single time I have talked to a person in depth about programming (both online and in person). It sounds fun and exciting, but unfortunately I have simply never had the opportunities in life to do so.
For me, AI is the first time I have ever been able to get something resembling an opinion on specific problems/situations that I encounter. I can ask it a very specific question about what the best approach is for what I am working on and it can give me an answer that I read over and consider before deciding on what approach to take. I still frequently get answers that are nonsense, but even then it helps me think deeper on how I should approach the problem because I can ask myself "Are the statements made by the AI true?".
AI is your Google and your yellow rubber ducky (rubber duck debugging) all rolled into one.
Absolutely. It can also be your brain if you let it, so…don’t let it.
It’s an absolutely fantastic educational tool if you choose to use it that way.
So are you saying we should ...
... Put down the duckie[0]?
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acBixR_JRuM
Curse you for this ear worm of a song, but also my brain keeps wanting to interpret this as "duck... You're bad at your job and will never amount to anything. Your mother is ashamed of you and you're the reason your father is an alcoholic." hahaha
For the longest time the Android community was super close-knit where people talked about this stuff online and in person constantly, and OP was a pretty active contributor.
Unfortunately Twitter pre-acquisition was probably the focal point and since then, I don't think the community has been the same.
Second order effects should enumerated and reasoned about. This companion perspective is perhaps only one, but very strong indeed
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
You know it's random nonsense, and yet you still take it on faith that it "gives you answers". That's what makes me despair about all the AI nonsense: it's the death of intellect. Not the death of deep thinking, but of common sense.
I can't wait for the day until all these people collectively snap out of it, and go "what the hell were we thinking with these chatbots".
If AI nonsens is doing the work I ask it to and I confirm it works and is useful .. then what exactly should I snap out of it?
It is just a tool and a useful one. Your loss for not making use of it, but .. you seem to live on a different timeline. I am reminded of old Japan, where the Samurais banned gun powder, so they could continue to fight with swords and not change their ways of living.
When I say it gives me an answer I mean an answer purely in the sense of it is a response to a question, whether or not the answer is correct is for me to decide and I put no faith in whether or not the answer will be correct. I treat the output like an opinion that can sometimes give me an idea for how I can better tackle the problem I am trying to solve.
Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked:
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it That unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all
Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
> take human intelligence to another pinnacle
I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.
Whenever this topic comes up I am reminded of the black and white picture of all the scientist of 19th century together. Each individual in that photo had contributed something to human knowledge. It feels like in 19th century we believed in our scientists and advancing our knowledge. I feel today celebrities are given more importance than our scientists. The best minds of our century are focused on extracting value from rest of the population.
You probably mean the Solvay conference. I just wanted to append this link to your comment: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6e/So...
It really is a remarkable picture, but I'd like to note that it's all physicists, not scientists in general. It was the golden era of physics.
I know it's a typo but it's Solvay, not Solay.
Yes this is the one.
Perhaps you are thinking of the 1927 Solvay Conference? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solvay_conference_1927.jp...
The era of scientists being celebrities is done for the simple reason that it's not possible for a single human to advance our knowledge. Breakthrough papers are published by large groups who build on knowledge created by even larger groups.
Also, science used to directly correlate with improvements in life standards. Nowadays we see advancements in science (AI, psychology) used to actively reduce the standard of life.
I assume you are here talking about political choices, social media influences, life style choices and so on.
While all those are true they are not reflecting the level of intelligence of people: intelligent people take personal stupid decisions because while intelligence is a function of let's say the more "abstract brain", decisions are emotionally driven and influenced by the "ancient, threat focused, pleasure driven brain".
Here is a quick way to think about this: some intelligent people are obease, some others don't exercise, and others don't take their health seriously while also working on the most amazing problems we ever solved. You know what's the biggest paradox here: they all have the capacity to understand fully the impact of their lifestyle on their health but still making a life style change is hard due to not being driven by knowledge and logic.
What do you mean by intelligence? And by your definition of it, can intelligence be improved intentionally or it happens as it happens like for evolution? If it happens by intention then why we have not pushed it at its maximium yet?
Let's start by using strength as an analogy. A human is strong when they develop their physical body to its potential. That means developing muscles, cardio, lung capacity, flexibility, etc. A human is weak when they fail to develop their physical body to its potential (we don't actually care how strong humans are compared to each other, only to themselves). We can then judge human populations based on, say, the strength of the median person.
Intelligence is the same but for mental faculties. A human is intelligent when they develop their critical thinking, memory, focus, logical reasoning, etc. A human is unintelligent when they fail to develop these things to their personal potential. And when I look around me I see a culture of inustrial-strength distraction that has robbed people of their ability to focus, I see encyclopedias in everyone's pockets that have robbed them of any incentive to remember, I see a society of comfortable complacency that has shielded them from any consequence of poor logical reasoning, and with LLMs I see a mass surrender of the need to exercise critical thinking in exchange for the warm embrace of thoughtlessness.
There's no reason that things need to be this way. The human hardware hasn't fundamentally changed in 100,000 years, and we have so many more resources today that it's easy to imagine that we could all be, collectively, more intelligent than ever if we could somehow inspire people to care. Sadly, we don't seem to be able to.
Human nature is also hasn't fundamentally changed in 100,000 years. We'll mostly take the easy path, if it is made available to us.
“Pinnacle” just means “highest point” here. They are saying that AI might take human intelligence to a higher point than was previously reached. That’s debatable, of course, but isn’t what you seem to be arguing against.
They know what pinnacle means, their point is intelligence is not knowledge. But I find that rather nitpicky as it's clear the top level comment just used one as a synonym for the other, not actually caring about the difference.
They wrote “I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle.” That can only be the case if the highest point of human intelligence was in the past and they are opining that the current level of human intelligence isn’t anywhere close to that past high point. However, that assessment wouldn’t contradict what OP wrote, so it’s more likely that they take “pinnacle” to mean something else.
If we train AI on human works and humans only do what the AI says, we're at a maximum.
Maybe peak human intelligence is like peak oil - it only goes down from here.
Like renewables were on track to bring us peak oil, maybe AI will bring us peak human intelligence.
When was the historical pinnacle in your opinion?
Neither intelligence nor knowledge, if you mean us average people.
But that shouldn't be any surprise. We're already at more than a hundred years of deliberate dumbing down of the population through schooling and mass media. These effects are exponential through generations.
Yeah, we peaked somewhere near the end of XIX century IMO. Before the transition to mass society.
we have more intelligent people than ever, but this also means we have more stupid people than ever
> I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber
We are at a peak in absolute terms, though the decline is coming quickly:
https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/2034755779501105321
But in relative terms intelligence has indeed been declining for a long time:
https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/2034912319256330729
Also, I think we (non-scientists) might be overestimating the average historical intelligence - see Flynn Effect [1] - perhaps because of a bias in our perception of the past levels based on who published books and thoughts - basically more intelligent members of our species.
May I suggest these historical references [2][3][4][5][6][7] as a counterpoint to AI driving lazy thoughtlessness, which rather seems to be innate to humans as a group.----------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[2] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.20 — 5th c. BCE Greece. “So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.”
[3] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.2 — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/stasis/2017/honeycutt/aris.... Aristotle treats public persuasion as necessary partly because ordinary audiences cannot easily follow complex chains of reasoning. He says rhetoric addresses deliberative matters before people “who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning.”
[4] Plato, Republic, Book V — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://topostext.org/work/768. Plato distinguishes philosophers from the many “lovers of sights and sounds,” who enjoy appearances but do not apprehend deeper truth. The text says their thought is “incapable” of grasping the underlying form or nature of beauty, and that few attain that deeper vision.
[5] Confucius, Analects, Book 2 — 5th c. BCE China. https://www.chinastory.cn/ywdbk/english/v1/detail/20190722/1.... "Learning without thought is pointless, Thought without learning is dangerous".
