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I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out ver
by matthewsinclair 1y ago
I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months.
I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even more entrenched than before.
Then something shifted. I started experimenting. I stopped giving it orders and began using it more like a virtual rubber duck. That made a huge difference.
It’s still absolute rubbish if you just let it run wild, which is why I think “vibe coding” is basically just “vibe debt” — because it just doesn’t do what most (possibly uninformed) people think it does.
But if you treat it as a collaborator — more like an idiot savant with a massive brain but no instinct or nous — or better yet, as a mech suit [0] that needs firm control — then something interesting happens.
I’m now at a point where working with Claude Code is not just productive, it actually produces pretty good code, with the right guidance. I’ve got tests, lots of them. I’ve also developed a way of getting Claude to document intent as we go, which helps me, any future human reader, and, crucially, the model itself when revisiting old code.
What fascinates me is how negative these comments are — how many people seem closed off to the possibility that this could be a net positive for software engineers rather than some kind of doomsday.
Did Photoshop kill graphic artists? Did film kill theatre? Not really. Things changed, sure. Was it “better”? There’s no counterfactual, so who knows? But change was inevitable.
What’s clear is this tech is here now, and complaining about it feels a bit like mourning the loss of punch cards when terminals showed up.
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-programming-is-more-mech-suit-than-artificial-human https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-progra...
- 0points 1y ago> Then I actually read the code. This is my experience in general. People seem to be impressed by the LLM output until they actually comprehend it. The fastest way to have someone break out of this illusion is tell them to chat with the LLM about their own expertise. They will quickly start to notice errors in the output.
- tptacek 1y agoThat has not been my experience at all with networking and cryptography.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jhanschoo 1y agoYour comment is ambiguous; what exactly do you refer to by "that"?
- 0points 1y ago[flagged]
- wickedsight 1y agoThat is no different from pretty any other person in the world. If I interview people to catch them on mistakes, I will be able to do exactly that. Sure, there are some exceptions, like if you were to interview Linus about Linux. Other than that, you'll always be able to find a fluke in someone's knowledge. None of this makes me 'snap out' of anything. Accepting that LLM's aren't perfect means you can just keep that in mind. For me, they're still a knowledge multiplier and they allow me to be more productive in many areas of life.
- tecleandor 1y agoNot at all. Useful or not, LLMs will almost never say "I don't know". They'll happily call a function to a library that never existed. They'll tell you "Incredible idea! You're on the correct path! And you can easily do that with so and so software", and you'll be like "wait what, that software doesn't do that", and they'll answer "Ah, yeah, you're right, of course."
- yujzgzc 1y agoNo there are many techniques now to curb hallucinations. Not perfect but no longer so egregiously overconfident.
- fsloth 1y agoI totally agree. The ”hard to control mech suit” is an excellent analogy. When it works it’s brilliant. There is a threshold point as part of the learning curve where you realize you are in a pile of spaghetti code and think it actually saves no time to use LLM assistant. But then you learn to avoid the bad parts - thus they don’t take your time anymore - and the good parts start paying back in heaps of the time spent learning. They are not zero effort tools. There is a non-trivial learning cost involved.
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoThe issue is we’re too early in the process to even have a solid education program for using LLMs. I use them all the time and continue to struggle finding an approach that works well. It’s easy to use them for documentation look up. Or filling in boilerplate. Sometimes they nail a transformation/translation task, other times they’re more trouble than they’re worth. We need to understand what kind of guard rails to put these models on for optimal results.
- fsloth 1y ago” we’re too early in the process to even have a solid education program for using LLMs” We don’t even have a solid education program for software engineering - possibly for the same reason. The industry loves to run on the bleeding edge, rather than just think for a minute :)
- baq 1y agowhen you stop to think, your fifteen (...thousand) competitors will all attempt a different version of the thing you're thinking about and one of them will be the about the thing you'll come up with, except it'll be built. it might be ok since what you were thinking about is probably not a good idea in the first place for various reasons, but once in a while stars align to produce the unicorn, which you want to be if you're thinking about building something. caveat: maybe you just want to build in a niche, it's fine to think hard in such places. usually.
- eleveriven 1y agoTotally agree with "vibe debt". Letting an LLM off-leash without checks is a fast track to spaghetti. But with tests, clear prompts, and some light editing, I’ve shipped a lot of real stuff faster than I could have otherwise.
