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> “We’ve seen this before and it didn’t happen” is not analysis. It’s selective pattern matching used when the conclusion feels safe. > If you want to argue se

by imiric 9mo ago

> “We’ve seen this before and it didn’t happen” is not analysis. It’s selective pattern matching used when the conclusion feels safe. > If you want to argue seriously, you have to start with ground truth. What is happening now. What the trendlines look like. What follows if those trendlines continue. Wait, so we can infer the future from "trendlines", but not from past events? Either past events are part of a macro trend, and are valuable data points, or the micro data points you choose to focus on are unreliable as well. Talk about selection bias... I would argue that data points that are barely a few years old, and obscured by an unprecedented hype cycle and gold rush, are not reliable predictors of anything. The safe approach would be to wait for the market to settle, before placing any bets on the future. > Time from idea to implementation is collapsing. Junior and mid level work is disappearing first. Teams are shipping with fewer people. These are not hypotheticals. What is hypothetical is what will happen to all this software and the companies that produced it a few years down the line. How reliable is it? How maintainable is it? How many security issues does it have? What has the company lost because those issues were exploited? Will the same people who produced it using these new tools be able to troubleshoot and fix it? Will the tools get better to allow them to do that? > The reason this argument keeps reappearing has little to do with tools and everything to do with identity. Really? Everything? There is no chance that some people are simply pointing out the flaws of this technology, and that the marketing around it is making it out to be far more valuable than it actually is, so that a bunch of tech grifters can add more zeroes to their net worth? I don't get how anyone can speak about trends and what's currently happening with any degree of confidence. Let alone dismiss the skeptics by making wild claims about their character. Do better.