[6] Buddhist tradition, Dhammapada, Appamāda-vagga. https://suttacentral.net/dhp21-32/en/sujato. Dhammapada contrasts heedfulness with heedlessness, treating heedlessness as a central human failing. In one translation: “Heedfulness is the state free of death; heedlessness is the state of death. The heedful do not die, while the heedless are like the dead.”
[7] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, “Idols of the Mind” — 1620. https://history.hanover.edu/texts/bacon/novorg.html. Bacon argues that the “Idols of the Tribe” are rooted in human nature itself, and that human understanding distorts reality like a false mirror.
Is a room with 300 morons and 1 genius more intelligent than a room with 10 morons and 1 genius? In my model, there is negative intelligence, so the 300 morons would actually be less intelligent. We do have more stupidity degrees of freedom, that’s for sure. That is, the domain of human stupidity is greatly expanded. Smart people can be stupid in an ever increasing number of ways. So a very bright person 100 years ago might appear very stupid if they were time machined into the now.
In a mathematical model of collective intelligence I think we need to also include a "productive use" factor. The total brain power of our species might be higher than in the past based on a summation, but how much per-capita intelligence is being utilized for productive/adaptive ends versus being being distracted from such ends? What's our distraction rate offset?
> In a mathematical model of collective intelligence I think we need to also include a "productive use" factor. The total brain power of our species might be higher than in the past based on a summation, but how much per-capita intelligence is being utilized for productive/adaptive ends versus being being distracted from such ends? What's our distraction rate offset?
Excellent question. Global GDP estimates going back to 1 CE are here [1][2]. I would argue that GDP is a good proxy for an estimate of the summation of per-capita intelligence being used for "productive" ends, by definition.
But, the global average GDP per capita is [3] with a similar hockey-stick curve, and it is unclear whether the per-capita intelligence used for "productive" ends has also been increasing similarly, because the confounding factor is the effect of tools as force-multipliers (impact on productivity). The Flynn Effect is the strongest indicator that yes, average intelligence has been rising as measured in certain populations where cultural differences do not wreck the applicability of IQ tests.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260525015042/https://ourworldi...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-ca...
Are you implying that all the scientific achievements of the last hundred years don't count somehow?
Did you perhaps miss this part:
> Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence?
of the post you responded to?
Proving the point, if anything.
Why do we need to promote intelligence? If we are all “intelligent”, what is the difference? At best, we have about 50 healthy years on this rock. I do think myself “intelligent”, relatively, but also that the notion is overrated. I want to be dumb and carefree, I’d rather bike, shoot some arrows at the sky, eat some escargot and die in my sleep when it’s time. Instead, we must toil and research nursing homes.
Did the previous tools, which freed us from physical work, take human physique to another pinnacle?
I think probably actually. The fittest people back then probably weren't as fit as people today with specialized diets and medical science, and surely those findings were a result of better equipment, which were a result of better tooling to manufacture that equipment.
Introducing a machine to a manufacturing role obviously makes the manufacturer less fit, but it enables society to break through fitness barriers in general
If your point is that it's not orders of magnitude fitter, that's a good one. I don't think people will be much more intelligent in the future than they are today but they'll probably just be more specialized and have deeper knowledge
I am no expert, just a guy reading the Internet. And it seems like there are two opposing factors. The increased access to nutritious food has dramatically increased health, shown in the increased average height. The exception to this is the first 50 years, 1830-1880 when widespread dietary deprivation and severe inequality caused a decrease in height (take this as a warning I guess).
The other factor is that we all get significantly less physical activity than before, and obesity is a increasing problem.
And while the first effect is a effect of the machines, it is the latter effect I think most easily maps onto today's situation.
Personally I am quite certain that if you could teleport 100 random 20-year old from 1820 they would be better than 100 random 20-year old today at most physical tests, especially if you gave them food first.
Considering developed societies with access to those specialized diets and medical science, the median person is definitely not stronger than the median person from a pre-industrial society, even taking malnutrition and injury into account. It seems you've never tried to arm-wrestle a farmer before.
Have you tried to arm-wrestle a subsistence farmer who saw multiple bad harvests growing up?
I've arm-wrestled office workers; I stand by my assertion.
But what about average person, not a professional athlete? In past people suffered from malnourishment, but today they suffer from obesity.
We also know that testosterone levels (which are connected with muscle mass, recovery etc.) are lower today than even few decades back.
It definitely doesn’t hold true for the average person, I was only thinking of the fittest today.
I’m not sure what it means if we want the average person to be fitter, it seems like we’d have to reinstitute manual labour if that was the goal.
Which is maybe a good analogy for not using AI in the classroom and forcing kids to use their minds
it wasn't about industrialization, but about not being complicit, the machine was the metaphor for the system (this was the 1960s)
Who is "we"? Do you operate a machine in a factory? Do you know how someone operating a machine felt in 1900?
Mechanical replacement cannot be compared with thought replacement anyway, but the most thoughtless pro-AI comment tends to be at the top.
A slop fork machine is way different though, I dont know why authors never thought about this but imagine a machine that can detect the features and replicate whatever it sees, show it how to make bread once and it can do it infinitely, make it listen to a song and its able to find why it sounds the way it does and just spam variations, even if it doesnt make anything original it demotivates any attempt to push the boundaries or make anything new
I argue the opposite, that originality will actually become more valuable.
Think about it: everyone has characterized AI slop, as slop. Which means that we negatively value it in terms of originality. Combine that with the fact that there will be a lot of it, this means that original work will 1. stand out or be very distinct from slop, and 2. have its value amplified as a result of this polarization.
basically, we value originality more AND are able to identify it more readily.
related is also the fact that originality will literally be valuable as training data for future models
I can prod at a model as much as I want to produce something I find more original than average, but there are plenty of people out there that will say it doesn't count because of the fact an AI made it. "Slop" doesn't just mean "it sucks because it's bad", it often means "it's sucks because it's AI". They'd argue that if you were creative enough to produce something so original you wouldn't rely on an AI to make it for you. It's tainted by association, all the way back to the multi-billion-dollar enterprises that originally trained the models for their own ends.
Also there have been dozens of HN submissions and comments where the poster didn't even bother to remove the em dashes. Most people just don't care. The people who continue to post like this wouldn't have been as visible had they not discovered AI and pounced on it, but they were always there. The idea of posting with an AI voice, em-dashes and all, would likely have still appealed to them if you'd asked 5-10 years ago. Nowadays it takes hardly any energy for them to have a persistent voice.
I also define "slop" in a similar way. However, I specifically define it as creations that lack soul or originality. And can actually have a high degree of quality in some aspects, as you can see with some AI generated art and music. Because of this, I'm tempted to adopt a different term since "slop" feels too negative
Slop has always been around. AI has cheapened its creation.
Depends on how good the slop fork machine is, the act of true original creation is a messy and long process if it can be replicated to death immediately basically for free its not viable anymore
then it isn't a slop fork machine anymore is it? i was under the impression that the best the SFM would get is generating... how do I say this? high quality low quality work. Basically, the ability to cheaply produce quality work, characterized by its lack of soul/originality. think amazing looking advertisement graphics. not to say that it can't do better than that. just meant it as an extreme example for illustrative purposes
If something is able to generate things with soul and true originality... we're talking about something incredible, a new intelligent species potentially
It doesnt have to able to generate original things, its enough to be able to detect what makes it original and replicate the original thing with enough variations in different contexts to be able to be destructive and render the true original thing completely useless
what you described is not how originality works.
think about how in music, when an artist comes out with something original and awesome, and then everyone starts copying it and creating their own derivative works, like Jimi Hendrix or something.