- throw310822 1y ago> Did Photoshop kill graphic artists? No, but AI did.
- tptacek 1y agoThis, as the article makes clear, is a concern I am alert and receptive to. Ban production of anything visual from an LLM; I'll vote for it. Just make sure they can still generate Mermaid charts and Graphviz diagrams, so they still apply to developers.
- hatefulmoron 1y agoWhat is unique about graphic design that warrants such extraordinary care? Should we just ban technology that approaches "replacement" territory? What about the people, real or imagined, that earn a living making Graphviz diagrams?
- tptacek 1y agoThe article discusses this.
- hatefulmoron 1y agoDoes it? It admits at the top that art is special for no given reason, then it claims that programmers don't care about copyright and they deserve what's coming to them, or something.. "Artificial intelligence is profoundly — and probably unfairly — threatening to visual artists" This feels asserted without any real evidence
- tptacek 1y agoLLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession, and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression. An coding agent writes a SQL join or a tree traversal. The two things are not the same. Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have. Finally, though I'm not stuck on this: I simply don't agree with the case being made for LLMs violating IPR. I have had the pleasure, many times over the last 16 years, of expressing my discomfort with nerd piracy culture and the coercive might-makes-right arguments underpinning it. I know how the argument goes over here (like a lead balloon). You can agree with me or disagree. But I've earned my bona fides here. The search bar will avail.
- tptacek 1y agoFor what it's worth: I'm not dismissive of the idea that these things could be ruinous for the interests of the profession. I don't automatically assume that making applications drastically easier to produce is just going to make way for more opportunities. I just don't think the interest of the profession control. The travel agents had interests too!
- ivape 1y agoSoon as the world realized they don't need a website and can just have FB/Twitter page, a huge percentage of freelance web development gigs just vanished. We have to get real about what's about to happen. The app economy filled the gap, and the only optimistic case is the AI app industry is what's going to fill the gap going forward. I just don't know about that. There's a certain end-game vibes I'm getting because we're talking about self-building and self-healing software. More so, a person can ask the AI to role play anything, even an app.
- daveguy 1y agoNone of the LLM models are self-building, self-healing or even self-thinking or self-teaching. They are static models (+rag, but that's a bolt-on). Did you have a specific tech in mind?
- tptacek 1y agoSure. And before the invention of the spreadsheet, the world's most important programming language, individual spreadsheets were something a programmer had to build for a business.
- Earw0rm 1y agoExcept that FB/Twitter are rotting platforms. I don't pretend that freelance web dev is a premium gig, but setting up Wordpress sites for local flower shops etc. shouldn't require a higher level of education/sophistication than e.g. making physical signs for the same shops. Technical? Yes. Hardcore expert premium technical, no. The people who want the service can pay someone with basic to moderate skills a few hundred bucks to spend a day working on it, and that's all good. Could I get an LLM to do much of the work? Yes, but I could also do much of the work without an LLM. Someone who doesn't understand the first principles of domains, Wordpress, hosting and so on, not so much.
- dogcomplex 1y ago"Mech suit" is apt. Gonna use that now. Having plenty of initial discussion and distilling that into requirements documents aimed for modularized components which can all be easily tackled separately is key.
- belter 1y ago> What fascinates me is how negative these comments are — how many people seem closed off to the possibility that this could be a net positive for software engineers rather than some kind of doomsday. I tried the latest Claude for a very complex wrapper around the AWS Price APIs who are not easy to work with. Down a 2,000 line of code file, I found Claude faking some API returns by creating hard coded values. A pattern I have seen professional developers being caught on while under pressure to deliver. This will be a boon to the human skilled developers, that will be hired at $900 dollars an hour to fix bugs of a subtlety never seen before.
- DontchaKnowit 1y agoI mean, that bug doesnt seem very subtle.
- belter 1y agoI did not want to bend the truthfulness of my story, to make a valid logical argument more convincing... :-)
- belter 1y agoI swear this is not me.. "Claude gives up and hardcodes the answer as a solution" - https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1j7tiw1/claude_gives_up_and_hardcodes_the_answer_as_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1j7tiw1/claude_gi...
