5 ms·

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airloc

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new under the sun. It's been seen before thousands of times, and so why not recall and use those old nuggets? For me coding agents are just code-reuse on steroids. Ps. Ironically, the article feels AI generated.

throwaway314155 1y ago
I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI generated. It's just good writing. Whether you buy the premise or not.
- boxed 1y ago
  Maybe he meant it was long. Some people seem to think that long walls of text is how you spot AI slop.
  - nozzlegear 1y ago
    And god forbid you use an emdash these days.
    - xigoi 1y ago
      I’ve recently been accused of using ChatGPT because I wrote a message with formal language and bullet points.
    - MrVandemar 1y ago
      I'm unapologetic about using em-dashes. They're in my toolbox, and I reach for them. I can and do manually type em-dashes manually in both Linux and Microsoft Windows using the key-codes. Anyone who is basing their opinion of the provenance of a piece of writing on whether em-dashes are used, then that opinion is emminently discardable lemming-babble.
- aozgaa 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - cedric_h 1y ago
    [flagged]
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  I got slightly LLM vibes for the first few paragraphs ngl. It became very clear it wasn't very fast, though.
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  Yeah, it feels a very different style of unhinged to LLMs. I can’t yet imagine an LLM producing such a beautiful and contextually-appropriate sentence as “They’ll be out there trying to duct-tape horses to an engine block, wondering why it doesn’t fly.”
  - nick3443 1y ago
    This brought tears to my eyes: But you—at your most frazzled, sleep-deprived, raccoon-eyed best—you can try. You can squint at the layers of abstraction and see through them. Peel back the nice ergonomic type-safe, pure, lazy, immutable syntactic sugar and imagine the mess of assembly the compiler pukes up. Amazing
- a0123 1y ago
  > The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. This is incredible you would say that because you'll never guess what it reads like.
  - petemir 1y ago
    I'm glad I'm not the only one to have thought that...
- yerushalayim 1y ago
  This rebuttal of the rebuttal does feel earily AI. Perhaps an injection of cynicism?
ivape 1y ago
It’s funny because I made a few funny clips (to my taste) on Google Whisk and figured, hey why not, let’s make a TikTok. Did you know that all of TikTok is full of millions of ai generated stuff or other people just copying each others stuff? I really thought there was something to this “original creation” stuff. We are all so simply reproducible. No one’s making anything special, anywhere, for the most part. If we all uploaded a TikTok video of daily coding, it would be the same fucking app over and over, just like the rest of TikTok. Elon may have be right all along, there’s literally nothing left to do but goto Mars. Some of us were telling many of you that the LLMs don’t hallucinate as much as you think just two years ago, and I think the late to the party crowd need to hear us again - we humans are not really necessary anymore. !RemindMe in 2 years
- whattheheckheck 1y ago
  There's literally genocide and war going on, solve that
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    Don't encourage them. They'll just build an AI to do the genocide faster.
  - ivape 1y ago
    The genocide is televised, it appears no one cares.
anon7000 1y ago
Yeah, and the article talks about those ways in which AI is useful. Overall, the author doesn’t have a problem with experts using AI to help them. The main argument is that we’re calling AI a copilot, and many newbies may be trusting it or leaning on it too much, when in reality, it’s still a shitty coworker half the time. Real copilots are actually your peers and experts at what they do. > Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin. On the other hand, one could argue that AI is just another abstraction. After all, some folks may complain that over-reliance on garbage collectors means that newbies never learn how to properly manage memory. While memory management is useful knowledge for most programmers, it rarely practically comes up for many modern professional tasks. That said, at least knowing about it means you have a deeper level of understanding and mastery of programming. Over time, all those small, rare details add up, and you may become an expert. I think AI is in a different class because it’s an extremely leaky abstraction. We use many abstractions every day. A web developer really doesn’t need to know how deeper levels of the stack work — the abstractions are very strong. Sure, you’ll want to know about networking and how browsers work to operate at a very high level, but you can absolutely write very nice, scalable websites and products with more limited knowledge. The key thing is that you know what you’re building on, and you know where to go learn about things if you need to. (Kind of like how a web developer should know the fundamental basics of HTML/CSS/JS before really using a web framework. And that doesn’t take much effort.) AI is different — you can potentially get away with not knowing the fundamental basics of programming… to a point. You can get