threethirtytwo 9mo ago
>Wait, so we can infer the future from “trendlines”, but not from past events? Either past events are part of a macro trend, and are valuable data points, or the micro data points you choose to focus on are unreliable as well. Talk about selection bias… If past events can be dismissed as “noise,” then so can selectively chosen counterexamples. Either historical outcomes are legitimate inputs into a broader signal, or no isolated datapoint deserves special treatment. You cannot appeal to trendlines while arbitrarily discarding the very history that defines them without committing selection bias. When large numbers of analogous past events point in contradictory directions, individual anecdotes lose predictive power. Trendlines are not an oracle, but once the noise overwhelms the signal, they are the best approximation we have. >What is hypothetical is what will happen to all this software and the companies that produced it a few years down the line. How reliable is it? How maintainable is it? How many security issues does it have? What has the company lost because those issues were exploited? Will the same people who produced it using these new tools be able to troubleshoot and fix it? Will the tools get better to allow them to do that? These are legitimate questions, and they are all speculative. My expectation is that code quality will decline while simultaneously becoming less relevant. As LLMs ingest and reason over ever larger bodies of software, human oriented notions of cleanliness and maintainability matter less. LLMs are far less constrained by disorder than humans are. >Really? Everything? There is no chance that some people are simply pointing out the flaws of this technology, and that the marketing around it is making it out to be far more valuable than it actually is, so that a bunch of tech grifters can add more zeroes to their net worth? The flaws are obvious. So obvious that repeatedly pointing them out is like warning that airplanes can crash while ignoring that aviation safety has improved to the point where you are far more likely to die in a car than in a metal tube moving at 500 mph. Everyone knows LLMs hallucinate. That is not contested. What matters is the direction of travel. The trendline is clear. Just as early aviation was dangerous but steadily improved, this technology is getting better month by month. That is the real disagreement. Critics focus on present day limitations. Proponents focus on the trajectory. One side freezes the system in time; the other extrapolates forward. >I don’t get how anyone can speak about trends and what’s currently happening with any degree of confidence. Let alone dismiss the skeptics by making wild claims about their character. Do better. Because many skeptics are ignoring what is directly observable. You can watch AI generate ultra complex, domain specific systems that have never existed before, in real time, and still hear someone dismiss it entirely because it failed a prompt last Tuesday. Repeating the limitations is not analysis. Everyone who is not a skeptic already understands them and has factored them in. What skeptics keep doing is reciting known flaws while refusing to reason about what is no longer a limitation. At that point, the disagreement stops being about evidence and starts looking like bias.
- krethh 9mo ago
  Respectfully, you seem to love the sound of your writing so much you forget what you are arguing about. The topic (at least for the rest of the people in this thread) seems to be whether AI assistance can truly eliminate programmers. There is one painfully obvious, undeniable historical trend: making programmer work easier increases the number of programmers. I would argue a modern developer is 1000x more effective than one working in the times of punch cards - yet we have roughly 1000x more software developers than back then. I'm not an AI skeptic by any means, and use it everyday at my job where I am gainfully employed to develop production software used by paying customers. The overwhelming consensus among those similar to me (I've put down all of these qualifiers very intentionally) is that the currently existing modalities of AI tools are a massive productivity boost mostly for the "typing" part of software (yes, I use the latest SOTA tools, Claude Opus 4.5 thinking, blah, blah, so do most of my colleagues). But the "typing" part hasn't been the hard part for a while already. You could argue that there is a "step change" coming in the capabilities of AI models, which will entirely replace developers (so software can be "willed into existence", as elegantly put by OP), but we are no closer to that point now than we were in December 2022. All the success of AI tools in actual, real-world software has been in tools specifically design to assist existing, working, competent developers (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code), and the tools which have positioned themselves to replace them have failed (Devin).
  - threethirtytwo 9mo ago
    There is no respectful way of telling someone they like the sound of their own voice. Let’s be real, you were objectively and deliberately disrespectful. Own it if you are going to break the rules of conduct. I hate this sneaky shit. Also I’m not off topic, you’re just missing the point. I responded to another person in this thread and it’s the same response I would throw at you. You can read that as well. Your “historical trend” is just applying an analogy and thinking that an analogy can take the place of reasoning. There are about a thousand examples of careers where automation technology increased the need of human operators and thousands of examples where automation eliminated human operators. Take pilots for example. Automation didn’t lower the need for pilots. Take intellisense and autocomplete… That didn’t lower the demand for programmers. But then take a look at Waymo. You have to be next level stupid to think that ok, cruise control in cars raised automation but didn’t lower the demand for drivers… Therefore all car related businesses including Waymo will always need physical drivers. As anyone is aware… this idea of using analogy as reasoning fails here. Waymo needs zero physical drivers thanks to automation. There is zero demand here and your methodology of reasoning fails. Analogies are a form of manipulation. They only help allow you to elucidate and understand things via some thread of connection. You understand A therefore understanding A can help you understand B. But you can’t use analogies as the basis for forecasting or reasoning because although A can be similar to B, A is not in actuality B. For AI coders it’s the same thing. You just need to use your common sense rather than rely on some inaccurate crutch of analogies and hoping everything will play out in the same way. If AI becomes as good and as intelligent as a human swe than your job is going out the fucking window and replaced by a single Prompter. That’s common sense. Look at the actual trendline of the actual topic: AI taking over our jobs and not automation in other sectors of engineering or other types of automation in software. What happened with AI in the last decade? We went from zero to movies, music and coding. What does your common sense tell you the next decade will bring? If the improvement of AI from the last decade keeps going or keeps accelerating, the conclusion is obvious. Sometimes the delusion a lot of swes have is jarring. Like literally if AGI existed thousands of jobs will be displaced. That’s common sense, but you still see tons of people clinging to some irrelevant analogy as if that exact analogy will play out against common sense.