- rollcat 1y agoMore or less this. Maybe a job opportunity, but many decision makers won't see the real problem until they get hit by that AWS bill. Ironic, if the business won't hire you because they went out of business?
- whazor 1y agoThe key is that manual coding for a normal task takes a one/two weeks, where-as if you configure all your prompts/agents correctly you could do it in a couple of hours. As you highlighted, it brings many new issues (code quality, lack of tests, tech debt) and you need to carefully create prompts and review the code to tackle those. But in the end, you can save significant time.
- drited 1y agoWould you have any standard prompts you could share which ask it to make a draft with you'd want (eg unit tests etc)?
- rerdavies 1y agoC++, Linux: write an audio processing loop for ALSA reading audio input, processing it, and then outputting audio on ALSA devices. Include code to open and close the ALSA devices. Wrap the code up in a class. Use Camelcase naming for C++ methods. Skip the explanations. ``` Run it through grok: https://grok.com/ When I ACTUALLY wrote that code the first time, it took me about two weeks to get it right. (horrifying documentation set, with inadequate sample code). Typically, I'll edit code like this from top to bottom in order to get it to conform to my preferred coding idioms. And I will, of course, submit the code to the same sort of review that I would give my own first-cut code. And the way initialization parameters are passed in needs work. (A follow-on prompt would probably fix that). This is not a fire and forget sort of activity. Hard to say whether that code is right or not; but even if it's not, it would have saved me at least 12 days of effort. Why did I choose that prompt? Because I have learned through use that AIs do will well with these sorts of coding tasks. I'm still learning, and making new discoveries every day. Today's discovery: it is SO easy to implement SQLLite database in C++ using an AI when you go at it the right way!
- skydhash 1y agoThat rely heavily on your mental model of ALSA to write a prompt like that. For example, I believe macOS audio stack is node based like pipewire. For someone who is knowledgeable about the domain, it's easy enough to get some base output to review and iterate upon. Especially if there was enough training data or you constrain the output with the context. So there's no actual time saving because you have to take in account the time you spent learning about the domain. That is why some people don't find AI that essential, if you have the knowledge, you already know how to find a specific part in the documentation to refresh your semantics and the time saved is minuscule.
- tuyiown 1y ago[flagged]
- rerdavies 1y agoAnd in the meantime, the people you are competing with in the job market have already become 2x more productive.
- johnecheck 1y agoOh no! I'll get left behind! I can't miss out! I need to pay $100/month to an AI company or I'll be out of a job!
- continuational 1y agoHype hype hype! Data please.
- jf22 1y agoWhat kind of "data" do you want? I'm submitting twice as many PRs with twice as much complexity. Changes that would take weeks take minutes. I generated 50 new endpoints for our API in a week. Last time we added 20 it took a month.
- vitaflo 1y agoUnless you’re being paid on a fixed bid it doesn’t matter. Someone else is reaping the rewards of your productivity not you. You’re being paid the same as your half-as-productive coworkers.
- jf22 1y agoI think it matters very much if the person next to me is 2x as productive and I'm not.
- continuational 1y ago
- raxxorraxor 1y agoThe better I am at solving a problem, the less I use AI assistants. I use them if I try a new language or framework. Busy code I need to generate is difficult to do with AI too. Because then you need to formalize the necessary context for an AI assistant, which is exhausting with an unsure result. So perhaps it is just simpler to write it yourself quickly. I understand comments being negative, because there is so much AI hype without having to many practical applications yet. Or at least good practical applications. Some of that hype is justified, some of it is not. I enjoyed the image/video/audio synthesis hype more tbh. Test cases are quite helpful and comments are decent too. But often prompting is more complex than programming something. And you can never be sure if any answer is usable.
- brulard 1y ago> But often prompting is more complex than programming something. It may be more complex, but it is in my opinion better long term. We need to get good at communicating with AIs to get results that we want. Forgive me assuming that you probably didn't use these assistants long enough to get good at using them. I'm web developer for 20 years already and AI tools are multiplying my output even in problems I'm very good at. And they are getting better very quickly.
- GoblinSlayer 1y agoYep, it looks like LLMs are used as fast typists, and coincidentally in webdev typing speed is the most important bottleneck when you need to add cookie consent, spinners, dozens of ad providers, tracking pixels, twitter metadata, google metadata, manual rendering, buttons web components with material design and react, hover panels, fontawesome, recaptcha, and that's only 1% of modern web boilerplate, then it's easy to see how a fast typist can help you.
