15 ms·

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

• justincormack 11mo ago
  Its interesting how people are still very positive about Marx’s labour theory of value, despite it being very much of its time and very discredited.
• deleted 11mo ago
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• shlip 11mo ago
  > AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. Exactly. You can see that with the proliferation of chickenized reverse centaurs[1] in all kinds of jobs. Getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop is the aim now that bosses/stakeholders have seen the light. [1] https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/ https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize...
  • flir 11mo ago
    Now apply that thinking to computers. Or levers. I've seen the argument that computers let us prop up and even scale governmental systems that would have long since collapsed under their own weight if they’d remained manual more than once. I'm not sure I buy it, but computation undoubtedly shapes society. The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here. I'm not even saying the core argument's wrong, exactly - clearly, tools build systems ("...and systems kill" - Crass). I guess I'm saying tools are value neutral. Guns don't kill people. So this argument against LLMs is an argument against all tools, unless you can explain how LLMs are a unique category of tool? (Aside: calling out the lever sounds silly, but I think it's actually a great example. You can't do monumental architecture without levers, and the point in history where we start doing that is also the point where serious surplus extraction kicks in. I don't think that's coincidence).
    • amrocha 11mo ago
      It’s a good thing that there’s centuries of philosophy on that subject and the general consensus is that no, tools are not “neutral” and do shape the systems they interact with, sometimes against the will of those wielding these tools. See the nuclear bomb for an example.
      • flir 11mo ago
        I'm actually thinking of Marshall McLuhan. Maybe you're right, and tools aren't neutral. Does this mean that computation necessitates inequality? That's an uncomfortable conclusion for people who identify as hackers.
    • prmph 11mo ago
      Tools are not value neutral in any way. In my third world country, motorbikes, scooters, etc have exploded in popularity and use in the past decade. Many people riding these things have made the roads much more dangerous for all, but particularly for them. They keep dying by the hundreds per month, not only just due to the fact that they choose to ride them at all, but how they ride them: on busy high speed highways, weaving between lanes all the time, swerving in front of speeding cars, with barely any protective equipment whatsoever. A car crash is frequently very survivable; motorcycle crash, not so much. Even if you survive the initial collision, the probability of another vehicle running you over is very high on a busy highway. On would think, given the clear evidence for how dangerous these things are, why do people (1) ride them at all on the highway, and (2) in such a dangerous manner? One might excuse (1) by recognizing that many are poor and can't buy a car, and the motorbikes represent economic possibility: for use in courier business, of being able to work much further from home, etc. But here is the thing about (2), A motorbike wants to be ridden that way. No matter how well the rider recognizes the danger, there is only so much time can pass before the sheer expediency of riding that way overrides any sense of due caution. Where it would be safer to stop or keep to a fixed lane without any sudden movements, the rider thinks of the inconvenience of stopping, does a quick mental comparison it to the (in their minds) the minuscule additional risk, and carries on. Stopping or keeping to a proper lane in a car require far less discipline than doing that on a motorbike. So this is what people mean when they say tech is not value neutral. The tech can theoretically be used in many ways. But some forms of use are so aligned with the form of the tech that in practice it shapes behavior.
  • countWSS 11mo ago
    Sounds like Manna control system: https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna
  • lynx97 11mo ago
    I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this kind of tech hate on HN of all places. Would you prefer we heat our homes by burning wood, carry water from the nearby spring, and ride horses to visit relatives? Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core. So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...
    • andrepd 11mo ago
      "You don't like $instance_of_X? You must want to get rid of all $X" has got to be one of the most intellectually lazy things you could say. You don't like leaded gasoline? You must want us to walk everywhere. Come on...
      • lynx97 11mo ago
        A tool is a tool. These AI critics sound to me like people who have hit their finger with a hammer, and now advocate against using them altogether. Yes, tech has always had two sides. Our "job" as humans is to pick the good parts, and avoid the bad. Nothing new, nothing exceptional.
        • lm28469 11mo ago
          > A tool is a tool. These AI critics sound to me like people who have hit their finger with a hammer, and now advocate against using them altogether. Speaking of wonky analogies, have you considered that other people have access to these hammers and are aiming for your head ? And that some people might not want to be hit on the head by a hammer
        • andrepd 11mo ago
          More lazy analogies... Yes a hammer is a tool, so is a machine gun, a nuke, or the guy with his killdozer. So what are you gonna do? Nothing to see here, discussion closed. This is not an interesting conversation.
  • Aeolun 11mo ago
    How is that different from making manual computation obsolete with the help of excel?
  • Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
    If you are a software engineere, you can leverage AI a lot better to write code than anyone else. The complexity of good code, is still complicated. which means 1. if software development is really solved, everyone else also gets a huge problem (ceo, cto, accountants, designers, etc. etc.) so we are in the back of the ai doomsday line. And 2. it allows YOU to leverage AI a lot better which can enable you to create your own product. In my startup, we leverage AI and we are not worried that another company just does the same thing because even if they do, we know how to write good code and architecture and we are also using AI. So we will always be ahead.
  • fennecfoxy 11mo ago
    Lmao Cory Doctorow. Desperately trying to coin another catchphrase again.
• huflungdung 11mo ago
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• aforwardslash 11mo ago
  Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or <insert politics rant here>". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?
  • nullbyte808 11mo ago
    Exactly.
  • stuartjohnson12 11mo ago
    There's a lot of overlap between "AI is evil megacapitalism" and "AI is ineffective", and I never understood the latter, but I am increasingly arriving to the understanding that the latter claim isn't real, it's just a soldier in the war being fought over the former.
    • zero-st4rs 11mo ago
      I read the intersection as this: We shape the world through our choices, generally under the umbrella of deterministic systems. AI is non-deterministic, but instead amplifies the concerns by a few wealthy corporations / individuals. So is AI effective at generating marketing material or propagating arguably vapid value systems in the face of ecological, cultural, and economic crisis? I'd argue yes. But effective also depends on an intention, and that's not my intention, so it's not as effective for me. I think we need more "manual" choice, and more agency.
    • andrepd 11mo ago
      Ineffective at what? Writing good code, or producing any sort of valuable insight? Yes, it's ineffective. Writing unmaintainable slop at line rate? Or writing internet-filling spam, or propagating their owners' points of view? Very effective. I just think the things they are effective at are a net negative for most of us.
    • 11mo ago
• EdiX 11mo ago
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  • mahrain 11mo ago
    Reading the blog post the Marxist sentiment was creeping in, and then I also saw actual Marx referenced in the footnotes.
• JyB 11mo ago
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• raincole 11mo ago
  > LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles What a loaded sentence lol. Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive. And implying somehow anti-AI is progressive. > AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point. Really? So we're not going to see AI users celebrating over how much less power DeepSeek used, right? Anyway guess what else is resource intensive? Making chips. Follow the line of logic you will find computers consolidate powers and real progressive hackers should use pencil and paper only. Back to the first paragraph... > almost like a reflex, was a self-justification of why the way they use these tools is fine, while other approaches were reckless. The irony is off the roof. This article is essentially: when I use computational power how I like, it's being a hacker. When others use computational power their way, it's being fascists.
  • ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
    Pro/regressive are terms that are highly contextual. Progress for progress’ sake alone can move anything forward. I would argue the progression of the attention economy has been extremely negative for most of the human race, yet that is “progressing.”
    • zmgsabst 11mo ago
      In this instance, it’s just claiming turf for the political movement in the US that has spent the last century: - inventing scientific racism and (after that was debunked) reinventing other academic pretenses to institutionalize race-base governance and society - forcibly sterilizing people with mental illnesses until the 1970s, through 2005 via coercion, and until the present via lies, fake studies, and ideological subversion - being outspokenly antisemitic Personally, I think it’s a moral failing we allow such vile people to pontificate about virtues without being booed out of the room.
  • _heimdall 11mo ago
    > Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive I didn't read it that way. "Progressive hacker circles" doesn't imply that all hackers are progressive, it can just be distinguishing progressive circles from conservative ones.