Did Hendrix become useless? Did everyone end up thinking he sucks or something? No, he is even more revered, as the originator of a new type of sound that probably created multiple genres
The same thing applies here. Originality will be valued and even empowered as extrapolation and development off of it can increase in speed and quality in the case you mention
> then it isn't a slop fork machine anymore is it?
True, but some nuance is that a LOT of artist/creative types lean exclusively on the mechanical skill needed to create, without anything really much to say. They also very frequently copy other's styles, etc.
I'm not defending AI pumping out crap, but this also shows a lot of folks don't have much to offer beyond the mechanical aspects and we shouldn't glorify churning out stuff by hand as high art either.
This honestly makes me feel ambivalent, as on the one hand, it is awesome that it is pushing creatives to be more original, but on the other hand it does threaten these types of creatives who have invested time into making this their livelihood :/
Yeah same, I'm definitely not applauding it, but it has felt like coming for a long time even before AI recently.
Really? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now.
For example, I want to make:
- A mini OS on top of SeL4
- A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust.
- My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends
- A local first data store, built on top of CRDTs
- My own programming language
And lots more.
Each of these projects on their own would take months of time. If LLMs can speed up development, that's great! I don't care if nobody else uses what I make. I want a personal computer full of my own software.
I feel the same way as you. But was unfortunately not surprised to see the replies you are getting here.
There are a ton of opportunities available right now to make new things. And make them better, more customizable, and more sovereign.
To the replies: be the change you want to see in the world, guys. That may be trite but focusing only on the negative will just make your own life shitty.
Leisure projects for me at least are about the personal challenge and achievement. If the LLM does it, you achieved nothing.
I'm glad that you find achievement in the personal challenge. At home, I'm just getting things done. Small things, bigger things, and best of all I get to pet the dog more while it works in the background.
Yeah so don't bother. I don't write code at home. What's the point? I go on holiday once a month!
Are you assuming that "using a LLM" automatically means "vibe coding"?
Is it not engineering anymore even if you micromanage and relegate the machine to a better typist, following patterns and doing research around?
*Make anything "new"
Everything I want to make is new. I don't understand the objection.
For example, the photo backup system I want to make will let me manage my ~400gb photo library. I want my library backed up on a couple devices, running linux and freebsd. I want my mac and iphone to have a local mirror of all the favorited photos, and when I'm at home, I want to be able to browse all photos from those devices by streaming them over the local network. I want native macos & ios app interfaces to view and manage all that.
I don't know any existing software that meets my requirements. I don't think any such software exists. Apple, Dropbox and Google will solve this problem for me if I store all my photos in their cloud and pay them an ongoing subscription for the privilege. I'd much rather make something myself, and back up my photos on my own hard drives.
Making something like this is simple enough, but very time consuming. If claude can take the drudgery out of it, well, I think that's just delightful.
What's your time and life worth? You pay Apple to deal with it (which I do) and get to live a peaceful life and go out and take photos and have experiences. Or do you spend weeks implementing your own solution with Claude. The latter is considerably higher cost in time and money.
AI is seen as a way out of drudgery but you're just trading one problem for another.
The implementation is part of the fun.
So why would you buy it off of Anthropic?
In any activity you can take shortcuts that makes it easier. It's up to you how many (if any) you want.
Take woodworking for example. When I build a kitchen cabinet, I can get lumber that's already smooth and treated, I can buy drawer tracks, I can use power tools instead of a handsaw and a screwdriver, I can use a pocket hole jig to make joints easier. I still have to do more planning and assembling than with the Ikea cabinet, which also takes more work than having a contractor do everything for me.
I'm doing it my way because it's fun for me. Other people might enjoy other parts of the process - or different things altogether.
There's a whole spectrum between doing everything from scratch and paying someone to have it done for you.
I don't understand the question. For one thing I use local models mainly, but even if I didn't, I'd be buying the tokens from cloud model providers, not the prepackaged, fully complete software itself. I buy the tokens to make what I want.
It's actually quite similar to buying the services of a programmer off Upwork to build something for me, only with LLMs it's way cheaper and faster, with a shorter feedback loop.
I think their point is that you aren't really doing the implementing, Claude (or any model really) is. If you genuinely find prompting LLMs to be fun, then by all means go for it.
Interesting that you think building is just coding.
What do you think architects do? Or interior designers? Or civil engineers?
Interesting that you think coding is writing down code. Code is just a language where the problem is specified in fine detail; the biggest value proposition of an LLM is being able to hand-wave and let some other tool take care of guessing at detail, where you can't be bothered to specify it in full.
Architecture certainly isn't building, and neither is interior design. Civil engineers calculate and specify the loads in excruciating detail, because if they didn't, people would die.
Take a look at https://immich.app/
Ente photos is one thing and there are others.
You can accomplish most of that by installing Syncthing.
But the objection is that you’re not really building anything new even if you think it’s a new idea. By your definition you’re building for yourself and not sharing…so what good are your little projects. Reading your original list it just seems like you want to build and run software without having to do any research, even if a solution already exists.
The issue is maintenance. If you want to use these projects for important things, you need to maintain them. If you don't want to maintain them, I can't see myself using them for anything important.
I actually want less software for myself. Less things to maintain. I've become a "digital minimalist" in that I use very few software, only ones maintained by others who can afford and are willing to keep them working.
I support this take especially since you added the "I don't care if nobody else uses what I make", but you should at least acknowledge what you're talking about is pretty unrelated to the article, as the author's entire context seems to be making something for other people to use and building it together with other people.
Since you said you want to make those things that you list, I assume none of these things have been built yet. If so, I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build. But even if the maintainence cycle won't be as exciting, since you are the sole user you have the advantage of being able to proceed at a leisurely pace even while doing maintainence work.
In a professional setting, the dopamine hit of being able to build something quickly that works in an area that you have little to no knowledge in makes you more dependent on the AI in the maintaince cycle as you want to chase that dopamine high by maintaining the same development speed. This in turn leads to a bigger burnout crash after that peak dopamine hit. Maintainence is a phase of diminishing returns even without AI, but when your coding agents are introducing new bugs at record pace with their bugfixes with no new features to write home about you are in a special place in Hell.
I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow.
If something like the Ladybird browser, or any browser that is "built by scratch", achieved Chrome parity in six months and consistently maintained the same level of stability with continuous releases then I would see that as proof that this approach has become professionaly sustainable.
The reason people are getting away with so much using AI is because of the open secret in most enterprise engineering practices: the customer cares more about the response time for fixes they report than they do about overall or longterm product quality.
And you're actually excited by the prospect of buying them from Anthropic instead of making them?
Open weight models exist and are good enough to make the projects above.
And you're actually excited about these table scraps that companies couldn't even monetize, rather than making something?
Couldn't even monetize? DeepSeek and Alibaba with Qwen are doing quite well, no table scraps required. I am making things, I don't have to physically type letters on a keyboard to make things as long as the output of what I want exists.
>and yet we all function well
Sure...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/694199/u.s.-depression-rate-rem...
>this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
Between the endless slop, loneliness and depression epidemics, record low reading comprehension, attention shortage, we're not in any pinnacle today. We're in a regression from a few decades ago, getting worse.
> Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
How? It's undermining what the human intellicence is made from, learning.
Hasn't all automation up to this point been same input equals same output though? Automation using LLMs feels different to anything before and I don't think there's a comparative time in history to point at and say "look it happened before and we are now better off"
I think we all been fooled by the sentence: "It's yet another automation, it's like horses were replaced by cars". It is not. Industrialization and automation is about manual labor. LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking. And while I'll give two thumbs up for using ML(there is not 'I' in 'AI') as a technology for some tasks, outsourcing thinking is an evolutionary dead-end.
Thank you for writing what I want to scream every time a comparison is made to some archaic technology change.