away with not knowing where to look for answers and how to learn. After all, AIs would be fucking great at completing basic programming assignments at the college level. But at some point, the abstraction gets very leaky. Your code will break in unexpected ways. And the core worry for many is that fewer and fewer new developers will be learning the debugging, thinking, and self-learning skills which are honestly CRITICAL to becoming an expert in this field. You get skills like that by doing things yourself and banging your head against the wall and trying again until it works, and by being exposed to a wide variety of projects and challenges. Honestly, that’s just how learning works — repetition and practice! But if we’re abstracting away the very act of learning, it is fair to wonder how much that will hurt the long-term skills of many developers. Of course, I’m not saying AI causes everyone to become clueless. There are still smart, driven people who will pick up core skills along the way. But it seems pretty plausible that the % of people who do that will decrease. You don’t get those skills unless you’re challenged, and with AI, those beginner level “learn how to program” challenges become trivial. Which means people will have to challenge themselves. And ultimately, the abstraction is just leaky. AI might look like it solves your problems for you to a novice, but once you see through the mirage, you realize that you cannot abstract away your core programming & debugging skills. You actually have to rely on those skills to fix the issues AI creates for you — so you better be learning them along the way!! Btw, I say this as someone who does use AI coding assistants. I don’t think it’s all bad or all good. But we can’t just wave away the downsides just because it’s useful
queenkjuul 1y ago
Fundamentally, mission critical low level code isn't the kind of software i want to write anyway. I don't find AI tools super useful for most of the same reasons as the author, but i do kind of get tired of the idea that if you're not writing systems in C you're not really programming. I like writing front end code. I'm probably never going to have a job where i need or would even want to write a low level graphics library from scratch. Fine, I'm not red-eyed 3am hacker brained, but I'm passionate and good at what i do. I don't think a world where every person working in software has the author's mentality is realistic or desirable.
- sgarland 1y ago
  > I like writing front end code. I'm probably never going to have a job where i need or would even want to write a low level graphics library from scratch. Fine, I'm not red-eyed 3am hacker brained, but I'm passionate and good at what i do. Keep that spirit! All I want from coworkers is genuine interest and curiosity. Not everyone is going to find investigating Linux’s networking stack interesting, just as not everyone is going to find making beautiful pure CSS animations interesting. I think one of the greatest mistakes the tech industry did was to create “full stack,” as though someone would have interest and skill in frontend, backend, and infra. Bring back specialists; we’re all better for it.
  - _rutinerad 1y ago
    I think it’s a fine label. I have skill and interest in all of those areas. Some things requires specialists, most jobs out there don’t.
agos 1y ago
from TFA: > Maybe you’ll never write the code that keeps a plane in the sky. Maybe you’ll never push bits that hold a human life in the balance. Fine. Most don’t. But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.
- jonaustin 1y ago
  > you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity. what does that even mean? Users don't care if code is written by a human or AI; they care that the code gives them what they need, hopefully in a fairly pleasant manner.
- Ferret7446 1y ago
  > you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity. This is moral grandstanding. You owe your customers a good product at a low cost. If you don't use a tool that can lower costs, you are wronging your users and will go out of business. Handcrafted CRUD will go the same way as handcrafted anything; an expensive niche hobby.
  - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    > This is moral grandstanding. I disagree. For the kind of relationships I want with other humans, respect and dignity are my end of the bargain.
Fuhrmanator 1y ago
I sometimes imagine, even before LLMs, how much human-written code still matters, like the DNA that has survived evolution. It's got to be a super low percentage. The trend with Autocomplete Industrialization (AI) is just speeding up the creation of shanty towns of code, as opposed to architecturally robust foundations. The survivability of code is dropping because of the Copilotz. But perhaps this rapidity of creating crude solutions will increase the chances of something truly significant? p.p.s there are too many times "it's" should be "its" in that blog post to have been AI-generated. That's a different kind of irony IMO, especially since that's just tricky English syntax (the thing AI is supposed to be good at). Maybe the author used AI to come up with the snarky metaphors. I asked ChatGPT for a sarcastic meaning for AI that starts with Autocomplete :)

throwaway314155 1y ago

I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI generated. It's just good writing. Whether you buy the premise or not.