• nullbyte808 11mo ago
  As a crappy programmer I love AI! Right now I'm focusing on building up my Math knowledge, general CS knowledge and ML knowledge. In the future, knowing how to read code and understanding it may be more important than writing it. I think its amazing what giant vector matrices can do with a little code.
  • skydhash 11mo ago
    The thing about reading code and understanding is logical reasoning, which you can do by knowing the semantic of each tokens. But the semantics are not universal. You have the Turing Machine, the lambda calculus, horn clauses, etc… Then there are more abstractions (and new semantics) built on top of those. Writing code is very easy if you know the solution and the semantics of the coding platform. But knowing the solution is a difficult task, even in a business settings where the difficulty are more communication issues. Knowing the semantics of the coding platform is also a difficult one, because you’ll probably be using others’ code and you’ll face the same communication issue (lack of documentation, erroneous documentation, etc…) So being good at programming does not really means knowing code. It’s more about knowing how to bypass communication barriers to get the knowledge you need.
  • deleted 11mo ago
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• hartator 11mo ago
  The main thing is everyone seems to hate reading someone else ChatGPT while we are still eager to share ours to others as it’s some sort of oracle.
• Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
  Its ignorant. Thats what it is. The big tech will build out compute in a never seen speed and we will reach 2e29 Flops faster than ever. Big tech is competing with each other and they are the ones with the real money in our capitalistic world but even if they would find some slow down between each others, countries are also now competing. In the next 4 years and the massive build out of compute, we will see a lot clearer how the progress will go. And either we hit obvous limitations or not. If we will not see an obvious limitation, fionas opinion will have 0 relevance. The best chance for everyone is to keep a very very close eye on AI to either make the right decisions (not buying that house with a line of credit; creating your own product a lot faster thanks to ai, ...) or be aware what is coming. Thanks for the fish and enjoy the ride.
• embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world). And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers. If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts. What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?
  • hacb 11mo ago
    It's absolutely not easy to find a new job in France, and more generally in Europe
    • embedding-shape 11mo ago
      My experience and the ones I personally known, been in Western Europe, South America and Asia, and programmers I know have an easier time to find new jobs compared to other professions. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot harder for new developers to enter the industry compared to a decade ago, even in Western Europe, but it's still way easier compared to the length people I know who aren't programmers or even in tech.
      • IAmBroom 11mo ago
        That's a quantifiable claim. Using experience to "prove" it is inappropriate. US data does back it up, though. The tech labor sector outperformed all others in the last 10 years. https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...
• rho4 11mo ago
  And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.
  • skydhash 11mo ago
    If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away. If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away. If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one. What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.
    • embedding-shape 11mo ago
      > What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end. "reliability" can mean multiple things though. LLM invocations are as reliable (granted you know how program properly) as any other software invocation, if you're seeing crashes you're doing something wrong. But what you're really talking about is "correctness" I think, in the actual text that's been responded with. And if you're expecting/waiting for that to be 100% "accurate" every time, then yeah, that's not a use case for LLMs, and I don't think anyone is arguing for jamming LLMs in there even today. Where the LLMs are useful, is where there is no 100% "right or wrong" answer, think summarization, categorization, tagging and so on.
      • skydhash 11mo ago
        I’m not a native English speaker so I checked on the definition of reliability the quality of being able to be trusted or believed because of working or behaving well For a tool, I expect “well” to mean that it does what it’s supposed to do. My linter are reliable when it catches bad patterns I wanted it to catch. My editor is reliable when I can edit code with it and the commands do what they’re supposed to do. So for generating text, LLMs are very reliable. And they do a decent job at categorizing too. But code is formal language, which means correctness is the end result. A program may be valid and incorrect at the same time. It’s very easy to write valid code. You only need the grammar of the language. Writing correct code is another matter and the only one that is relevant. No one hire people for knowing a language grammar and verifying syntax. They hire people to produce correct code (and because few businesses actually want to formally verify it, they hire people that can write code with a minimal amount of bugs and able to eliminate those bugs when they surface).
• mazone 11mo ago
  Does the author feel the same way of running the models locally?
• deleted 11mo ago
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• Separo 11mo ago
  If as the author suggests AI is inherently designed to further concentrate control and capital, that may be so, but that is also the aim of every business.
• abbadadda 11mo ago
  I really enjoyed how your words made me _feel._ They encouraged me to "keep fighting the good fight" when it comes to avoiding social media, et. al. I do Vibe Code occasionally, Claude did a decent job with Terraform and SaltStack recently, but the words ring true in my head about how AI weakens my thinking, especially when it comes to Python or any programming language. Tread carefully indeed. And reading a book does help - I've been tearing through the Dune books after putting them off too long at my brother's recommendation. Very interesting reflections in those books on power/human nature that may apply in some ways to our current predicament. At any rate, thank you for the thoughtful & eloquent words of caution.
  • scld 11mo ago
    Doesn't Python weaken your thinking about how computers actually work?
    • marcus_cemes 11mo ago
      You could make the same argument for any language. It still requires you to think and implement the solution yourself, just at a certain level of abstraction.
    • miningape 11mo ago
      It may - but it doesn't weaken your ability to think computationally
    • paddleon 11mo ago
      you mean by calling arrays "lists"?
• zkmon 11mo ago
  So, you want to rebel and stay as organic-minded human? But the what exactly is "being a human"? The biological senses and abilities were constantly augmented throughput the centuries, pushing the organic human to hide inside deeper layers of what you call as yourself. What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these. Now let's wind back. Why resist just one more layer of augmentation of our senses, mind and physical abilities?
  • zero-st4rs 11mo ago
    > What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these. perhaps a being that has the capacity for intention and will?
    • zkmon 11mo ago
      Capacity for intention and will were already driven by augmentations that were knowledge and reasoning. Knowledge was sourced externally and reasoning was developed from externally recorded memory of past. Even the instincts get updated by experiences and knowledge.
      • zero-st4rs 11mo ago
        I'm not sure if you wrote this with AI, but could you provide examples? Knowledge is shaped by constraints which inform intention, it doesn't "drive it." "I want to fly, I intend to fly, I learn how to achieve this by making a plane." not "I have plane making knowledge therefore I want and intend to fly" However, I totally understand that constraints often create a feedback loop where reasoning is reduced to the limitations which confine it. My Mom has no idea that "her computer" != "windows + hp + etc", and if you were to ask her how to use a computer, she would be intellectually confined to a particular ecosystem. I argue the same is true for capitalism/dominant culture. If you can't "see" the surface of the thing that is shaping your choices, chances are your capacity for "will" is hindered and constrained. Going back to this. > What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these. I don't think my very ability to make choices comes from owning stuff and knowing people.
• noobcoder 11mo ago
  I see this play out everywhere actually be it code, thoughts, even intent, atomized for the capital engine. Its more than a productivity hack, its a subtle power shift decisions getting abstracted, agency getting diluted Opting in to weirdness and curiosity is the only bug worth keeping which will eventually become a norm
• skwee357 11mo ago
  Well, there are two aspects from which I can react to this post. The first aspect is the “I don’t touch AI with a stick”. AI is a tool. Nobody is obligated to touch it obviously, but it is useful in certain situations. So I disagree with the author’a position to avoid using AI. It reads like stubbornness for the sake of avoiding new tech. The second angle is the “bigtech corporate control” angle. And honestly, I don’t get this argument at all. Computers and the digital world has created the biggest distopian world we have ever witnessed. From absurd amounts of misinformation and propaganda fueled by bot farms operated at government levels, all the way to digital surveillance tech. You have that strong of an opinion against big tech and digital surveillance, blaming AI for that, while enjoying the other perils of big tech, is virtue signaling. Also, what’s up with the overuse of “fascism” in places where it does not belong?
• simianwords 11mo ago
  What's with these kinda people and their obsession with the pejorative "fascist". Overused to the point where it means nothing.
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  • yahoozoo 11mo ago
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• arowthway 11mo ago
  I like the "what’s left" part of the article. It’s applicable regardless of your preferred flavor of resentment about where things are going.