Its advertised as outsourcing thinking, but I doubt many serious people making serious things actually outsourced their thinking very much. I definitely outsource my typing, search, and LSP interaction!
>LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking.
No it isn't. I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.
If you also outsource thinking to it, that's your choice though. Or the company's choice. But ultimately the free market will deiced with products made using LLMs outcompete those made without.
It shouldn't be used for that either. The problem is our programming languages and tools are shit so we made another expensive tool to drive them.
I've said this elsewhere before but I single-handedly produced more actual tangible business value with Microsoft Access than anything else since. What was an hour's work is now a procurement process and thousands of lines of tedious configuration and boilerplate that involves pipelines and tens of services all coordinated and hosted by someone who has created a moat to extract money out of me.
All I want is a fucking report.
The LLM makes us blind to the gigantic fucking shit show we built.
Recently, I had some data for which I wanted some graphs. I uploaded the .jsonl file, and prompted "make a html page and graph this data using plotly". I wanted a report, and got a report, quicker than I could have made it myself.
> I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.
Do you really though?
Here's a question: how many times do you visit claude.ai or open Claude Code (or whatever harness you use) (or use whatever model you prefer) to help you solve a problem, ask it a question, etc.?
One thing I've noticed, which seems to go completely unmentioned, is how these LLM tools are like drugs. It can pump out thousands of lines of code ---> it can write my entire program for me ---> I've written quite a few programs with it and I don't write a single line anymore ---> I go to it for what would normally be things I could do on my own. The problem is that this isn't some immediate thing: like a drug, it sneaks up on you and you don't even realize it until it's far, far too late. I've been programming since I was 13 and I've just now started to notice the deskilling that's been happening to me. I've just now started noticing how often I'll visit Claude Web for something I should be able to do on my own. Nobody really seems to mention this, or it's repharsed as a good thing. And I don't get it: how is undergoing cognitive surrender a "good" thing by any metric other than the metric a beancounter would use? What worries me is that I fear this is happening to way, way more people than those who actually bring it up, potentially yourself included, and you just haven't yet realized it because you haven't really thought about it. That is ultimately what this "AI revolution" is going to bring. It's what the billionaires want, and what they want is usually what they get because the systems we've built are set up to not constrain them.
Moreover, historical events and processes are unique, even if there are some similarities. Nothing that happened in the past can give us certainty on what will happen now.
It’s worse— it’s seeking to replace every single aspect of what it means to be YOU in the world. Some people are literally trying to “fire themselves” and be replaced with digital twins. Perhaps those people are independently wealthy and also have no need of human connection? For the rest of us, it is a sickening prospect.
AI is automated irresponsibility, and it is nothing like any earlier transition.
When a technology trend means people literally won’t be able to tell if you are living or dead, and also stop caring about the difference— that’s unprecedented in the history of humans.
The automation at least built unimaginable amounts of wealth for the rich people while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
>while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
How can people say false things like this with a straight face?
Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to death, cars, planes, MRI machines, helicopter ambulances, vaccines, personal heating and air conditioning, OZEMPIC, etc
Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Meanwhile the cool homeless guy outside my building has 3 hot meals a day and a daily shower in the homeless shelter nearby, warm clean sleeping bag for winter, shades for summer, a bicycle for moving around town, a smartphone which he uses to watch youtube all day in his sleeping bag, plus access to medical care that kings of kings never had. All this with no job, and no care in the world.
Because most of the poor people in the world (majority of the population of the planet actually) have no access to clean water, food or medical care or education and that is the same as it was hundreds of years ago.
They get food, water infrastructure and medical aid from foreign aid. And then a local warlord steals the food and destroys the water infrastructure, to enslave them, just like hundreds of years ago. If you lack the foundational values to self organize as a functioning society, then it's just gonna be like that for a long time.
Mainly all due to what is the spiritual successor to slave labor, not industrialization.
You can thank people dying in Chinese and African mines to extract the resources to build your planes and MRI machines.
You can thank the people working tirelessly until their hands are crippled in bengladesh to make the cheap clothes that make it seem to your western eyes that a poor person here can live a life of luxury. Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rana_Plaza_collapse
hit them and kills a thousand under your total westoid apathy.
You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet. They have suicide prevention nets so that their precious slave labor doesn't die from jumping from their buildings. How amazing.
>the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Indeed, the wealth that kings couldn't dream of hundreds of years ago, because kings back then didn't have the power a billionaire can wield today to pollute, enslave and ruin millions of lives at a scale that makes things like the Napoleon wars look like a footnote to history.
>All this with no job, and no care in the world.
This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people. You are blind to the reality of the humans you are exploiting.
>Mainly all due to what is the spiritual successor to slave labor, not industrialization.
Firstly, industrialization is what led to the abolishment of slavery in the west, because owning machines was making you more money than slaves, and it was the west who fought the seas to stop slavery internationally, to the disappointment of slave owners in Africa who were enslaving their own people before the western slave trade began. So you can stop blaming the west for slavery now. The age of English and Dutch slave trade boats is long gone, we don't have MRI machines because of slaves.
>Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
100% nobody cares because they have their own government who is accountable to them. What should other countries do about it when it's their own government killing them. I also don't expect other countries to care about the deaths and issues in my country since our politicians are to blame, not foreigners. People care about their immediate family members, they don't care about random people on the other side of the planet dying in some domestic accident. It's just how it is.
>You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet.
Just a couple of days ago there was a post here on the front page of shipping a used Macbook from Australia to a student in Ghana. It's precisely because western investments in technology and Chinese mines and sweatshop factories that people in countries like Ghana can have cheap laptops and cheap smartphones to access the internet and gain higher education for well paying IT jobs on the international market. So thank you and you're welcome.
>This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people.
Humans were always divided into classes of people ever since human species existed, they were never equal and they never will be equal, this is a human trait, not something billionaires created, they were just the best today at rising to the top within this human inequality system that has always existed and will always exist.
Need I remind you communism also existed based on the ideals of equalizing everyone, and so everyone was equally poor except of course the ruling elites, while also having no MRI machines.
"Humans were always divided into classes of people ever since human species existed, they were never equal and they never will be equal, this is a human trait, not something billionaires created, they were just the best today at rising to the top within this human inequality system that has always existed and will always exist."
Woah the air is thick with BS.
Just because someone is rich doesn't mean they're better smarter hard working or anything more than anyone else. They've just had particular circumstances in their lives. Most societies are not truly meritocratic where the most competent and skilled people would succeed. This is not the determining factor. Education is a great example of this when in many countries not everyone has equal access to education. People do not have equal access to resources or networks or support structures to become entrepreneurs. To start a business or to study or to become whatever they could be.
Eventually People may not be equal or have equal skills and talents and that's fine but everyone should have an equal opportunity.
> Did they teach history where you're from? Humans were always divided into classes of people ever since human species existed, they were never equal and they never will be equal, this is a human trait, not something billionaires created, they were just the best at rising to the top within this human inequality system that has always existed.
If anyone could use a history or anthropology lesson, it is you.
What you stated is simply not true, and we have plenty of ethnographical and archeological evidence for that.
You simply repeat ideology of the current times.
Last but not least, your parent speaks of dividing whole countries into classes. I don't know what billionaires have to do with it.
>What you stated is simply not true, and we have plenty of ethnographical and archeological evidence for that.
Can you post some of that evidence? How many MRI machines and missions to the moon, did those "egalitarian" civilizations develop?
So which do you mean:
1. None of that is necessary to having planes and MRI machines, so what you're replying to is basically correct,
or
2. We should rouse ourselves from apathy in order to give up planes and MRI machines, and even out the poverty, which is eternal.
> All this with no job, and no care in the world.
Have you ever been without a job and/or homeless to say shit like this?
yes. Have you?