- avemuri 1y agoI agree with your points but I'm also reminded of one my bigger learnings as a manager - the stuff I'm best at is the hardest, but most important, to delegate. Sure it was easier to do it myself. But putting in the time to train, give context, develop guardrails, learn how to monitor etc ultimately taught me the skills needed to delegate effectively and multiply the teams output massively as we added people. It's early days but I'm getting the same feeling with LLMs. It's as exhausting as training an overconfident but talented intern, but if you can work through it and somehow get it to produce something as good as you would do yourself, it's a massive multiplier.
- throwawayffffas 1y agoI generally agree with the attitude of the original post as well. But I stick one one point. It definitely doesn't cost 20 dollars a month, cursor.ai might and I don't know how good it is, but claude code costs hundreds of dollars a month, still cheaper than a junior dev though.
- hiddenfinance 1y agoThe question is can I self-host this "mech suit"? If not, I would much not use some API hosted by another party. Saas just seems very much like a terminator seed situation in the end.
- richardw 1y agoPhotoshop etc are still just tools. They can’t beat us at what has always set us apart: thinking. LLM’s are the closest, and while they’re not close they’re directionally correct. They’re general purpose, not like chess engines. And they improve. It’s hard to predict a year out, never mind ten.
- osigurdson 1y agoThe arguments seem to come down to tooling. The article suggests that ChatGPT isn't a good way to interact with LLMs but I'm not so sure. If the greatest utility is "rubber ducking" and editing the code yourself is necessary then tools like Cursor go too far in a sense. In my own experience, Windsurf is good for true vibe coding where I just want to explore an idea and throw away the code. It is still annoying though as it takes so long to do things - ruining any kind of flow state you may have. I am conversing with ChatGPT directly much more often. I haven't tried Claud code yet however. Maybe that approach is more on point.
- dcow 1y ago[flagged]
- permo-w 1y agothe irony with AI sceptics is that their opinions usually sound like they've been stolen from someone else
- bccdee 1y agoReally? I feel like the article pointedly skirted my biggest complaint. > ## but the code is shitty, like that of a junior developer > Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. > Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic. Using agents well is both a both a skill and an engineering project all its own, of prompts, indices, and (especially) tooling. LLMs only produce shitty code if you let them. I hate pair-programming with junior devs. I hate it. I want to take the keyboard away from them and do it all myself, but I can't, or they'll never learn. Why would I want a tool that replicates that experience without the benefit of actually helping anyone?
- kylereeve 1y ago> Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. This stuck out to me. How long will it continue to be so cheap? I would assume some of the low cost is subsidized by VC money which will dry up eventually. Am I wrong here?
- simonw 1y agoPrices have been dropping like a stone over the past two years, due to a combination of new efficiencies being developed for serving plus competition from many vendors: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#llm-prices-crashed-thanks-to-competition-and-increased-efficiency https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#llm-pric... I'm not seeing any evidence yet of that trend stopping or reversing.