boxed 1y ago
Maybe he meant it was long. Some people seem to think that long walls of text is how you spot AI slop.
- nozzlegear 1y ago
  And god forbid you use an emdash these days.
  - xigoi 1y ago
    I’ve recently been accused of using ChatGPT because I wrote a message with formal language and bullet points.
  - MrVandemar 1y ago
    I'm unapologetic about using em-dashes. They're in my toolbox, and I reach for them. I can and do manually type em-dashes manually in both Linux and Microsoft Windows using the key-codes. Anyone who is basing their opinion of the provenance of a piece of writing on whether em-dashes are used, then that opinion is emminently discardable lemming-babble.
aozgaa 1y ago
[flagged]
- cedric_h 1y ago
  [flagged]
queenkjuul 1y ago
I got slightly LLM vibes for the first few paragraphs ngl. It became very clear it wasn't very fast, though.
chrismorgan 1y ago
Yeah, it feels a very different style of unhinged to LLMs. I can’t yet imagine an LLM producing such a beautiful and contextually-appropriate sentence as “They’ll be out there trying to duct-tape horses to an engine block, wondering why it doesn’t fly.”
- nick3443 1y ago
  This brought tears to my eyes: But you—at your most frazzled, sleep-deprived, raccoon-eyed best—you can try. You can squint at the layers of abstraction and see through them. Peel back the nice ergonomic type-safe, pure, lazy, immutable syntactic sugar and imagine the mess of assembly the compiler pukes up. Amazing
a0123 1y ago
> The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. This is incredible you would say that because you'll never guess what it reads like.
- petemir 1y ago
  I'm glad I'm not the only one to have thought that...
yerushalayim 1y ago
This rebuttal of the rebuttal does feel earily AI. Perhaps an injection of cynicism?

ivape 1y ago

It’s funny because I made a few funny clips (to my taste) on Google Whisk and figured, hey why not, let’s make a TikTok. Did you know that all of TikTok is full of millions of ai generated stuff or other people just copying each others stuff? I really thought there was something to this “original creation” stuff. We are all so simply reproducible. No one’s making anything special, anywhere, for the most part. If we all uploaded a TikTok video of daily coding, it would be the same fucking app over and over, just like the rest of TikTok. Elon may have be right all along, there’s literally nothing left to do but goto Mars. Some of us were telling many of you that the LLMs don’t hallucinate as much as you think just two years ago, and I think the late to the party crowd need to hear us again - we humans are not really necessary anymore. !RemindMe in 2 years

whattheheckheck 1y ago
There's literally genocide and war going on, solve that
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Don't encourage them. They'll just build an AI to do the genocide faster.
- ivape 1y ago
  The genocide is televised, it appears no one cares.