Also, how nice of you to ignore my entire argument on how the poor today are NOT as poor as they were hundreds of years ago, and instead sidetrack the conversation one offtopic tangent for a cheap jab in the name of scoring some emotional virtue signaling brownie points.
> Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.
> Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Wealth has no intrinsic value, only relative one. You are only wealthy relatively to other members of the society. Doesn't matter if pharaohs had less comfortable lives than me. What matters is that a gap between pharaoh and a worker working on pyramids was way smaller than between Jeff Bezos and person working at the Amazon distribution center.
Also, most sweet fruits of progress that its prophets like to enumerate are not direct consequences of technological changes, but they came only after political struggle that has arisen exactly because the direct consequences were very dire for most people. If people pushing today for AI could decide on these things, they would be very happy to take away these hot meals from homeless people and let them starve to death.
>Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.
You don't have to participate in globalism, you can be a hermit state that doesn't trade with the evil imperial capitalists, like Cuba and North Korea. Everyone wants to live there because the QoL is so good.
And it so good, because west extracted wealth and materials from all around the world places, and still extracts through globalisation.
QoL is so good here precisely because it is so poor out there.
>because west extracted wealth and materials from all around the world places
If those "around the world places" had all the valuable resources that enabled modern civilisation when the west came and took them, why weren't they the ones to first make use of them to build computers, vaccines, MR machines and moon rockets, or at least clean drinking water and indoor sanitation facilities for their people?
Or why didn't those "around the world places" then go and extract wealth and materials from the west instead? What stopped them? Surely it wasn't their moral values, since war, slavery and genocide even cannibalism, of their neighboring tribes and nations, was the norm of the day over there.
>and still extracts through globalisation
Correction: "pays for it through globalisation". That's how countries like India and China got so many people out of poverty after globalisation.
No, because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.
Machinists and lathe operators became CNC operators, they didn't lose their jobs, just that instead of turning the inputs by hand, they punch numbers in a machine, but the advent of CNC didn't mean anyone off the street can now punch numbers in the machine and replace the machinists since you still need the years of training and experience.
SW devs will be the new CNC operators, about knowing what data to input and how to wrangle the slop machine to get the desired output faster and better than your competition.
> No because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.
For now. Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?
If you're a programmer, your skills have been devalued significantly in the last 12 months. What makes you think the remaining value you offer will be required 12 months from now?
What are your plans if you truly think that that's the future?
> What are your plans if you truly think that that's the future?
I don't have any - thinking is the only non-cattle job left for humans to do; if we outsource thinking for all of humanity, we're an evolutionary dead-end.
>Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?
I don't have a crystal ball. In 4 years whoever is US president might start another war and fuck the whole planet back to the stone age. Nobody will know what will happen in 4 years so why worry about it?
This article was very eye-opening for me. I think I understand the author's pain and I could certainly feel it while reading the article. The fact that it was "the people" that made the difference kind of surprised me, and then I realized it was because I have seldom had the experiences he's had and that this might have a major impact on the way I (and others) view the technology.
For me, building software has often been a solitary process in which I was far more obsessed with it than those around me. I'm not in a tech-heavy area and I don't have a ton of well-informed people to talk to about programming, software engineering, or AI. I have had experiences like the author in which I needed to learn a new technology or a new language but ended up doing so on my own at home, not with the assistance of a much more knowledgeable developer with significantly more experience.
To me LLMs have left us in a situation where the following things are true and moving forward lies somewhere in figuring out how to reconcile / resolve these things:
- You can use LLMs and learn things or not learn things; this is a result of the approach, desire, and willpower of the user.
- There is a level of skill associated with using LLMs much like nearly everything else in existence. The user's skill level impacts their perception of the technology and also affects the way those around them view the technology. Unskilled users will generate more negative sentiment.
- Some people love to do the things the machine is good at and do not want the machine to do them, while others hate to do the things the machine is good at and want the machine to do them. I realized at some point this year that I don't love programming anywhere near as much as I love building and designing systems and solving problems.
- Software development is many things wrapped up in one and talking about it as a single thing makes it more confusing. Some people like to think through the logic of the application and have an LLM write the code while others want the LLM to think up the solution, implement it, and test it. These are two very different people with likely different goals and different desires.
- When someone else looks at Claude or ChatGPT they might see something completely different than what you see.
I hope some of this resonates with others.
Very well said. And I'm in the same camp. I've very rarely had someone with whom I could interact, bounce off ideas, brainstorm regarding the nitty gritty of code. Most of the time, I've had to dig through books, online articles and create my own mental framework of how things work.
And this has held me up in good stead.
Now with AI, I've found a tool from which I can learn, show me the right way to do things, and explain in detail what has been done. I can ask questions, point out mistakes, go back and forth on different implementations and at the end of it, come out a better programmer.
As many commentators have mentioned, AI means different things to different people. For me, it has been empowering, enlightening, and humbling.
There have always been so many things to learn, but never enough time. Now, it doesn't quite feel that way.
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
I'm all for open models, open source agents, etc. I don't want to give more power to the big corps, though. Imagine what software engineering could become in 5 years if all thse big corporations gain even more power over us. It's a terrifying scenario (e.g., pay more so we don't show you ads in between claude code prompts; pay more so that the produced code doesn't incrust ads in your app...). Do you really want the same shitty experience we have now in the global internet, but deeply ingrained in your software engineering workflows?
There were lots of proprietary database companies in the 70s-90s when they first came out (Oracle, IBM, Sybase, SQL Server), but these days open source databases are the default. Everyone's making so many wild predictions based off the current state of LLMs. We don't know how the market will unfold.
Even in regards to programming competency and the culture of vibecoding, it's similar to the early stages of electric cars where they fill some roles better than ICE engines, but it's still a decade away from doing the same job. And the whole time there was people trashing electric cars as a novelty/impractical/expensive/dangerous/etc because the infrastructure wasn't there yet and the technology was immature.
The only real moat pattern we see is datacenters being hotly in demand but even those will scale up and commoditize, RAM manufacturing will catch up etc.
It seems to me that the article is creating a false dichotomy where either you don't use AI at all, or you delegate every aspect of the work to AI. This simply isn't how it works in practice. You get to choose how much of the work you delegate to AI. There's still an enormous amount of space for human expertise, community, and enthusiasm for technology.
The public debate around AI makes me think of the cognitive distortions discussed in cognitive behavioral therapy. In particular, all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing. These are often symptoms of anxiety or psychosis. I sometimes wonder whether entire societies can experience these symptoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortion#Decatastr...
> This simply isn't how it works in practice. You get to choose how much of the work you delegate to AI. There's still an enormous amount of space for human expertise, community, and enthusiasm for technology.
I agree, especially with my own projects. Except you don't always get to choose in the workplace. Now that teams are being measured by PR throughput and token usage, you will look "worse" next to the person who is totally vibecoding. My fear is that if I don't vibecode, I'll be passed up for promotion.
The indicators that vibecoding may be bad, are lagging. What I mean is that issues that come up from vibecoding whether its performance, service degradation, massive data migrations etc. will always show up later.
Exactly. To be fair, there would be people in both camps (all-in and no-go) and they would be the vocal ones.
Those are the minority. The majority will find the middle ground.
I think this post is either LLM-written, or written in a standard blogpost style of today which is increasingly becoming LLM-like. Sam Kriss had a good recent post pointing out some of the "tells": https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...
That Sam Kriss article is a wonderful read!
"If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you"
Thank you for posting.
I definitely don't have time for AI-generated crap. I've got to get back to asking Claude to write code for me. ;)
Most humans derive their purpose and meaning from their work. Has always been that way. What do you think happens when you remove meaning from people’s lives at scale? It won’t be pretty.
It's not about removing meaning. A normal thoughtful person can surely come up with things to do and occopy their lives with. In fact for most of people work just gets in the way of that.