• dangus 11mo ago
  This piece started relatively well but devolved by the end. Is AI resource-intensive by design? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I think companies are furiously working toward reducing AI costs. Is AI a tool of fascism? Well, I’d say anything that can make money can be a tool of fascism. I can sort of jive with the argument that AI is/will be reinforcing the ideals of those in power, although I think traditional media and the tooling that AI intends to replace like search engines accomplished that just fine. What we are left with is, I think, an author who is in denial about their special snowflake status as a programmer. It was okay for the factory worker to be automated away, but now that it’s my turn to be automated away I’m crying fascism and ethics. Their friends behave the way they do about AI because they know it’s useful but know it’s unpopular. They’re trying to save face while still using the tool because it’s so obviously useful and beneficial. I think the analogy is similar to the move from film to digital. There will be a tiny amount of people who never buy in, there will be these “ashamed” adopters who support the idea of film and hope it continues on, but for themselves personally would never go back to film, and then the majority who don’t see the problem with letting film die.
• metalman 11mo ago
  "chat~fu" cachonk! snap your cuffs, wait fot it eyebrows! and demonstrate your mastery ,to the muterings of the golly gee's it will last several more months untill the , GASP!!!, bills ,maintenance costs, regulatory burdens, and various legal issues combine to, pop AI's balloon, where then AI will be left automating all of the tedious, but chair filling, beurocratic/secretarial/appretice positions through out the white collar world. technology is slowly pushing into other sectors, where legacy methods and equipment can now be reduced to a free app on a phone, more to the point, a free, local only app. fact is that we are way over siliconed going forward and that will bite as well, terra bite phones for $100, what then?
• eisbaw 11mo ago
  Programming and CS is the art of solving problems - hopefully problems that matter. AI lets you do that faster. AI may suggest a dumb way, so you have to think, and tell it what to do. My rate of thinking is faster than typing, so the bottleneck has switched from typing to thinking! Don't let AI think for you. Do actual intensional arch design. Programmers that don't know CS who only care about hammering the keyboards because they're artisans have little future. AI also give me back my hobby after having kids -- time is valuable, and AI is energy efficient. We are truly living in a cambrian explosion -- lot of slop will be produced, but market and selection pressure will weed those out.
  • danillonunes 11mo ago
    > My rate of thinking is faster than typing, so the bottleneck has switched from typing to thinking! Unless you're neuralinking to AI, you're still typing. What changed is what you type. You type less words to solve your problem. The machine does the conversion from less words to more words. At the expense of less precision: the machine can do the conversion to the incorrect sequence of more words.
• ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
  I recently had to write a simple web app to search through a database, but full-text searching wasn't quite cutting it. The underlying data was too inconsistent and the kind of things people would ask for would mean searching across five or six columns. Just the job for an AI agent! So what I did is this - I wrote the app in Django, because it's what I'm familiar with. Then in the view for the search page, I picked apart the search terms. If they start with "01" it's an old phone number so look in that column, if they start with "03" it's a new phone number so look in that column, if they start with "07" it's a mobile, if it's a letter followed by two digits it's a site code, if it's numeric but doesn't have a 0 at the start it's an internal number, and if it doesn't match anything then see if it exists as a substring in the description column. There we go. Very fast and natural searching that Does What You Mean (mostly). No Artificial Intelligence. All done with Organic Home-grown Brute Force and Ignorance. Because that's sometimes just what you need.
• everdrive 11mo ago
  >In a world where fascists redefine truth, where surveillance capitalist companies, more powerful than democratically elected leaders, exert control over our desires, do we really want their machines to become part of our thought process? To share our most intimate thoughts and connections with them? Generally speaking people just cannot really think this way. People broadly are short term thinkers. If something is convenient, people will use it. Is it easier to spray your lawn with pesticides? Yep, cancer (or biome collapse) is a tomorrow problem and we have a "pest" problem today. Is it difficult to sit alone with your thoughts? Well good news, Youtube exists and now you don't have to. What happens next (radicalization, tracking, profiling, propaganda, brain rot) is a tomorrow problem. Do you want to scroll at the end of the day and find out what people are talking about? Well, social media is here for you. Whether or not it's accidentally part of a privatized social credit system? Well again, that 's a problem for later. I _need_ to feel comfortable _right now_. It doesn't matter what I do to the world so long as I'm comfortable _right now._ I don't see any way out of it. People can't seem to avoid these patterns of behavior. People asking for regulation are about as realistic as people hoping for abstinence. It's a correct answer in principle but just isn't going to happen.
  • Razengan 11mo ago
    > People broadly are short term thinkers. I wonder how much of that is "nature vs. nurture"? Like the Tolkienesque elves in fantasy worlds, would humans be more chill too if our natural lifespans were counted in centuries instead of decades? Or is it the pace of society, our civilization, that always keeps us on edge? I mean I'm not sure if we're born with a biological sense of mortality, an hourglass of doom encoded into our genes.. What if everybody had 4 days of work per week, guaranteed vacation time every few months, kids didn't have to wake up at 7/8 in the morning every day, and progress was measured biennially, e.g. 2 years between school grades/exams, and economic performance was also reviewed in 2 year periods, and so on, could we as a species mellow the fuck out?
    • IAmBroom 11mo ago
      I've wondered about this a lot, and I think it's genetic and optimized for survival in general. Dogs barely set food aside; they prefer gorging, which is a good survival technique when your food spoils and can be stolen. Bees, at the other end of the spectrum, spend their lives storing food (or "canning", if you will - storing prepared food). We first evolved in areas that were storage-adverse (Africa), and more recently many of us moved to areas with winters (both good and needful storage). I think "finish your meal, you might not get one tomorrow" is our baseline survival instinct; "Winter is coming!" is an afterthought, and might be more nurture-based behavior than the other.
• mono442 11mo ago
  The author may not care but I doubt people care that a software has been developed by AI instead of a human. Just like nobody cares whenever a hole has been dug by hand using a shovel or by an excavator.
  • cpburns2009 11mo ago
    The problem is the AI excavator destroying the road because it hallucinated the ditch.
  • notTooFarGone 11mo ago
    people care if there is noone able to fix the software or adjust it. Think of old SAP systems with a million obscure customization - any medium to large codebase that is mostly vibe coded is instantly legacy code. In your hole analogy: People don't care if a mine is dug by a bot or planned by humans until there is structural integrity issues or tunnels that are collapsing and nobody is able to read the map properly.
  • bigstrat2003 11mo ago
    No, but people do care if the software works. And the software developed by LLMs doesn't work.
• 0xFEE1DEAD 11mo ago
  I honestly don't get vibe coding. I've tried it multiple times, but even after spending 4 hours on a fresh project I don't feel like I know what the hell is going on anymore. At that point I'm just guessing what the next prompt is to make it work. I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would probably take longer than 4 hours). I don't understand how anyone can work like that and have confidence in their code.
  • gavmor 11mo ago
    > I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would probably take longer than 4 hours). Peter Naur argues that programming is fundamentally an activity of theory building, not just program text production. The code itself is merely the artifact of the real work. You must not confuse the artifact (the source code) with the mind that produced the artifact. The theory is not contained in the text output of the theory-making process. The problems of program modification arise from acting on the assumption that programming is just text production; the decay of a program is a result of modifications made by programmers without a proper grasp of the underlying theory. LLMs cannot obtain Naur's Ryleian "theory" because they "ingest the output of work" rather than developing the theory by doing the work. LLMs may _appear_ to have a theory about a program, but this is an illusion. To believe that LLMs can write software, one must mistakenly assume that the main activity of the programmer is simply to produce source code, which is (according to Naur) inaccurate.
    • 0xFEE1DEAD 11mo ago
      I agree with this take, but I'm wondering what vibe coders are doing differently? Are they mainly using certain frameworks that already have a rigid structure, thus allowing LLMs to not worry about code structure/software architecture? Are they worry-free and just run with it? Not asking rhetorically, I seriously want to know.
    • xrrocha 11mo ago
      This is one of the most insightful thoughts I've read about the role of LLM's in software development. So much so, indeed, its pertinence would remain pristine after removing all references to LLM's
• zajio1am 11mo ago
  > We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft. Valuation is fundamentally connected to scarcity. 'Devaluation' is just negative spin for making it plentyful. When cicumstances changed to make something less scarce, one cannot expect to get the same value for it because of past valuation. That is just rent-seeking.