- overflow897 1y ago
- wpietri 1y agoOne of the things I think is going on here is a sort of stone soup effect. [1] Core to Ptacek's point is that everything has changed in the last 6 months. As you and I presume he agree, the use of off-the-shelf LLMs in code was kinda garbage. And I expect the skepticism he's knocking here ("stochastic parrots") was in fact accurate then. But it did get a lot of people (and money) to rush in and start trying to make something useful. Like the stone soup story, a lot of other technology has been added to the pot, and now we're moving in the direction of something solid, a proper meal. But given the excitement and investment, it'll be at least a few years before things stabilize. Only at that point can we be sure about how much the stone really added to the soup. Another counterfactual that we'll never know is what kinds of tooling we would have gotten if people had dumped a few billion dollars into code tool improvement without LLMs, but with, say, a lot of more conventional ML tooling. Would the tools we get be much better? Much worse? About the same but different in strengths and weaknesses? Impossible to say. So I'm still skeptical of the hype. After all, the hype is basically the same as 6 months ago, even though now the boosters can admit the products of 6 months ago sucked. But I can believe we're in the middle of a revolution of developer tooling. Even so, I'm content to wait. We don't know the long term effects on a code base. We don't know what these tools will look like in 6 months. I'm happy to check in again then, where I fully expect to be again told: "If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing." At least until then, I'm renewing my membership in the Boring Technology Club: https://boringtechnology.club/ https://boringtechnology.club/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup
- xpe 1y agoAlmost by definition, one should be skeptical about hype. So we’re all trying to sort out what is being sold to us. Different people have different weird tendencies in different directions. Some people irrationally assume that things aren’t going to change much. Others see a trend and irrationally assume that it will continue on a trend line. Synthesis is hard. Understanding causality is even harder. Savvy people know that we’re just operating with a bag of models and trying to choose the right combination for the right situation. This misunderstanding is one reason why doomers, accelerations, and “normies” talk past each other or (worse) look down on each other. (I’m not trying to claim epistemic equivalence here; some perspectives are based on better information, some are better calibrated than others! I’m just not laying out my personal claims at this point. Instead, I’m focusing on how we talk to each other.) Another big source of misunderstanding is about differing loci of control. People in positions of influence are naturally inclined to think about what they can do, who they know, and where they want to be. People farther removed feel relatively powerless and tend to hold onto their notions of stability, such as the status quo or their deepest values. Historically, programmers have been quite willing to learn new technologies, but now we’re seeing widespread examples where people’s plasticity has limits. Many developers cannot (or are unwilling to) wrap their minds around the changing world. So instead of confronting the reality they find ways to deny it, consciously or subconsciously. Our perception itself is shaped by our beliefs, and some people won’t even perceive the threat because it is too strange or disconcerting. Such is human nature: we all do it. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to admit it.
- taylodl 1y agoI treat AI as my digital partner in pair programming. I've learned how to give it specific and well-defined tasks to do, and it gets it done. The narrower the scope and more specific the task then the more successful you'll have.
- jes5199 1y agothere’s a sweet spot in there, it’s not “as narrow as possible” - the most productive thing is to assign the largest possible tasks that are just short of the limit where the agents become stupid. this is hard to hit, and a moving target!
- svachalek 1y agoExactly. When you get a new tool or a new model, ask it for things the previous one failed at until you find the new ceiling.
- notindexed 1y agoThe irony of the ChatGPT em dashes ;3
- bytesandbots 1y agoThe entire comment feels way too long, structured and convincing in a way that can only be written by an AI. I just hope that once the em-dashes are "fixed", we still be able to detect such text. I fear for a future when human text is sparse, even here at HN. It is depressing to see such a comment take the top spot.
- volkk 1y agoLol -- it even reads with the same exact tone as AI. For those that use it often, it's so easy to spot now. The luddites on HN that fear AI feel end up affected the most because they have no idea how to see it.
- osigurdson 1y agoI have been using Windsurf for a few months and ChatGPT for a couple of years. I don't feel Windsurf is a massive game changer personally. It is good if you are very tired or working in a new area (also good for exploring UI ideas as the feedback loop is tight), but still not a real game changer over ChatGPT. Waiting around for it to do its thing ("we've encountered at error - no credits used") is boring and flow destroying. Of you know exactly what you are doing the productivity is probably 0.5 vs just typing the code in yourself. Sorry, I'm not going to bang around in Windsurf all day just to help with the training so that "v2" can be better. They should be paying me for this realistically. Of course, in aggregate AI makes me capable in a far broader set of problem domains. It would be tough to live without it at this stage, but needs to be used for what it is actually good at, not what we hope it will be good at.
- ketzo 1y agoHave you tried Cursor or Zed? I find they’re both significantly better in their “agent” modes than Windsurf.
- osigurdson 1y agoI used Cursor before Windsurf but I have not used Zed.
- chinchilla2020 1y agoThe reason I remain in the "skeptical" camp is because I am experiencing the same thing you are - I keep oscillating between being impressed, then disappointed. Ultimately the thing that impresses me is that LLMs have replaced google search. The thing that disappoints me is that their code is often convincing but wrong. Coming from a hard-engineering background, anything that is unreliable is categorized as bad. If you come from the move-fast-break-things world of tech, then your tolerance for mistakes is probably a lot higher.
- saltcured 1y agoThis is a bit tangential, but isn't that partly because google search keeps evolving into a worse resource due to the SEO garbage race?