What's it about is once you remove the paycheck that all proletariats need when things get "interesting".
I hear this all the time but where is the explosion in people learning art, music, increased time with friends and family, etc… instead it’s all the opposite. We’re using all our extra free time to doomscroll.
What extra free time? Have we gotten more of that in the last years? From what I can see, everyone is still working full time jobs, needing to make more money than ever in recent history to survive.
They shouldn't do this.
> What do you think happens when you remove meaning from people’s lives at scale?
You get some AI-slop like this:
> Your AI email deliverability specialist that tests and fixes your emails — backed by a Top-Rated expert.
I am a senior php dev, and I was recently transferred to a Ruby on Rails project. It's completely foreign to me. Our client has advised us to use LLMs as much as possible. The problem is that it's virtually impossible to learn a codebase when you're using AI to do the coding. You never see more than a few lines of code at a time unless you purposefully dig in, but you might not have the time given velocity demands. And yes, it also results in nobody on the team really knowing any area of the code inside-out. It's very very different from my previous 25 years of coding, and I do enjoy it less, but...
>>It (software development) is sincerely an art form; A craft that takes >>dedication, perseverance and especially, a strong community to endure. >>Software was built by humans, for humans.
100 years ago, you could only buy furniture made by crafts people. Real artisans. Now you have a choice: IKEA or hand made Most people choose IKEA because they don't care how it was made, as long as it does the job There are still those who prefer hand made furniture, and they pay a pretty penny for it. I think that's where this is heading, and I agree it's unfortunate. Software development will become a hobby (many people do wood working in their spare time). There will be a few real experts left, who largely do consulting. Maybe they create training data? Maybe they design frameworks for the AI to master. I don't know. But things sure are going to be different from here on out, and not entirely for the better.
>>If it’s not built by humans, then who is it being built for?
Right now it's built by AI for humans (and sometimes other AI). Very soon it'll be built by AI for other AI (and sometimes humans). Later it'll be built by AI primarily for AI (rarely humans).
By the way, where I live you can still buy furniture from crafts people. I bought by bed from a local shop, it was not expensive at all and I was pretty happy about it.
Perhaps check in your country if that isn’t true as well, people automatically assume IKEA killed all local shops, but there are many out there if you search for them.
I buy ikea because I can't afford to pay an artisan, there aren't enough left to produce enough to bring the price down
I can relate to this article. My reaction to what is happening is also: "Leave me behind".
However, missing the joy of the old-school way of growing as a developer is not only the wrong reason, but also very dangerous according to Darwin.
Our customers don't care about how it is made after all, but they do care about long-term support, costs, and predictability, etc.
But I'm not sure whether we can say we made a real net positive progress in the industry. The whole thing is a big mess. In many cases, AI moves us in the same direction in turbo mode, making it not only messier and more expensive but also dangerous.
I tell them, "Leave me alone", as I see this mess as an opportunity if you think the right way, starting from the first principles.
Maybe our customers do care about how it's made.
Its a lot more fun when you start playing around with finetuning different models, learning basic differences in their architecture and co.
You can experiment with different agent harnesses (pi, hermes, opencode, goose, ..) do experiemnets with gastown and paperclip ai.
I also get a lot of fun at experimenting with ideas i have and had were the focus is not the pure programming language but the application.
But i do think and we will see, as soon as there are clear winners of agentic platforms, we will finetune and adjust these agents.
This really resonates with me, and reminds me of all that I've missed in the years since COVID and going full remote. There's magic in a room when a mob programming session results in a breakthrough that just can't ever be replicated remotely. Not sure I'd jump to sign up for a daily commute again, especially where I live now, an hour away from a major city without traffic, but I do miss that.
Just do it the way you want to do it and have fun [1] (I've recently started doing streams where I showcase a mix of AI + manual coding and why I think that's best).
The "powers that be" would prefer if you sideline yourself. Instead, pop a bird and say "thank you kind sir, but no."
[1] https://youtu.be/KqQpYgvrEqM?si=gfGCOqgmF4iy4077
One of the things I really don’t understand about the “learn or youll be left behind” sentiment is it also comes from people saying “we’re building PhDs in a box!” It cannot both be the case that AI is something challenging enough to use that a current software engineer can’t learn how to use it and that the promises of these tools are fulfilled.
You won't be left behind because you don't know how to use them - as you say, it doesn't take that much time to be at useful proficiency - but you will be left behind if you refuse to engage with them at all.
We we all be left behind my friend. Soon enough.
> “If you don’t learn how to use AI, you’re going to be left behind.”
I don't subscribe to that even to begin with. Learning "how to use AI" in a a dev workflow takes less than a month, just by practice. Assuming "how to use AI" refers to using agents, rather than just a more advanced auto complete, once you've made the couple of mistakes you can make a couple of times (mainly, leave the coding agent to do something too big for too long), you're caught up. Maybe it take a little more time to get the habits into your workflow.
Leveraging a LLM for coding is orders of magnitude simpler than the code it's writing, and the skills you need to review said code.
I don't think AI changed anything at all to the possibility of communicating between humans. This is a job that you've always been able to do alone in your cave.
Really? How do you learn how to code with out communicating with another human? Which man pages in a general Linux install will teach you all you need to know? Without communication you get no books, no StackOverflow, no-LLMs even. You were allowed to do it alone but we can't pretend humans communicating isn't how most of the available knowledge for your perusal came to be.
It has. Some utter morons seem to run everything they receive and send through it at work.
I have a spreadsheet now of people I can't be fucked with.
Like the artisans/craftsmen in many places (especially Japan), hand craft will always carry enduring meaning — machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. But historically at least, they can replace over 99.9% of it.
> machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands.
What about 'machines' with hands and human-level cognition?
I don't have a quantitative way to argue this, but my intuition says that for humans to build something that matches human capability across every dimension would require a breakthrough at the physical level — and such a breakthrough may itself be bounded by the limits of humans as observers.
That said, this goal might itself be a non-goal. AI is going to be — or already is — more powerful than any individual human in many ways. But what my intuition points to is that humans will still have plenty of interesting work to do, like the author's example of handwriting code: it shifts from being scalable value creation into a form of craftsmanship.
This ship has sailed.
I absolutely understand this sentiment. I've been working in tech since the late 90s and I have had MORE than my share of let-me-off-this-ride moments.
But this post (and the many I see like it) feels like giving up. And now's not the time for empathetic people to give up.
Technology is how we expand human capability. We are well within our rights to pick and choose how we interact with that capability. But it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out. Billionaires are doing a remarkable job at making their vision of the future seem inevitable. Don't fall for it.
If more people aren't willing to help us steer this capability towards a better future, then we all know how this ends.
> it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out
Maybe it's just that the capability is bad. Adtech, for example, isn't something that anyone uses for good. They blow a lot of smoke about it--looking at you, Apple--but despite the "good-washing" it's all just the same extractive, invasive, dehumanizing business. Bad people will naturally concentrate around this capability. I know because I've worked with a few of them.
AI coding tools seem like they're engineered to undermine cautious, rigorous, and pragmatic engineering discipline. Of course the bosses want that, they see a short term path to massive output increases and nothing sounds better. They'll be cashed out by the time the mess needs to be cleaned up, that's someone else's problem. People who are predisposed to this kind of antisocial behavior are the ones who concentrate around AI tools. Rigorous, careful engineers who care about building maintainable systems that will outlast their tenure find less value in them.
I think it's more nuanced than
> Technology is how we expand human capability.
I think as a general statement about technology as a whole it's true. But do all technologies expand human capabilities? I don't think so.
In my mind, I would separate technology from its application.
Advertising tech and AI coding tools are applications of technology stacks that could have been used to create what you and I might agree to be "better" tools. I don't need to tell you why ad tech got created instead of something that is a net societal benefit.