• nachox999 11mo ago
  It's up to you to use candles instead of lightbulbs
• bgwalter 11mo ago
  The increasingly rough tone against "AI" critics in the comments and the preposterous talking points ("you are not a senior developer if you do not get value from 'AI'") is an indication that the bubble will burst soon. It is the tool obsessed people who treat everything like a computer game that like "AI" for software engineering. Most of them have never written anything substantial themselves and only know the Jira workflow for small and insignificant tickets.
• BrotherBisquick 11mo ago
  [dead]
• cwiz 11mo ago
  well, maybe adopt an outlook that things you think are real aren't, and just maybe it will work just as fine if you completely ignore them. going forward ignoring ai that are smarter than autocomplete may be just the way to go
• ojr 11mo ago
  I always thought years of experience in a language was a silly job requirement. LLMs allow me to write Rust code as a total Rust beginner and allows me to create a valuable SaaS while most experienced Rust developer never built anything that made $1 outside of their work. I wouldn't say devaluation, my programming experience definitely helps with debugging. LLMs eliminate boilerplate, not engineering judgement and product decisions.
  • mountainriver 11mo ago
    I really love LLMs for Rust. Before them I was an intermediate Rust dev, and only used it in specific circumstances where the extra coding overhead paid off. Now I write just about everything in Rust because why not? If I can vibe code Rust about as fast as Python, why would I ever use Python outside of ML?
  • drudolph914 11mo ago
    I think when the author says > “We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft” my interpretation of what the author means by devaluation is the general trend that we’re seeing in LLMs The theory that I hear from investors is as LLMs generally improve, there will exist a day where a LLMs default code output, coupled with continued hardware speeds, will become _good enough_ for the majority of companies - even if the code looks like crap and is 100x slower than it needs to be This doesn’t mean there won’t be a few companies that still need SWEs to drop down and do engineering, but tbh, the majority of companies today just need a basic web app - and we’ve commoditized web app dev tools to oblivion. I’d even go as far to argue that what most programmers do today isn’t engineering, it’s gluing together an ecosystem of tooling and or API’s. Real engineering seems to happen outside of work on open source projects, at the mav 7 on specialized teams, or at niche deeply technical startups EDIT: I’m not saying this is good or bad, but I’m just making the observation that there is a trend towards devaluing this work in the economy for the majority of people, and I generally empathize with people who just want stability and to raise a family within reasonable means
• TrackerFF 11mo ago
  I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever. If your org is blindly data/metric driven, it is probably just a mater of time until managers start asking why everyone else is producing so much, while you're slow?
  • zwnow 11mo ago
    > You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. If it doesn't, yay refactoring prompts instead of tackling the actual problem. Also I can write code for free, LLMs coding assistants aren't free. I can fit business problems amd edge cases into my brain given some time, a LLM is unaware about edge cases, legal requirements, decoupled dependencies, potential refactors or the occasional call of boss asking for something to be sneaked into the code right now. If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into.
    • Aurornis 11mo ago
      > I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. You don’t have to let the LLM write code for you. They’re very useful as a smart search engine for your code base, a smart refactoring tool, a suggestion generator, and many other ways. I rarely have LLMs write code for me from scratch that I have to review, but I do give them specific instructions to do what I want to the codebase. They can do it much faster than I can search around the codebase and type out myself. There are so many ways to make LLMs useful without having them do all the work while you sit back and judge. I think some people are determined to get no value out of the LLM because they feel compelled to be anti-hype, so they’re missing out on all the different little ways they can be used to help. Even just using it as a smarter search engine (in the modes where they can search and find the right sections of right articles or even GitHub issues for you) has been very helpful. But you have to actually learn how to use them. > If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into. Okay, good luck with your hut in the forest. The rest of us will move on using these tools how we see fit, which for many of us doesn’t actually include this idea where the LLM is the author of the code and you just ask nicely and reject edits until it produces the exact code you want. The tools are useful in many ways and you don’t have to stop writing your own code. In fact, anyone who believes they can have the LLM do all the coding is in for a bad surprise when they realize that specific hype is a lie.
• JimmaDaRustla 11mo ago
  We don't care that you don't care
  • jillesvangurp 11mo ago
    Harsh but fair. In short, some people are upset about change happening to them. They think it's unfair and that they deserve better. Maybe that's true. But unfair things happen to lots of people all the time. And ultimately people move on, mostly. There's a futility to being very emotional about it. I don't get all the whining of people about having to adapt. That's a constant in our industry and always has been. If what you were doing was so easy that it fell victim to the first generation of AI tools that are doing a decent enough job of it, then maybe what you were doing was a bit Ground Hog day to begin with. I've certainly been involved with a lot of projects where a lot of the work felt that way. Customer wants a web app thing with a log in flow and a this and a that. 99% of that stuff is kind of very predictable. That's why agentic coding tools are so good at this stuff. But lets be honest, it was kind of low value stuff to begin with. And it's nice that people over-payed for that for a while but it was never going to be forever. There's still plenty of stuff these tools are less good at. It gets progressively harder if you are integrating lots of different niche things or doing some non standard/non trivial things. And even those things where it does a decent job, it still requires good judgment and expertise to 1) be able to even ask for the right thing and then 2) judge if what comes back is fit for purpose. There's plenty of work out there supporting companies with decades of legacy software that are not going to be throwing away everything they have overnight. Leveling up their UIs with AI powered features, cross integrating a lot of stuff, etc. is going to generate lots of work and business. And most companies are very poorly equipped to do that in house even if they have access to agentic coding tools. For me AI is actually generating more work, not less. I'm now taking on bigger things that were previously impossible to take on without involving more people. I have about 10x more things I want to do than I have bandwidth for. I have to take decisions about doing things the stupid old way because it's better/faster or attempting to generate some code. All new tools do is accelerate the pace and raise the ambition levels. That too is nothing new in our industry. Things that were hard are now easy, so we do more of them and find yet harder things to do next. We're not about to run out of hard things to do any time soon. Adapting is hard. Not everyone will manage. Some people might burn out doing that or change career. And some people are in denial or angry about that. And you can't really expect others to loose a lot of sleep over this. Whether that's unfair or not doesn't really matter.
• lxgr 11mo ago
  > I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. Anything worth reading beyond this transparent and hopefully unsuccessful appeal to tribalism? Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different? > the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. A fate that designers, writers, translators, tailors or book-binders lived through before us What is it with this perceived right to fulfilling, but also highly paid, employment in software engineering? Nobody is stopping anyone from doing things by hand that machines can do at 10 times the quality and 100 times the speed. Some people will even pay for it, but not many. Much will be relegated to unpaid pastime activities, and the associated craftspeople will move on to other activities to pay the bills (unless we achieve post-scarcity first). That's just human progress in a nutshell. If the underlying problem is that many societies define a person's worth via their employability, that seems like a problem best fixed by restructuring said societies, not by artificially blocking technological progress. "progressive hackers"...
  • ceejayoz 11mo ago
    > Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different? Who says we haven't tried it out?
    • lxgr 11mo ago
      Seems like various hackers came to various different conclusions from trying them out, then. Why feign surprise about this?
      • ceejayoz 11mo ago
        Why not? I was surprised how hard many here fell for the NFT thing, too.