- conradev 1y agoI’m learning live how to use these things better, and I haven’t seen practical guides like: - Split things into small files, today’s model harnesses struggle with massive files - Write lots of tests. When the language model messes up the code (it will), it can use the tests to climb out. Tests are the best way to communicate behavior. - Write guides and documentation for complex tasks in complex codebases. Use a language model for the first pass if you’re too lazy. Useful for both humans and LLMs It’s really: make your codebase welcoming for junior engineers
- gs17 1y ago> it can use the tests to climb out Or not. I watched Copilot's agent mode get stuck in a loop for most of an hour (to be fair, I was letting it continue to see how it handles this failure case) trying to make a test pass.
- conradev 1y agoYeah! When that happens I usually stop it and tap in a bigger model to “think” and get out of the loop (or fix it myself) I’m impressed with this latest generation of models: they reward hack a lot less. Previously they’d change a failing unit test, but now they just look for reasonable but easy ways out in the code. I call it reward hacking, and laziness is not the right word, but “knowing what needs to be done and not doing it” is the general issue here. I see it in junior engineers occasionally, too.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- giancarlostoro 1y ago> Then something shifted. I started experimenting. I stopped giving it orders and began using it more like a virtual rubber duck. That made a huge difference. This is how I use it mostly. I also use it for boilerplate, like "What would a database model look like that handles the following" you never want it to do everything, though there are tools that can and will and they're impressive, but then when you have a true production issue, your inability to quickly respond will be a barrier.
- nashashmi 1y agoThat’s all great news that if you know how to use an LLM, it works wonders for you. But LLMs are changing so fast, can it really be sustainable for me to “learn” it only for it to change and go backwards the next month? (I am thinking about how terrible Google became.)
- caycep 1y agoI think also the key is - don't call it AI, because it's not. It's LLM assist query parsing and code generation. Semantically, if you call it AI, the public expects a cognitive equivalent to a human which this is not, and from what @tptacek describes, is not meant to be - the reasoning and other code bits to create agents and such seem to be developed specifically for code generation and programming assist and other tasks thereof. Viewed in that lens, the article is correct - it is by all means a major step forward.
- digianarchist 1y agoI agree but that battle is lost. Someone was calling Zapier workflows AI on X.
- b112 1y agoAGI vs AI is how to separate this these days.
- munificent 1y ago> Did Photoshop kill graphic artists? Did film kill theatre? To a first approximation, the answer to both of these is "yes". There is still a lot of graphic design work out there (though generative AI will be sucking the marrow out of it soon), but far less than there used to be before the desktop publishing revolution. And the kind of work changed. If "graphic design" to you meant sitting at a drafting table with pencil and paper, those jobs largely evaporated. If that was a kind of work that was rewarding and meaningful to you, that option was removed for you. Theatre even more so. Yes, there are still some theatres. But the number of people who get to work in theatrical acting, set design, costuming, etc. is a tiny tiny fraction of what it used to be. And those people are barely scraping together a living, and usually working side jobs just to pay their bills. > it feels a bit like mourning the loss of punch cards when terminals showed up. I think people deserve the right to mourn the loss of experiences that are meaningful and enjoyable to them, even if those experiences turn out to no longer be maximally economically efficient according to the Great Capitalistic Moral Code. Does it mean that we should preserve antiquated jobs and suffer the societal effects of inefficiency without bound? Probably not. But we should remember that the ultimate goal of the economic system is to enable people to live with meaning and dignity. Efficiency is a means to that end.
- pvg 1y agoBut the number of people who get to work in theatrical acting, set design, costuming I think this ends up being recency bias and terminology hairsplitting, in the end. The number of people working in theatre mask design went to nearly zero quite a while back but we still call the stuff in the centuries after that 'theatre' and 'acting'.
- munificent 1y agoI'm not trying to split hairs. I think "theatre" is a fairly well-defined term to refer to live performances of works that are not strictly musical. Gather up all of the professions necessary to put those productions on together. The number of opportunities for those professions today is much smaller than it was a hundred years ago before film ate the world. There are only so many audience members and a night they spend watching a film or watching TV or playing videogames is a night they don't spend going to a play. The result is much smaller audiences. And with fewer audiences, there are fewer plays. Maybe I should have been clearer that I'm not including film and video production here. Yes, there are definitely opportunities there, though acting for a camera is not at all the same experience as acting for a live audience.