At the same time, I would say that, yes, those applications do indeed expand human capabilities. The important nuance here is whose capability, and to what end.
All I am saying is that opting out of this, in whatever form that takes, hands your agency over to those who would use it to enrich themselves at the cost of others. I sincerely feel that decades of this type of capitulation is exactly how we got to where we are today.
Could adtech really be used for something better? The capability is to precisely model users' emotional reward centers and then bombard them with content that targets those reward centers. Is there any way you can imagine this being used for good? Even if you do it in the least bad, privacy preserving way possible you're still messing with people's minds on a massive scale. Sure, that's a capability alright! I can't imagine a decent use of that capability, though. In my view it's one that should be prevented via regulation and treaties, much like weapons of mass destruction.
Unlike weapons of mass destruction, though, there's nothing to be gained by working on adtech. Let me unpack that a bit--a "good guy" can justify working on nuclear weapons because if he doesn't his country will be unable to defend itself when the treaties break down. There's no similar existential threat with adtech. If I choose to not work on that poison, I'm not leaving any advantage on the table. My agency in this situation is worthless. At least that conclusion is why I don't do adtech anymore.
I broadly agree with your bigger point though. To the extent that AI coding tools are useful it's important to explore their use, and evaluate whether they're any good. But if I'm in a company that's forcing their use, or putting up token use leaderboards, or any of the other horror stories we've been hearing about, you can be damn sure I'd get myself fired or quit. At that point the inmates are running the asylum, and there's no reason to stay.
Nice read, and agreed, leave me behind. I have been telling people that I am running a John Henry experiment with LLMs. I don't use them just so I can prove the human is better than the machine, even if it leaves me in the dirt like John.
Summarize this text into one or two paragraphs.
Oops, wrong input field.
> but it is a necessity to maintain humanity in software development
Seems like I'm reading the pope encyclical
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics
Yeah yeah back to Reddit
For real though: you can keep doing artisanal hand-written code as a hobby. Just like you can still write a web server in assembly if you really want to. But that’s just not how professional software development is done anymore. Just a new tool, I don’t think it’s as deep as the author is making it out to be.
The lack of humanity or ability to empathize with someone else’s feelings displayed in these comments, instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
It also is a great example of why AI has such a PR problem among normal people.
Exactly this.
I’m forever getting asked for help by people who suddenly value the human experience when their machine god fails them.
Sometimes fuck ‘em because they devalued me first.
Frustratingly, these attitudes have been around long before LLMs, and they'll continue to exist long after. To those individuals who have staunchly refused to broaden their horizons or empathize with their fellow man, these posts are direct threats to the wagons they've hitched themselves to, a challenge to their own narrow passions because they exist in a zero-sum environment where if even one person doesn't think and act like them, then clearly they're in the obvious wrong.
Conflating a preference for manual creation with opposition to the existence of a tool should be the single biggest signal flare that they are someone who will not argue with you in good faith. They're the ones who barnstorm every single one of these posts to denigrate the author rather than even attempt to empathize with their plight or evaluate the validity of their arguments. Surely the current cohort of HN commenters have seen this repeatedly in just the past five years as technical circles have jumped from cryptocurrency to blockchain to NFTs to LLMs to GenAI; every single one is a "must have", every single one something we "must learn or be left behind forever", and every single one refused to be evaluated on its merits in favor of simply embracing something new for its novelty.
I have given up debating with these people, because they do not wish for debate, they wish for dominance. I have better things to do with my time - as do you, as do all of us - than to give a moment of consideration to a viewpoint that relies on pithy quotes out of context and a reductionist narrative of history to justify their own superiority over others, in lieu of nuanced discourse.
Remember that it is not the obligation of the status quo to defend itself, rather the obligation belongs to those advocating changes to justify and defend their position and its benefits. In that regard, the pro-AI camp continues to come up hollow and empty.
Wonderfully put, thank you. Ultimately, we’re supposed to be “engineers,” and that means (for our jobs) assessing tools and practices in terms of their net benefit on the products we create: there is no free lunch, and a thing’s downside is often proportional to its upside, so it seems wise to approach these things with caution and to have the kind of nuanced discussions that you note have been lacking.
I’d also hope, though, that as humans, we can recognize that tools do not exist in a vacuum, and that their effect on ourselves and society at large can be net negative even if they have a net positive effect on our work (whether due to something fundamental to the tool or due to the way it is being applied at scale). We can’t responsibly leave these discussions out of our analysis of the tool itself and its fitness for purpose, because we are members of society, and our adoption/use of the tool helps to determine that societal impact.
> instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
I’ll be the devil’s advocate and suggest that it might not be AI usage, but the technology attracting vilest scum of the Earth. It’s just they were staying mostly silent before, or wasted someone else’s time in different circles.
Ok you're doing exactly what GP said, but in the opposite direction
people need to reframe coding agent usage. i see a lot of framing in zero-sum terms where it's either all dev or all agent, and then people start dooming and glooming over the latter. in reality it's like that one post on here a few days ago about it being like an iron man suit. it is a glowing, bright white power that can be incredible when wielded properly. unfortunately, people characterize it as an adversarial power that can and will take over your soul.
how about some true synergy instead of boring zero-sum people? smh. the true poetry here is that zero-sum thinking will become more of a thing of the past so there is some natural comedy with this title
This is some anecdata, but I'll share it nonetheless as I have a pretty wide network of software and security engineer friends from which I've heard the following.
Almost no one I know wants agent usage to be a zero-sum activity. There are a few oddballs who obviously only got into software for the money, so any means to that end is acceptable. That does not stop those with say-so over things like employment (and, if you're in the USA, the associated healthcare), from treating it as a zero-sum activity.
When engineers are being told to maximize token usage, are constantly being brought into meetings where they're expected to reveal their latest and greatest use of LLMs, and not using enough tokens in your role is seen as a negative, then the pressure starts to creep in. Yes, I know this is silly to most people who read this site, and I agree. It's bonkers. But there is certainly something to the idea of "AI psychosis" in upper management that is making agent use zero-sum company-wide.
That's good to know, because all I really go off of is what I see posted online which is most likely skewed towards the polarizing takes (been unemployed for a while). Sounds like some positive news though, and I hope that these tools can help empower people to the point where they don't feel shackled by their jobs by doing something like lowering the barrier and manpower needed to succeed at entrepreneurship.
That shit with upper management sounds stupid af and I've heard the same type of shit from people I know who are in other fields. I'm guessing it's happening from a combination of ignorance, FOMO, investment, etc etc. But that is more of a systemic issue than anything to do with these tools imo.
I'm in a position right now where I'm trying to decide if staying in my own field of information security is worth it to me. I have an entire project plan built out for using local models to do some crazy augmentation of my own skill set, e.g. malware development pipelines and vulnerability research.
My biggest problem as an independent contractor is marketing and notoriety. Security has been a race to the bottom for over a decade now, but it's gotten exponentially worse. LLMs can't just do my job, but there are enough people with checkbooks who believe that it can and enough companies out there with an incentive to confirm that belief that it's getting harder for me to find work organically.
This psychosis you keep referring to will only end up punishing the ones who subscribe to it wouldn't it? Since it's out of touch with reality.
If that's indeed the case, then it sounds like an opportunity to get ahead of them since you know they will trip and fall at some point.
That's what I make of what you're describing, while sleep deprived and having given it some light thought LOL. So take that with a lot of salt. But it's kind of what I've been thinking these days anyways. Add to that that entrepreneurship is most likely getting empowered, and I think investing in yourself is the move these days. It will probably characterize the coming years strongly.
I would like to think they'll be the only ones punished, should punishment come. And as a disclaimer for what I'm about to say, I'm neither a Wall Street banker nor an AI company executive, so I don't want to accidentally make a specious connection between the two, but...