        • lxgr 11mo ago
          Please, not the old "AI is the new crypto" trope. Various people have been wrong on various predictions in the past, and it seems to me that any implied strong overlap is anecdotal at best and wishful (why?) thinking at worst. The only really embarrassing behavior is never updating your priors when your predictions are wrong. Also, if you're always right about all your prognoses, you should probably also not be in the HN comments but on a prediction market, on-chain or traditional :)
• markbnj 11mo ago
  I think the dangers that LLMs pose to the ability of engineers to earn a living is overstated, while at the same time the superpowers that they hand us don't seem to get much discussion. When I was starting out in the 80's I had to prowl dial-up BBSs or order expensive books and manuals to find out how to do something. I once paid IBM $140 for a manual on the VGA interface so I could answer a question. The turn around time on that answer was a week or two. The other day I asked claude something similar to this: "when using github as an OIDC provider for authentication and assumption of an AWS IAM role the JWT token presented during role assumption may have a "context" field. Please list the possible values of this field and the repository events associated with them." I got back a multi-page answer complete with examples. I'm sure github has documents out there somewhere that explain this, but typing that prompt took me two minutes. I'm able daily to get fast answers to complex questions that in years past would have taken me potentially hours of research. Most of the time these answers are correct, and when they are wrong it still takes less time to generate the correct answer than all that research would have taken before. So I guess my advice is: if you're starting out in this business worry less about LLMs replacing you and more about how to efficiently use that global expert on everything that is sitting on your shoulder. And also realize that code, and the ability to write working code, is a small part of what we do every day.
  • hvb2 11mo ago
    > So I guess my advice is: if you're starting out in this business worry less about LLMs replacing you and more about how to efficiently use that global expert on everything that is sitting on your shoulder. There's a real danger in that they use so many resources though. Both in the physical world (electricity, raw materials, water etc.) as well as in a financial sense. All the money spent on AI will not go to your other promising idea. There's a real opportunity cost there. I can't imagine that, at this point, good ideas go without funding because they're not AI.
  • skydhash 11mo ago
    I’m glad you listed the manual example. Usually when people are solving problems, they’re not asking the kind of super targeted question in you second example. Instead it’s an exploration. You read and target the next concept you need to understand. And if you do have this specific question, you want the surrounding context because you’ll likely have more questions after the first. So what people do is collecting documentations. Give them a glance (or at least the TOC), the start the process to understand the concepts. Sure you can ask the escape code for setting a terminal title, but will it says that not all terminals support that code? Or that piping does not strip out escape codes? That’s the kind of gotchas you can learn from proper manuals.
• kleiba 11mo ago
  Damn, I knew I shouldn't have read on after "falafel sandwich"...
• disambiguation 11mo ago
  I'm under the impression that AI is still negative ROI. Creating absolute value is different from creating value greater than the cost. A tool is a tool, but could you continue performing professionally if it was suddenly no longer available?
• ttul 11mo ago
  This post raises genuine concerns about the integration of large language models into creative and technical work, and the author writes with evident passion about what they perceive as a threat to human autonomy and craft. BUT… the piece suffers from internal contradictions, selective reasoning, and rhetorical moves that undermine its own arguments in ways worth examining carefully. My opinion: This sort of low-evidence writing is all too common in tech circles. It makes me wish computer science and engineering majors were forced to spend at least one semester doing nothing but the arts. The most striking inconsistency emerges in how the author frames the people who use LLM tools. Early in the piece, colleagues experimenting with AI coding assistants are described in the language of addiction and pathology: they are “sucked into the belly of the vibecoding grind,” experiencing “existential crisis,” engaged in “harmful coping.” The comparison to watching a friend develop a drinking problem is explicit and damning. This framing treats AI adoption as a personal failure, a weakness of character, a moral lapse. Yet only paragraphs later, the author pivots to acknowledging that people are “forced to use these systems” by bosses, UI patterns, peer pressure, and structural disadvantages in school and work. They even note their own privilege in being able to abstain. These two framings cannot coexist coherently. If using AI tools is coerced by material circumstances and power structures, then the addiction metaphor is not just inapt but cruel — it assigns individual blame for systemic conditions. The author wants to have it both ways: to morally condemn users while also absolving them as victims of circumstance. This tension extends to the author’s treatment of their own social position. Having acknowledged that abstention from LLMs requires privilege, they nonetheless continue to describe AI adoption as a “brainworm” that has infected even “progressive hacker circles.” The disgust is palpable. But if avoiding these tools is a luxury, then expressing contempt for those who cannot afford that luxury is inconsistent at best and self-congratulatory at worst. The acknowledgment of privilege becomes a ritual disclaimer rather than something that actually modifies the moral judgments being rendered. The author’s claims about intentionality represent another significant weakness. The assertion that AI systems being resource-intensive “is not a side effect — it’s the point” is presented as revelation, but it functions as an unfalsifiable claim. No evidence is offered that anyone designed these systems to be resource-hungry as a mechanism of control. The technical requirements of training large models, competitive market pressure to scale, and the emergent dynamics of venture capital investment all offer more parsimonious explanations that don’t require attributing coordinated malicious intent. Similarly, the claim that “AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence” is stated as though it were established fact rather than contested interpretation. This is the central claim of the piece, and yet it receives no argument — it is simply asserted and then built upon, which amounts to begging the question. The essay also suffers from a pronounced selection bias in its examples. Every person described using AI tools is in crisis, suffering, or compromised. No one uses them mundanely, critically, or with benefit. This creates a distorted picture that serves rhetorical purposes but does not reflect the range of actual use cases. The author’s friends who share their anti-AI sentiment are mentioned approvingly, establishing clear in-group and out-group boundaries. This is identity formation masquerading as analysis — good people resist, compromised people succumb. There is a false dichotomy running through the piece that deserves attention. The implied choice is between the author’s total abstention, not touching LLMs “with a stick,” and being consumed by the pathological grind described earlier. No middle ground exists in this telling. The possibility of critical, limited, or thoughtful engagement with these tools is never acknowledged as legitimate. You are either pure or contaminated. Reality doesn’t work this way! It’s not black and white. My take: AI is a transformative technology and the spectrum of uses and misuses of AI is vast and growing. The philosophical core of their argument also contains an unexamined equivocation. The author invokes the extended cognition thesis — the idea that tools become part of us and shape who we are — to make AI seem uniquely threatening. But this same argument applies to every tool mentioned in the piece: hammers, pens, keyboards, dictionaries. The author describes their own fingers “flying over the keyboard, switching windows, opening notes, looking up words in a dictionary” as part of their extended cognitive process. If consulting a dictionary shapes thought and becomes part of our cognitive process, what exactly distinguishes that from asking a language model to check grammar or suggest a word? The author never establishes what makes AI categorically different from the other tools that have already become part of us. The danger is assumed rather than demonstrated. There is also a genetic fallacy at work in the argument about power. The author suggests AI is bad partly because of who controls it — surveillance capitalists, fascists, those with enormous physical infrastructure. But this argument conflates the origin and ownership of a technology with its inherent properties. One could make identical arguments about the printing press, the telephone, or the internet itself. The question of whether these tools could be structured differently, owned differently, or used toward different ends is never engaged. Everything becomes evidence of a monolithic system of control. Finally, there is an unacknowledged irony in the piece’s medium and advice. The author recommends spending less time on social media and reading books instead, while writing a blog post clearly designed for social sharing, complete with the vivid metaphors, escalating moral stakes, and calls to action that characterize viral content. The post exists within and depends upon the very attention economy it criticizes. This is not necessarily hypocrisy — we all must operate within systems we find problematic — but the lack of self-awareness about it is notable given how readily the author judges others for their compromises. The essay is most compelling when it stays concrete: the phenomenology of writing as discovery, the real pressures workers face, the genuine concerns about who controls these systems and toward what ends. It is weakest when it reaches for grand unified theories of intentional domination, when it mistakes assertion for argument, and when it allows moral contempt to override the structural analysis it claims to offer. The author clearly cares about human flourishing and autonomy, but the piece would be stronger if that care extended more generously to those navigating these technologies without the privilege of refusal.
• 64718283661 11mo ago
  The answer is I will kill myself when I become replaced by LLMs entirely.
• easterncalculus 11mo ago
  > I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away" from superintelligence for the forseeable future. All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this. It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.
  • poszlem 11mo ago
    > That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. People who haven't lived through the transition will likely come here to tell you how wrong you are, but you are 100% correct.
    • codeflo 11mo ago
      You were proven right three minutes after you posted this. Something happened, I'm not sure what and how. Hacking became reduced to "hacktivism", and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.
      • Blackthorn 11mo ago
        > and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces. That happened because technology stopped being fun. When we were kids, seeing Penny communicating with Brain through her watch was neat and cool! Then when it happened in real life, it turned out that it was just a platform to inject you with more advertisements. The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology. Where is technology still fun? The places that don't have ads being vomited at you 24/7. At-home CNC (including 3d printing, to some extent) is still fun. Digital music is still fun.