- billy99k 1y agoI use LLMs daily. From helping me write technical reports (not 100%, mostly making things sound better after I have a first draft) to mapping APIs (documentation, etc). I can only imagine what this technology will be like in 10 years. But I do know that it's not going anywhere and it's best to get familiar with it now.
- Jordanpomeroy 1y agoThis is my experience as well. I’d add that Excel didn’t kill the engineering field. It made them more effective and maybe companies will need less of them. But it also means more startups and smaller shops can make use of an engineer. The change is hard and an equilibrium will be reached.
- MattGrommes 1y agoI agree, this article is basically what I've been thinking as I play with these things over time. They've gotten a ton better but the hot takes are still from 6-12 months ago. One thing I wish he would have talked about though is maintenance. My only real qualm with my LLM agent buddy is the tendency to just keep adding code if the first pass didn't work. Eventually, it works, sometimes with my manual help. But the resulting code is harder to read and reason about, which makes maintenance and adding features or behavior changes harder. Until you're ready to just hand off the code to the LLM and not do your own changes to it, it's definitely something to keep in mind at minimum.
- timcobb 1y ago> Did film kill theatre? Relatively speaking, I would say that film and TV did kill theater
- ljsprague 1y agoYes, film killed theatre.
- beloch 1y agoLLM's are self-limiting, rather than self-reinforcing, and that's the big reason why they're not the thing, both good or bad, that some people think they are. "Garbage in, garbage out", is still the rule for LLM's. If you don't spend billions training them or if you let them feed on their own tail too much they produce nonsense. e.g. Some LLM's currently produce better general search results than google. This is mainly a product of many billions being spent on expert trainers for those LLM's, while google neglects (or actively enshitifies) their search algorithms shamefully. It's humans, not LLM's, producing these results. How good will LLM's be at search once the money has moved somewhere else and neglect sets in? LLM's aren't going to take everyone's jobs and trigger a singularity precisely because they fall apart if they try to feed on their own output. They need human input at every stage. They are going to take some people's jobs and create new ones for others, although it will probably be more of the former than the latter, or billionaires wouldn't be betting on them.
- timeon 1y ago> Did Photoshop kill graphic artists? Did film kill theatre? Not really. Things changed, sure. Was it “better”? My obligatory comment how analogies are not good for arguments: there is already discussion here that film (etc.) may have killed theatre.
- didibus 1y agoI agree with the potential of AI. I use it daily for coding and other tasks. However, there are two fundamental issues that make this different from the Photoshop comparison. The models are trained primarily on copyrighted material and code written by the very professionals who now must "upskill" to remain relevant. This raises complex questions about compensation and ownership that didn't exist with traditional tools. Even if current laws permit it, the ethical implications are different from Photoshop-like tools. Previous innovations created new mediums and opportunities. Photoshop didn't replace artists, because it enabled new art forms. Film reduced theater jobs but created an entirely new industry where skills could mostly transfer. Manufacturing automation made products like cars accessible to everyone. AI is fundamentally different. It's designed to produce identical output to human workers, just more cheaply and/or faster. Instead of creating new possibilities, it's primarily focused on substitution. Say AI could eliminate 20% of coding jobs and reduce wages by 30%: * Unlike previous innovations, this won't make software more accessible * Software already scales essentially for free (build once, used by many) * Most consumer software is already free (ad-supported) The primary outcome appears to be increased profit margins rather than societal advancement. While previous technological revolutions created new industries and democratized access, AI seems focused on optimizing existing processes without providing comparable societal benefits. This isn't an argument against progress, but we should be clear-eyed about how this transition differs from historical parallels, and why it might not repeat the same historical outcomes. I'm not claiming this will be the case, but that you can see some pretty significant differences for why you might be skeptical that the same creation of new jobs, or improvement to human lifestyle/capabilities will emerge as with say Film or Photoshop. AI can also be used to achieve things we could not do without, that's the good use of AI, things like Cancer detection, self-driving cars, and so on. I'm speaking specifically of the use of AI to automate and reduce the cost/speed of white collar work like software development.