The 2008 housing crisis affected everyone. Bubbles that get too big pop across the population, whether they're complicit or not. As a little guy in a big world, with no expertise to truly know if there's a meaningful difference, I have a bit of anxiety about it all. I just don't want to catch collateral.
well... shit
There is a saying in finance, "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
glad i gave that disclaimer to my advice then lol. my question then is, how long will that happen with AI psychotic upper management?
Per learning from others after encountering an unfamiliar problem, I think there are rose-tinted glasses here. 90%+ of the time, either someone else had already provided the relevant answer at Stack Overflow or I could find it on a documentation page, a blog. There is no social engagement then. Just search. That also hasn't gone away, as LLMs can also provide sources to justify their answers.
Per the human element, the author is in part relaying about formative experiences from youth that you won't easily repeat, and also experiences that are not decoupled from the work as it still exists, unless you are entirely remote, which is not a LLM-specific problem.
All of which to say, the emotional element behind it is valid, but the diagnosis is off the mark. I think the human element, should it be jeopardized, is in part through the complacent convenience of remote work and disinterest in community participation. But, communities still exist, and tech communities historically were always niche. As it stands they're probably bigger now than they ever were.
There are still new frontiers with software where LLMs will be less effective. Yes, there is less friction than before for learning technologies, but all this does is move the goalpost as we can accomplish more with our time.
Instead of hacking things out through trial and error on mature stacks (with or without others), you'll be closer to the cutting edge and have different problems. Many of which will still be technological in nature.
Its classic HN to dismiss the emotional cost of change as sunk cost stages of grief. A person is allowed to love their work and miss deep understanding, and allowed to be nostalgic for a preferred way of working. It's human and everything they have shared in this post is unequivocally true about software dev and moving into a career, arguably even before LLMs took over.
What I mean is that the thrilling buddy system coding starts to happen less frequently over a career, and the time for deep exploring and side projects is organically maximized early and during school.
While LLMs have forced that divide to be more stark, the human connection and sense of wonder has always required maintenance, and it's best to get into the habit of maintaining it before your 36th JIRA triage meeting in a week completely destroyed your love of the industry.
Well before LLMs I went through exactly what TFA describes when I had to adapt from grad school labs to industrial labs, then to project management or task leadership (even just filling in for my boss), and each new job has required me to say goodbye to great friends and colleagues and make new ones.
Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft, we all could probably write this post for our own reasons.
> Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft
This is not some kind of universal truth. I can see how being stuck in an unfulfilling job could lead you to say this. But for the last 20+ years I love the craft of writing efficient, dependable, understandable code more with every new insight from every hard-won experience.
What if you could finish your passion project in an evening? Would that increase not the time, but capacity for deep exploring and side projects?
Only if having a set of competed projects is what makes you happy. Some love learning and overcoming challenges.
This will inevitably lead to tired discussion of “there are two types of developers, those who care about the craft and those who want to get things” done. I believe that to be a false dichotomy, and will link to someone else’s comment in another thread who makes the argument that caring about the craft is part of caring about the product.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591796
More specifically to the submission, I’ll say I agree with the author. This “being left behind” fear mongering is an exhausting uncritical talking point. Life isn’t about rushing through the end and killing yourself to be “productive”. “Being left behind” is only bad if what’s “ahead” is an improvement to your situation, and that’s not a given. Humans aren’t built to be pushed to 11 without rest. Stopping to smell the roses is good. Immediatelly thinking “how can I kill these to package the smell to sell to others at a profit” is not.
Anyone still have some hope for humanity? Or yourselves as a person? Asking for a friend who thinks that the dark horizon has already swallowed all but our eyes, leaving us the brief observers of our oblivion
AI is repulsive. You either feel it, maybe not immediately, or don't. When you feel it, you'll rationalize it one way or another. The rationalization does not matter that much. It's essentially arbitrary and is a product of whatever experience you've accumulated so far. (E.g. could be a Communist rationalization of alienation under capitalism.) Yet the underlying feeling is true. Stick to it.
“So leave me behind.”
That’s easy to say for someone in their 50s who built wealth under favorable conditions.
But it’s quite ignorant and inhumane to say that to someone in their 20s who is just starting their career.
Too bad to see these boomer antics continue to be perpetuated.
The second sentence of TFA: "I learned to build Android applications in 2014. I was in college taking a Java programming class".
So this person's twelve years out of college. You may want to train your fire elsewhere.
???
But that's exactly my point. He got twelve good years out of it.
People in their 50s are not boomers.
>[...] these boomer antics continue to be perpetuated.
>continue to be perpetuated
The funniest thing about this post is that Java Android programming circa 2014 is somehow romanticized as "real programming." 2014 Android code has got to be peak corpo-slop with the most inane abstractions, unintuitive paradigms, and copy-paste boilerplate syndrome. Ironically, exactly why we need AI these days, since like 90% of the code you wrote didn't technically do anything.
It's apparently very funny though, cause the author was laughing a lot. Systems and embedded programmers like myself are grumpy af with or without AI
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics, trained on the years and years of dedication by brave engineers willing to learn and build in the open. Building in the open meant we were not gatekeeping technology, but creating tangible examples for young engineers to explore, understand, and learn from.
Another grief-post with people unable to cope with the fact that the whole structure of learning and work is going to change so they resort to pseudo nostalgia and romanticism. Not to mention that "They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics" is basically incorrect and belongs in 2024.
Not gonna pretend that this is anything other than the author's personal gripe with this whole thing, but this is really just the sunk cost fallacy with extra steps.
Even by trying to reassure (the reader? Himself?) that LLMs are just a tool for humans, he asserts in the final paragraph that software is no longer made by humans. Something something linotype operators.
What's your take on it?
You mean on his writing? My take is that most of the text is him grandiosely talking about the skillset he built is... somehow nullified with the appearance of AI and is taking the path of graphic artists that are focusing their no-AI work as craft.
He believes that AI is making him redundant and soul-less, and at the same time tries to minimize it by reminding everyone that LLMs are a tool - yet he argues that software can now be created without humans so his perception of AI is inconsistent at best.
This is the writing of a person with an existential crisis, which will be obviously egocentric by nature, and I wish the author the best. His approach is not too different of Japanese woodcarvers, Linotype experts switching to computers... there is no real mention about "AI creep" so the extent of AI usage is inconsequential. He has realized he mastered a craft that, as all types of crafts, are subject to technological advancement. At a personal level, it's a hard pill to swallow
For me it's incomprehensible how a tool that allows you to be 100 times more productive is derided as something we should never use for the sake of craftmanship. Same as shoemakers or horseback messengers 100 years ago. Those who fund the next Nike or FedEx will be the winners of this new race. AI is a tool, an exceptional tool for providing solutions.
But what does "100x more productive" mean for code quality and employment? Are we all going to adopt it as just another tool? Are 99% of the engineers going to get fired? Do all engineers need to become managers now?
> how a tool that allows you to be 100 times more productive
Because we don’t agree on this premise
"100 times more productive" is such a wild exaggeration. Do you understand that productivity is not equal to lines of code written? Yeah, AI can write many lines of code very quickly. Productivity is about making something economically valuable. Are you producing 100 times more value with AI than you were without AI? Is your business making 100 times more money? Are you being paid 100 times as much?
The factories that replaced shoemakers actually produced physical shoes that real humans wore. What is your AI producing, other than garbage bug-filled software that no one wants or needs? What real-life human problems is it solving?
I also think 100x is an exageration. May be 5x for producing coed ? And in terms of understanding, may be 2x.
So so much this. Also: what does 100x even mean? What is the baseline? I can write a program in 5 minutes that will spit out 10 billion lines of code. As such, does that somehow mean I'm 1000000x more productive?