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I perfectly agree with antirez about the importance of AI and the benefit for coders. In the last month we saw a big jump and we all are in the middle of the bi
by silcoon 9mo ago
I perfectly agree with antirez about the importance of AI and the benefit for coders. In the last month we saw a big jump and we all are in the middle of the biggest technological revolution since the internet. He summarised the benefits, but omitted the rest.
Why we don't have to be anti-AI? Why in his opinion is just "HYPE"? I didn't find any answer in his post. He doesn't analyse the cons of AI and explain why some people might be anti-AI. He skipped the hard part and wrote a mild article that re-publish the narrative that is already getting spread on every social media.
Edit for clarification: I don't consider anti-AI the people that think LLMs don't work, they are wrong. I consider anti-AI people that are worried how this technology will impact society in so many ways that are hard to predict, including the future of software engineering.
- jstummbillig 9mo agoThere is no hard part. The anti-AI position has simply become trite. The idea is that agentic coding does not work. Today, it does work.
- Diti 9mo agoIt only works for languages and frameworks that are already in the training data (duh). It still is mostly useless when you need to create something from scratch in an unstable language. That, and you can’t also get the amazing results if you’re poor or have bad internet.
- darkhorse222 9mo agoGood thing almost all of programming falls into the former. Most of the economy runs on well defined languages. Billions and billions of dollars.
- christophilus 9mo agoNot true. I built some tools in Hare, which almost certainly isn’t in the training data to any significant extent. It was more work than having it build Go or Rust, but it got it done. It had to curl the docs a fair bit.
- CrimsonRain 9mo agoThat's true for most people too. You are trying too hard.
- ATMLOTTOBEER 9mo agoOpus 4.5 and update your priors. This was certainly true >6months back and is no longer the case
- Capricorn2481 9mo agoWe are using the latest stuff. Our experience is still not great. Why do you guys always assume we don't as though the oldest models are easy to use accidentally
- callc 9mo agoIt’s an easy deflection. Dismiss any opinions because you’re using it wrong or not the latest. Good for anything >= 1 month old. Use other nonsense fear inducing argument in the mean time, continue gathering gobs of VC money, get your bag, continue till the bubble pops. In all fairness, and putting hype and anti-hype aside, I’m really interested to see the actual value of LLM/agent services after the VC money subsidies dry out. Would people we willing to pay for services at 10x the current price?
- Cornbilly 9mo agoI have a feeling that the HN hypebeasts have a lot of overlap with the folks that previously used to copy/paste blindly from StackOverflow.
- bschwindHN 9mo agoI read the same exact thing 6 months ago.
- viking123 9mo agoYeah bro thanks for the tip and few shillings to you good sir. I was here still using GPT 2 because they said GPT 3 might be too dangerous.
- fabrice_d 9mo agoSome people are also opposed because of the negative externalities when building and running AI systems (environmental consequences, intellectual property theft), even if they understand that agentic coding "works". This is a valid position.
- jstummbillig 9mo agoI have not seen those arguments in the context of what I would consider anti-hype. But in any case: There are certainly issues attached to usage of AI more generally.
- wat10000 9mo agoIt works for some things, not everything.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- tokioyoyo 9mo agoFrom purely business and career perspective, being anti-AI will be a self-own unless you work for niche companies that have the anti-AI stance. Yes, they exist. But if a company is building, supporting, or consulting any product, where timing matters and there’s competition (which is super majority), it’ll be in their best interest to nudge their employees to speed up via AI. I do think at least being proficient right now with the LLMs will help you with whatever comes next, just because you’ll build the intuition around it. Being anti-AI might negatively affect one’s employability, and especially the younger ones who don’t have seniority or connections over the decades.
- anileated 9mo ago> From purely business and career perspective, being anti-AI will be a self-own From purely business and career perspective being anti-blockchain/NFT/online gambling/adtech/fascism (at least for now in US)/etc. is a self-own, too. I'm sure everybody making a choice against that knows it. Thankfully purely business and career perspectives don't dictate everything.
- jonas21 9mo agoThere are plenty of non-blockchain, non-NFT, non-online gambling, non-adtech, non-facist software jobs. In fact, the vast majority of software jobs are. You can refuse to work with all of these things and not even notice a meaningful difference in career opportunities. If you refuse to work with AI, however, you're already significantly limiting your opportunities. And at the pace things are going, you're probably going to find yourself constrained to a small niche sooner rather than later.
- anileated 9mo agoIf your argument is that there are more jobs that require morally dubious developments (stealing people's IP without licensing it, etc.) than jobs that don't, I don't think that's news. There's always more shady jobs than ethically satisfying ones. There's increasingly more jobs in prediction markets and other sorts of gambling, adtech (Meta, Google). Moral compromise pays. But if you really think about it and set limits on what is acceptable for you to work on (interesting new challenges, no morally dubious developments like stealing IP for ML training, etc.) then you simply don't have that FOMO of "I am sacrificing my career" when you screen those jobs out. Those jobs just don't exist for you. Also, people who tag everybody like that as some sort of "anti-AI" tinfoilhatters are making a straw man argument. Most people with an informed opinion don't like the ways this tech is applied and rolled out in ways that is unsustainable and exploitative of ordinary people and open-source ecosystem, the confused hype around it, circular investment, etc., not the underlying tech on its own. Being vocally against these matters does not make one an unemployable pariah in the slightest, especially considering most jobs these days build on open source and being anti license-violating LLMs is being pro sustainable open-source.