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• trashb 11mo ago
  In general using natural language to feed into AI to generate code to compile to runnable software seems like the long way around to designing a more usable programming language. It seems that most people preferring natural language over programming languages don't want to learn the required programming language and ending up reinventing their own worse one. There is a reason why we invented programming languages as an interface to instruct the machine and there is a reason why we don't use natural language.
• rbongers 11mo ago
  I view current LLMs as new kinds of search engines. Ones where you have to re-verify their responses, but on the other hand can answer long and vague queries. I really don't see the harm in using them this way that can't also be said about traditional search engines. Search engines already use algorithms, it's just swapping out the algorithm and interface. Search engines can bias our understanding of anything as much as any LLM, assuming you attempt to actually verify information you get from an LLM. I'm of the opinion that if you think LLMs are bad without exception, you should either question how we use technology at all or question this idea that they are impossible to use responsibly. However I do acknowledge that people criticize LLMs while justifying their usage, and I could just be doing the same thing.
  • tylershuster 11mo ago
    Exactly. Using them to actually “generate content” is a sure fire way to turn your brain into garbage, along with whatever you “produce” - but they do seem to have fulfilled Google’s dream of making the Star Trek computer reality.
• the__alchemist 11mo ago
  I am getting tilted by both corp AI hype and the luddites like this. If you don't think that term is appropriate, then I am not sure if it's ever appropriate to use it in the general sense. The "I know you will say you use it appropriately but others don't" pre-emption is something I have seen before, and it isn't convincing. This article lacks nuance, and could be summarized as "LLMs are bad" Later, I suspect this author (and others of this archetype) will moderate and lament "What I really meant was: I don't like corporations lying about LLMs, or using them maliciously; I didn't imply they don't have uses". The words in the article do not support this. I believe this pattern is rooted in social-justice-oriented (Is that still the term?) USA left politics. I offer no explanation for this conflation, but an observation.
• atleastoptimal 11mo ago
  HN loves this "le old school" coder "fighting the good fight" speak but it seems sillier and sillier the better and better LLM's get. Maybe in the GPT 4 era this made sense but Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 are substantively different, and anyone who can extrapolate a few years out sees the writing on the wall. A year ago, no reasonable person would use AI for anything but small-scoped autocomplete. Now it can author entire projects without oversight. Inevitably every failure case for LLM's is corrected, everything people said LLM's "could never do" they start doing within 6 months of that prognostication.
  • AlexandrB 11mo ago
    Where are these LLM-authored projects though? I was expecting to see a fresh flood of cheap shovelware in the App Store after LLMs appeared.
    • atleastoptimal 11mo ago
      Most "low hanging fruits" have been taken. The thing with AI is that it gets worse in proportion to how new of a domain it is working in (not that this is any different than humans). However the scale of apps made that utilize AI have exploded in usefulness. What is funny is that some of the ones making a big dent are horrible uses of AI and overpromise its utility (like cal.ai)
  • cyral 11mo ago
    Great comment. I'll add that despite being a bit less powerful, the Composer 1 model in Cursor is also extremely fast - to the point where things that Claude would take 10+ minutes of tool calls now takes 30 seconds. That's the difference between deciding to write it yourself, or throwing a few sentences in Cursor and having it done right away. A year ago I'd never ask AI to do tasks without being very specific about which files and methodologies I want it to use, but codebase search has improved a ton and it can gather this info on it's own, often better than I can (if I haven't worked on particular feature or domain in a few months and need to re-familiarize myself with how it's structured). The bar for what AI can do today is a LOT higher than the average AI skeptic here thinks. As someone who has been using this since the GPT4 era, I'd say that I find a prompt about once a week that I figured LLMs would choke on and screw up - but they actually nail it. Whatever free model is running in Github Copilot is not going to do as well, which is probably where a lot of frustration comes from if that is all someone has experienced.
• ciconia 11mo ago
  Where's the popcorn? I don't really care either way about so-called AI. I find the talk about AGI quite ridiculous, but I can imagine LLMs have their utility just like anything else. I don't vibe code because I don't find it useful. I'm fine coding by myself thank you very much. When the AI hype is over and the bubble has burst, I'll still be here, writing quality software using my brain and my fingers, and getting paid to do it.
• yathaid 11mo ago
  >> No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress. Without an explanation of what they author is calling out as flaws, it is hard to take this article seriously. I know engineers I respect a ton who have gotten a bunch of productivity upgrades using "AI". My own learning curve has been to see Claude say "okay, these integration tests aren't working. Let me write unit tests instead" and go on when it wasn't able to fix a jest issue.
  • layer8 11mo ago
    The entire rest of the article consists of describing the problems. The problems aren’t about the technical abilities of AI.
• constantcrying 11mo ago
  >I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. This is such a bizarre sentiment for any person interested in technology. AI is, without any doubt, the most fascinating and important technology I have seen developed in my lifetime. A decade ago the idea of a computer not only holding a reasonable conversation with a human, but being able to talk with a human on deep and complex subjects seemed far out of reach. No doubt there are many deep running problems with it, any technology with such a radical breakthrough will have them. But none of that takes away from how monumental of an achievement it is. Looking down at people for using it or being excited about it is such an extreme position. Also the insinuation that the only reason anybody uses it because they are forced into it, is completely bizarre.
• Atlas667 11mo ago
  Luddism is a reaction to the current situation as it pertains to labor. Marx had this to say about it: "It took both time and experience before the workers learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used." - Karl Marx. Das Kapital Vol 1 Ch 15: Machinery and Modern Industry, 1867 Tech can always be good, how its used is what makes it bad, or not.
• pneumic 11mo ago
  For me LLMs have been an incredible relief when it comes to software planning—quickly navigating the paralyzing quantity of choices when it comes to infrastructure, deployment, architecture and so on. Of course, this only highlights how crushingly complex it all is now, and I get a sinking feeling that instead of people solving technical complexity where it needs solving, these tools will be an abstraction layer over ever-rolling balls of mud that no one bothers to clean up anymore.
  • tasty_freeze 11mo ago
    I learned to code in the late 70s on computers using BASIC, then got into Z80 assembly language. Sure, the games were wrote back then were nothing like today's 10GB, $100M+ multi-year projects, but they were still extremely exciting because expectations were much lower back then. Anyway, the point I'm getting to was it was glorious to understand what every bit of every register and every I/O register did. There were NO interposing layers of software that you didn't write yourself or didn't understand completely. I even wrote a disassembler for the BASIC ROM and spend many hours studying it so I could take advantage of useful subroutines. People even published books that had that all mapped out for you (something like "Secrets of the TRS-80 ROM Decoded"). Recently I have been helping a couple teenagers in my neighborhood learn Python a couple hours a week. After installing Python and going through the foundational syntax, you bet I had them write many of those same games. Even though it was ASCII monsters chasing their character on the screen, they loved it. It was similar to this, except it was real-time with a larger playfield: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/1g6sd5q/way_back_to_the_1970s_for_a_little_basic_game/ https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/1g6sd5q/way_ba...
    • miningape 11mo ago
      I'm currently coding a Gameboy (which kinda has a Z80) emulator and it's so much fun! (I'm in my mid-20s for context) I've never really worked on such a low level, the closest I've gotten before is bytecode - which while satisfying - just isn't as satisfying as having to imagine the binary moving around the CPU and registers (and busses too). I'm even finding myself looking at computers in a totally different way, it's a similar feeling to learning a declarative, or functional language (coming from a procedural language) - except with this amazing hardware component too. Hats off to you though, I'm not sure I'd have had the patience to code under those conditions!
• TechDebtDevin 11mo ago
  First accurate article with AI in the name I've seen on this site a long time.
• nathias 11mo ago
  every important technology produces its own amish
• deleted 11mo ago
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• OBELISK_ASI 11mo ago
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• periodjet 11mo ago
  The todsacerdoti rule continues to hold.
• geldedus 11mo ago
  Cope bettter, Luddite.