anon7000 1y ago

Yeah, and the article talks about those ways in which AI is useful. Overall, the author doesn’t have a problem with experts using AI to help them. The main argument is that we’re calling AI a copilot, and many newbies may be trusting it or leaning on it too much, when in reality, it’s still a shitty coworker half the time. Real copilots are actually your peers and experts at what they do. > Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin. On the other hand, one could argue that AI is just another abstraction. After all, some folks may complain that over-reliance on garbage collectors means that newbies never learn how to properly manage memory. While memory management is useful knowledge for most programmers, it rarely practically comes up for many modern professional tasks. That said, at least knowing about it means you have a deeper level of understanding and mastery of programming. Over time, all those small, rare details add up, and you may become an expert. I think AI is in a different class because it’s an extremely leaky abstraction. We use many abstractions every day. A web developer really doesn’t need to know how deeper levels of the stack work — the abstractions are very strong. Sure, you’ll want to know about networking and how browsers work to operate at a very high level, but you can absolutely write very nice, scalable websites and products with more limited knowledge. The key thing is that you know what you’re building on, and you know where to go learn about things if you need to. (Kind of like how a web developer should know the fundamental basics of HTML/CSS/JS before really using a web framework. And that doesn’t take much effort.) AI is different — you can potentially get away with not knowing the fundamental basics of programming… to a point. You can get away with not knowing where to look for answers and how to learn. After all, AIs would be fucking great at completing basic programming assignments at the college level. But at some point, the abstraction gets very leaky. Your code will break in unexpected ways. And the core worry for many is that fewer and fewer new developers will be learning the debugging, thinking, and self-learning skills which are honestly CRITICAL to becoming an expert in this field. You get skills like that by doing things yourself and banging your head against the wall and trying again until it works, and by being exposed to a wide variety of projects and challenges. Honestly, that’s just how learning works — repetition and practice! But if we’re abstracting away the very act of learning, it is fair to wonder how much that will hurt the long-term skills of many developers. Of course, I’m not saying AI causes everyone to become clueless. There are still smart, driven people who will pick up core skills along the way. But it seems pretty plausible that the % of people who do that will decrease. You don’t get those skills unless you’re challenged, and with AI, those beginner level “learn how to program” challenges become trivial. Which means people will have to challenge themselves. And ultimately, the abstraction is just leaky. AI might look like it solves your problems for you to a novice, but once you see through the mirage, you realize that you cannot abstract away your core programming & debugging skills. You actually have to rely on those skills to fix the issues AI creates for you — so you better be learning them along the way!! Btw, I say this as someone who does use AI coding assistants. I don’t think it’s all bad or all good. But we can’t just wave away the downsides just because it’s useful

queenkjuul 1y ago

Fundamentally, mission critical low level code isn't the kind of software i want to write anyway. I don't find AI tools super useful for most of the same reasons as the author, but i do kind of get tired of the idea that if you're not writing systems in C you're not really programming. I like writing front end code. I'm probably never going to have a job where i need or would even want to write a low level graphics library from scratch. Fine, I'm not red-eyed 3am hacker brained, but I'm passionate and good at what i do. I don't think a world where every person working in software has the author's mentality is realistic or desirable.

sgarland 1y ago
> I like writing front end code. I'm probably never going to have a job where i need or would even want to write a low level graphics library from scratch. Fine, I'm not red-eyed 3am hacker brained, but I'm passionate and good at what i do. Keep that spirit! All I want from coworkers is genuine interest and curiosity. Not everyone is going to find investigating Linux’s networking stack interesting, just as not everyone is going to find making beautiful pure CSS animations interesting. I think one of the greatest mistakes the tech industry did was to create “full stack,” as though someone would have interest and skill in frontend, backend, and infra. Bring back specialists; we’re all better for it.
- _rutinerad 1y ago
  I think it’s a fine label. I have skill and interest in all of those areas. Some things requires specialists, most jobs out there don’t.

agos 1y ago

from TFA: > Maybe you’ll never write the code that keeps a plane in the sky. Maybe you’ll never push bits that hold a human life in the balance. Fine. Most don’t. But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

jonaustin 1y ago
> you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity. what does that even mean? Users don't care if code is written by a human or AI; they care that the code gives them what they need, hopefully in a fairly pleasant manner.
Ferret7446 1y ago
> you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity. This is moral grandstanding. You owe your customers a good product at a low cost. If you don't use a tool that can lower costs, you are wronging your users and will go out of business. Handcrafted CRUD will go the same way as handcrafted anything; an expensive niche hobby.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  > This is moral grandstanding. I disagree. For the kind of relationships I want with other humans, respect and dignity are my end of the bargain.

Fuhrmanator 1y ago

I sometimes imagine, even before LLMs, how much human-written code still matters, like the DNA that has survived evolution. It's got to be a super low percentage. The trend with Autocomplete Industrialization (AI) is just speeding up the creation of shanty towns of code, as opposed to architecturally robust foundations. The survivability of code is dropping because of the Copilotz. But perhaps this rapidity of creating crude solutions will increase the chances of something truly significant? p.p.s there are too many times "it's" should be "its" in that blog post to have been AI-generated. That's a different kind of irony IMO, especially since that's just tricky English syntax (the thing AI is supposed to be good at). Maybe the author used AI to come up with the snarky metaphors. I asked ChatGPT for a sarcastic meaning for AI that starts with Autocomplete :)