- throw234234234 1y agoFor me this is the "issue" I have with AI. Unlike say the internet, mobile and other tech revolutions where I could see new use cases or existing use case optimisation spring up all the time (new apps, new ways of interacting, more efficient than physical systems, etc) AI seems to be focused more on efficiency/substitution of labour than pushing the frontier on "quality of life". Maybe this will change but the buzz is around job replacement atm. Its why it is impacting so many people, but also having very small changes to everyday "quality of life" kind of metrics (e.g. ability to eat, communicate, live somewhere, etc). It arguably is more about enabling greater inequality and gatekeeping of wealth to capital - where intelligence and merit matters less in the future world. For most people its hard to see where the positives are for them long term in this story; most everyday folks don't believe the utopia story is in anyway probable.
- brianjking 1y agoLove all of this. Most importantly, I'll embrace the change and hope for the possible abundance.
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- sim7c00 1y agoi love your views and way to express it, spot on. i feel similar in some ways. i hated ai, loved ai, hated it again and love it again. i still feel the code i unusable for my main problems, but i realize better its my arrogance that causes it. i cant formulate solutions eloquently enough and blame the AI for bad code. AI has helped me pick up my pencil and paper again and realize my flawed knowledge, skills, and even flawed approach to AI. Now i instructed it to never give me code :). not because the code is bad, but my attempts to extract code from it are more based in laziness than efficiency. they are easy to confuse afterall ;(.... I have tons of fun learning with AI, exploring. going on adventures into new topics. Then when i want to really do something, i try to use it for the things i know i am bad at due to laziness, not lack of knowledge. the thing i fell for first... it helps me explore a space, then i think or am inspired for some creation, and it helps me structure and plan. when i ask it from laziness to give me the code, it helps me overcome my laziness by explaining what i need to do to be able to see why asking for the code was the wrong approach in the first place. now, that might be different for you. but i have learned i am not some god tier hacker from the spawl, so i realized i need to learn and get better. perhaps you are at the level you can ask it for code and it just works. hats off in that case ;k (i do hope you tested well!)
- bytesandbots 1y agoI am pretty sure this comment is also AI generated. Just a guess but so many em-dash is suspicious. And the overall structure of convincing feels uncanny. If this is true, can you share your initial draft that you asked the AI to rewrite. Am I not right that the initial draft is more concise and better conveys your actual thought, even though it's not as much convincing.
- zedcombination 1y agoDefinitely. So many people taken in by it!
- jlaternman 1y agoYes! It needs and seems to want the human to be a deep collaborator. If you take that approach, it is actually a second senior developer you can work with. You need to push it, and explain the complexities in detail to get fuller rewards. And get it to document everything important it learns from each session's context. It wants to collaborate to make you a 10X coder, not to do your work for you while you laze. That is the biggest breakthrough I have found. They basically react like human brains, with the same kind of motives. Their output can vary dramatically based on the input you provide.
- H1Supreme 1y ago> Did Photoshop kill graphic artists? Desktop publication software killed many jobs. I worked for a publication where I had colleagues that used to typeset, place images, and use a camera to build pages by hand. That required a team of people. Once Quark Xpress and the like hit the scene, one person could do it all, faster. In terms of illustration, the tools moved from pen and paper to Adobe Illustrator and Aldus / Macromedia Freehand. Which I'd argue was more of a sideways move. You still needed an illustrators skillset to use these tools. The difference between what I just described and LLM image generation is the tooling changed to streamline an existing skillset. LLM's replace all of it. Just type something and here's your picture. No art / design skill necessary. Obviously, there's no guarantee that the LLM generated image will be any good. So, I'm not sure the Photoshop analogy works here.
- nipah 1y ago> What’s clear is this tech is here now, and complaining about it feels a bit like mourning the loss of punch cards when terminals showed up. Just stop with this, it's bulshitty. There's nothing related between LLMs and the migration from punch cards to terminals, nor to photoshop compared to film theatre, literally [nothing]. This is a pretty underwelming way of trying to say people that are critiques of this are akin to nostalgic people that "miss the old good days", when there are more than enough pertinent reasons to disagree with this tech in this case. Basically calling opposing people irrational. I'm not talking about doom or software dev dying or any bullshit like that, I'm just saying this kind of point you make in the end is not reasonable.