• shadowgovt 11mo ago
  I think the author makes some very good points, but it's perhaps worth noting that they are the current status quo. I do find myself wondering if the author re-evaluates in a future where the technology gets cheaper, the executable AI engine fits on a standalone Raspberry Pi, and retraining the engine is done by volunteer co-ops. ... but, it is definitely worth considering whether the status quo is tolerable and whether we as technical creatives are willing to work with tools that live within it.
• spot5010 11mo ago
  "I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment." Any software engineer who shares this sentiment is doing their career a disservice. LLMs have their pitfalls, and I have been skeptical of their capabilities, but nevertheless I have tried them out earnestly. The progress of AI coding assistants over the past year has been remarkable, and now they are a routine part of my workflow. It does take some getting used to, and effectively using an AI coding assistant is a skill in and of itself that is worth mastering.
  • jtrn 11mo ago
    I feel AI now is good enough to follow the same pattern as with internet usage. The quality ranges from useless to awesome based on how you use it. Blanked statements that “it is terrible and uesless” reveals more about the person than the tech at this point.
  • swaits 11mo ago
    It’s some mixture of luddites, denial, ignorance, and I don’t know what else. I’m not sure what these people are NOT seeing. Maybe I’m somehow fortunate with visibility into what AI can do today, and what it will do tomorrow. But I’m not doing anything special. Just paying attention and keeping an open mind. I’ve been at this for 40 years, working professionally for more than 30. I’ve seen lots. One pattern I’ve seen repeating is folks who seem to stop leaning at some point. I don’t understand this, because for me learning everyday is what fuels me. And those folks eventually die on the vine, or they become the last few greybeards working on COBOL. We are alive at a very interesting time in tech. I am excited about that. I am here for it.
    • em-bee 11mo ago
      some of us learn from the bad experience of others, like this sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061520 it already tells me enough to stay away from using AI tools for coding. and that's just one reason, if i consider all the others, then that's more than enough.
  • 11mo ago
• fancyfredbot 11mo ago
  I feel like in a sci-fi world with robots, teleportation and holodecks these people would decide to stay at home and hand wash the dishes. If an amazing world changing technology like LLMs shows up on your doorstep and your response is to ignore it and write blog posts about how you don't care about it then you aren't curious and you aren't really a hacker.
  • IshKebab 11mo ago
    I don't touch dishwashers with a stick. No matter how well they work. I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the dishwasher brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive cleaning circles. Edit: Ha I see you edited "empty the dishwasher" to "hand wash the dishes". My thoughts exactly. There's no hope for these people.
    • alcasa 11mo ago
      Tbf there are a lot of dishwashers, where I have had to essentially prewash all the dishes to make sure the dishes actually come out clean.
    • fancyfredbot 11mo ago
      lol, sorry for the edit. I realised such people would surely be disgusted with a dishwasher and had to change it.
  • alcasa 11mo ago
    I feel like the hacker response would be to roll your own models and move away from commercial offerings. Stuff like eleuther.ai is pretty inspirational, but that movements seems to have died down a bit. At least we still have a couple companies believing in doing open-weight stuff.
  • adrr 11mo ago
    Dishwasher use is correlated to allergies in children. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25713281/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25713281/
• phplovesong 11mo ago
  We will have decades of AI slop that needs to be cleaned up. Many startups will fail hard when the AI code bugs all creep up when a certain scale is reached. There will be massive dataloss, lots of hacking attempts that will succeed because of poor AI code no one understands. I dont see a dev staying in the same place for many years when its just soulless AI day in day out. Either way its a lost cause.
• wowamit 11mo ago
  AI is not one solution to all the problems in the world. But neither is it worthless. There's a proper balance to be had in knowing how useful AI is to an individual. Sure, it can be overdone. But at the same time, it shouldn't be undersold.
• gradus_ad 11mo ago
  Maybe because I came into software not from an interest in software itself but from wanting to build things, I can't relate to the anti-LLM attitude. The danger in becoming a "crafter" rather than a "builder" is you lose the forest for the trees. You become more interested in the craft for the craft's sake than for its ability to get you from point A to point B in the best way. Not that there's anything wrong with crafting, but for those of us who just care about building things, LLM's are an absolute asset.
  • thuuuomas 11mo ago
    Glad we agree that the “builder” without craft is just looking for the nearest exit.
• 1dom 11mo ago
  I think we can all agree AI is a bubble, and is over-hyped. I think we can ignore any pieces that say "AI is all bad" or "AI is all good" or "I've never used AI but...". It's nuanced, can be abused, but can be beneficial when used responsibly in certain ways. It's a tool. It's a powerful tool, so treat it like a powerful tool: learn about it enough to safely use it in a way to improve your life and those around you. Avoiding it completely whilst confidently berating it without experience is a position formed from fear, rather than knowledge or experience. I'm genuinely very surprised this article has so many points here.
  • wltr 11mo ago
    Commenting on the internet points (this article is having), I realised I was reading most of the popular things here for some time, months, and it was such a huge and careless waste of my time… So I’m not even surprised it’s having so many internet points. As if they were the sign of quality, then the opposite. Bored not very smart people thinking the more useless junk they consume, the better off they’ll become. Doesn’t work that way.
• micromacrofoot 11mo ago
  Personally I use AI for most of my work, launder it a bit to adhere to my own personal style, and don't tell anyone most of the time. In the end? no one cares. I get just as much done (maybe more), while doing less work. Maybe some of my skills will atrophy, but I'll strengthen others. I'm still auditing everything for quality as I would my own code before pushing it. At the end of the day, it usually makes fewer typos than I would. It certainly searches the codebase better than I do. All this hype on both ends will fade away, and the people using the tools they have to get things done will remain.
• Aeroi 11mo ago
  Unbelievably stale take. You can criticize the future effects of LLM's on critical thinking skills and cognitive degradation of N number metrics, but this is an incredibly jaded and emotional take on what is a freight train of technology.
• bubbi 11mo ago
  [dead]
• d_burfoot 11mo ago
  > AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists. Persuasion tip: if you write comments like this, you are going to immediately alienate a large portion of your audience who might otherwise agree with you.
• yosefk 11mo ago
  "AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence." I still can barely believe a human being could write this, though we have all read this sort of sentence countless times. Which "structure of power and violence" replicated itself into the brains of people, making them think like this? Everything "exists to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence" with these people, and they will not rest until there's anything left to attack and destroy
• jhack 11mo ago
  "I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain." Then why should I care about your opinions of them if you have zero experience using them?
  • dzikimarian 11mo ago
    I look at these people with fascination. We had digital nomads, guess now we have digital Amishes :-)
    • ahaferburg 11mo ago
      The AImish
• tacitusarc 11mo ago
  > AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists. I… what…?
• LudwigNagasena 11mo ago
  I couldn't care less about that pseudo-Marxist mumbo-jumbo about fascists redefining truth. I feel happier and less alienated (to speak in author's terms) due to LLMs. And no rhetoric about control and power can change the fact that lots of software engineering tasks are outright boring for many people. For example, I spent a bunch of dollars to let Claude figure out how to setup a VSCode workspace with a multi-environment uv monorepo with a single root namespace and an okayish VSCode linting support (we still failed to figure out how to enable a different python interpreter for each folder for Ruff, but that seems to be a Ruff extension limitation).
• exizt88 11mo ago
  Marc Maron has coined the perfect description for sanctimonious posts like these: "annoying Americans into fascism".
• karmakaze 11mo ago
  > I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment. > [...] making it increasingly hard to learn things [...] I find chatting with AI and drilling it for details is often more effective than other means of searching for the same information, or even asking random co-workers. It's all about how you use it. > No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress. I’d even go as far and say they are intentional. > AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point. WTF? There's nothing for me to learn from this post.
• jrm4 11mo ago
  "Hacker" of course, has overwhelmingly mostly lost the plot. Especially here, but elsewhere too. "Hacker" was a recognition that there existed a crusty old entrenched system (mostly not through any fault of any individual) and that it is good to poke and chip away at it, though exploring the limits of new technology. Whatever we're doing now here, it's emphatically not that.
• edfletcher_t137 11mo ago
  Those folks who are trying these tools are going to make it through this period. If you're not yet, you won't. Period, end of story. Those hackers you're so lamenting are gonna make it, but you aren't.
• pessimizer 11mo ago
  I vaguely agree with the fake conclusions at the end, which are vapid and do not arise from the arguments. "Be kind to babies, brush your teeth twice a day, always tip the waitstaff, blah blah blah whatever Bernie said, etc..." The real conclusion is: > No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deeply fundamental problems, that won’t go away with technical progress. which you can tell from the title. There are zero arguments made to support this. It's just faux-radical rambling. I'm amazed how people are impressed by this privileged middle-class babble. This is an absolutely empty-headed article that AI could spit out dozens of versions of. I care how well your AI works. I also care how it works, like I care about how transistors work. I do not want to build my own transistors*, although I like to speculate about how different ones could be built, just like I like to think about different machine learning architectures. The skills that I learned when I learned computers put me in an ideal position to understand, implement, and use machine learning. The reason I care about how well your AI works is because I am going to use it to accomplish my own goals. I am not going to fetishize being a technician in an art most people don't know, I am not a middle-class profession worshiper. I get it, your knowledge of a rare art guarantees that you eat. If your art becomes obviated by technology (like the art of doing math by hand, which you could once live very well on from birth to death), you have to learn something else. But I care how well your AI works because I am trying to accomplish things in the world, not build an identity. I think AI is bad, and I'm a bit happy that it's bad, because it means that I can use it to bridge myself to the next place before it gets good enough not to need me. The fact that I know how computers work means that I can make the AI do what I want in a way that somebody who didn't have my background couldn't. The first people that were dealing with computers were people who were good at math. Life is not going to be good for the type of this year's MBP js programmer who learned it because the web was paying, refused to learn anything else so only gradually became a programmer after node came around, and only used the trendy frameworks that it seemed they were hiring for, who still has no idea how a computer works. AI is actually going to give everything back to the nerds, because AI assistance might eventually mean you're only limited by your imagination (within the context of computers.) Nerds are imaginative. The kind of imagination that has been actively discouraged in tech for a long time, since it became a profession for marketers and middlemen. I almost guarantee this call for craftsmen against AI is coming from someone who builds CRUD apps for a living. To not be excited about what AI can do for the things that you already wanted to create, the things you dream of and couldn't find enough people with enough skills to dream with you to get it done; to me that's a sign that you're just not into computers. My fears of AI is that it will be nerfed, made so sycophantic that it sucks down credits and gets distracted so often that it makes it impossible to work, be used to extract my ideas and give them to someone with more capital and manpower who can jump in front of me (the Amazon problem), that governments will be bribed into making it impossible to run them locally, that governments will be bribed into letting corporations install them on all our computers so they can join in on the surveillance and control. I'm worried about the speakwrite. I'm worried about how it will make dreams possible for evil men. I am not worried about losing my identity. I'm not insecure like that. * although I have of course, in school, by stringing a bunch of NANDs together. I was a pioneer of the WAS-gate, which is when you turn on the power and a puff of smoke comes out of one of your transistors.
• Vaslo 11mo ago
  Once I saw the use of “FaCiSm” and “capitalist corporate control” I tuned out. I wouldn’t trust this persons opinion on trimming my nails let alone future tech.
• jsh1 11mo ago
  Most of this debate misses the real shift. AI isn't replacing programmers, it's replacing the parts of programming that were never craft in the first place. In the future, most people will prompt code they barely understand while a small minority who keep real depth will end up owning the hard problems. If anything collapses the culture, it won't be AI but our willingness to trade mastery for convenience.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• k6hkUZtLUM 11mo ago
  I'm really excited that the current AI tools will help lots of people build small and useful projects. Normal people who would otherwise be subject to their OS. Subject to vendor options. Help desk, HR, or finance folks will be able to compose and build tools to help them do their jobs (or hobbies) better. Just like we do. I think of it like frozen dinners. Frozen dinners are not the same as home cooked meals. There is a place for frozen dinners, fast foods, home cooked meals, and nice restaurants. Plus, many of us spend extra time and money making specialty food that may be as good as anything. Frozen dinners don't take away from that. I think it's the same for coding and AI use. It might eventually enhance coding overall and help bring an appreciation to what engineers are doing. Hobby or incidental coders have vastly expanded capabilities. Think of the security guy that needs one program to parse through files for a single project. Those tasks are reasonably attainable today without buying and studying the sed/awk guide. (Of course, we should all do that) Professionals might also find value using AI tools like they would use a spell checker or auto-complete that can also lookup code specs or refer to other project files for you. The most amazing and useful software, the software that wows us and moves us or inspires us, is going to be crafted and not vibed. The important software will be guided by the hands of an engineer with care and competence to the end.
• puchatek 11mo ago
  How can you have an opinion string enough for a blog post about something when you have decided not to go near it?
• iepathos 11mo ago
  These hyper paranoid statements like "I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain", are fairly worrisome for a technical person who claims to have any understanding of AI and undermines the credibility of the critique. There is some truth in here but it's beneath a lot of paranoia that's hard to sift through.
• MattyRad 11mo ago
  I think this was a really good article up until `on power`, where it became whiny, vindictive, and aimless.
• quercus 11mo ago
  I was interested until I got to the "fascist" line where the author reveals his motives for avoiding AI. Bummer, I was hoping for a level headed technical argument. This post doesn't belong on the front page.
• alcasa 11mo ago
  I think there might be a culture divide here. That person is very likely from Germany/Berlin based on their attitudes and descriptions and I feel like the hacker/tech scene is very different from bay area vibes. FAANG is not really a thing here and people are much more tech-luddite, privacy paranoid.
• tsoukase 11mo ago
  In graphics there is the uncanny valley effect: when the object approaches reality the experience degrades. A similar mode holds for AI: the more the agent resembles human thinking, feeling and (in the future) touch, the more distress creates. Because it is not and probably never be real.
• sershe 11mo ago
  One day long time ago, I decided that hex grid coordinates lovingly described by redblobgames and used by every developer delivering actual games are inelegant. I wanted to store them in a rectangular array, and also store all edges and vertices in rectangular arrays with simple numerical addressing for the usual algos (distance, neighbors etc) between all 3. I messed around with it and a map generator for a few weeks. Needless to say it was as elegant as a glass hammer, 3 simple arrays beautiful to look at. I didn't finish anything close to a game. But it was a great fun. If I ever want to deliver a game I might outsource my hex grid to AI. But back in those days I could have probably used a library. Is hacking about messing around with things? You can still do it, ignore AI, ignore prior art. You can reimplement STL because std vector is "not fast enough". Is hacking about making things? Then again, AI boilerplate is little different than stitching together libraries in practice.
• enbugger 11mo ago
  Wow, author is such a cool kid. So rebelish. I want to be her
• wltr 11mo ago
  I don’t care what an internet rando with two posts think either, thank you very much.
• mdrzn 11mo ago
  "I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick." I immediately disregard the rest of the article. You are not using the tools, you cannot comment on the tools.
• frgturpwd 11mo ago
  The argument assumes a naïve pre-hermeneutic subject who could maintain a pure unmediated "self" if only they avoided LLMs. The author is nostalgic for a world that never really existed. Photography ruined painting, digital ruined film, typewriters ruined writing, audiobooks ruined literacy etc etc! This is the same lament lodged by every craft-class when industrialization hits their domain. Programmers aren't special. AI is not a fascist project simply due to the fact that different actors are bound to weaponize it differently, so this take is.. kinda tired and full of blindspots. I could have used my prejudice in figuring that out as soon as it implied that abstinence is superior, but I wanted to give it a fair shot. It ending with self-helpesque advice is just so funny.
• Hoasi 11mo ago
  > Not that their craft would die out, but it would be mutilated This is spot on, exactly how it felt for illustrators/designers. With disruptive technologies, the correct response is to use the tools in unintended ways. And thus reappropriate them.
• smoody07 11mo ago
  Glad to see the purity tests shifting to human vs AI. The future is bright!