by imiric 9mo ago

threethirtytwo 9mo ago

>Wait, so we can infer the future from “trendlines”, but not from past events? Either past events are part of a macro trend, and are valuable data points, or the micro data points you choose to focus on are unreliable as well. Talk about selection bias… If past events can be dismissed as “noise,” then so can selectively chosen counterexamples. Either historical outcomes are legitimate inputs into a broader signal, or no isolated datapoint deserves special treatment. You cannot appeal to trendlines while arbitrarily discarding the very history that defines them without committing selection bias. When large numbers of analogous past events point in contradictory directions, individual anecdotes lose predictive power. Trendlines are not an oracle, but once the noise overwhelms the signal, they are the best approximation we have. >What is hypothetical is what will happen to all this software and the companies that produced it a few years down the line. How reliable is it? How maintainable is it? How many security issues does it have? What has the company lost because those issues were exploited? Will the same people who produced it using these new tools be able to troubleshoot and fix it? Will the tools get better to allow them to do that? These are legitimate questions, and they are all speculative. My expectation is that code quality will decline while simultaneously becoming less relevant. As LLMs ingest and reason over ever larger bodies of software, human oriented notions of cleanliness and maintainability matter less. LLMs are far less constrained by disorder than humans are. >Really? Everything? There is no chance that some people are simply pointing out the flaws of this technology, and that the marketing around it is making it out to be far more valuable than it actually is, so that a bunch of tech grifters can add more zeroes to their net worth? The flaws are obvious. So obvious that repeatedly pointing them out is like warning that airplanes can crash while ignoring that aviation safety has improved to the point where you are far more likely to die in a car than in a metal tube moving at 500 mph. Everyone knows LLMs hallucinate. That is not contested. What matters is the direction of travel. The trendline is clear. Just as early aviation was dangerous but steadily improved, this technology is getting better month by month. That is the real disagreement. Critics focus on present day limitations. Proponents focus on the trajectory. One side freezes the system in time; the other extrapolates forward. >I don’t get how anyone can speak about trends and what’s currently happening with any degree of confidence. Let alone dismiss the skeptics by making wild claims about their character. Do better. Because many skeptics are ignoring what is directly observable. You can watch AI generate ultra complex, domain specific systems that have never existed before, in real time, and still hear someone dismiss it entirely because it failed a prompt last Tuesday. Repeating the limitations is not analysis. Everyone who is not a skeptic already understands them and has factored them in. What skeptics keep doing is reciting known flaws while refusing to reason about what is no longer a limitation. At that point, the disagreement stops being about evidence and starts looking like bias.

krethh 9mo ago
Respectfully, you seem to love the sound of your writing so much you forget what you are arguing about. The topic (at least for the rest of the people in this thread) seems to be whether AI assistance can truly eliminate programmers. There is one painfully obvious, undeniable historical trend: making programmer work easier increases the number of programmers. I would argue a modern developer is 1000x more effective than one working in the times of punch cards - yet we have roughly 1000x more software developers than back then. I'm not an AI skeptic by any means, and use it everyday at my job where I am gainfully employed to develop production software used by paying customers. The overwhelming consensus among those similar to me (I've put down all of these qualifiers very intentionally) is that the currently existing modalities of AI tools are a massive productivity boost mostly for the "typing" part of software (yes, I use the latest SOTA tools, Claude Opus 4.5 thinking, blah, blah, so do most of my colleagues). But the "typing" part hasn't been the hard part for a while already. You could argue that there is a "step change" coming in the capabilities of AI models, which will entirely replace developers (so software can be "willed into existence", as elegantly put by OP), but we are no closer to that point now than we were in December 2022. All the success of AI tools in actual, real-world software has been in tools specifically design to assist existing, working, competent developers (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code), and the tools which have positioned themselves to replace them have failed (Devin).
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  There is no respectful way of telling someone they like the sound of their own voice. Let’s be real, you were objectively and deliberately disrespectful. Own it if you are going to break the rules of conduct. I hate this sneaky shit. Also I’m not off topic, you’re just missing the point. I responded to another person in this thread and it’s the same response I would throw at you. You can read that as well. Your “historical trend” is just applying an analogy and thinking that an analogy can take the place of reasoning. There are about a thousand examples of careers where automation technology increased the need of human operators and thousands of examples where automation eliminated human operators. Take pilots for example. Automation didn’t lower the need for pilots. Take intellisense and autocomplete… That didn’t lower the demand for programmers. But then take a look at Waymo. You have to be next level stupid to think that ok, cruise control in cars raised automation but didn’t lower the demand for drivers… Therefore all car related businesses including Waymo will always need physical drivers. As anyone is aware… this idea of using analogy as reasoning fails here. Waymo needs zero physical drivers thanks to automation. There is zero demand here and your methodology of reasoning fails. Analogies are a form of manipulation. They only help allow you to elucidate and understand things via some thread of connection. You understand A therefore understanding A can help you understand B. But you can’t use analogies as the basis for forecasting or reasoning because although A can be similar to B, A is not in actuality B. For AI coders it’s the same thing. You just need to use your common sense rather than rely on some inaccurate crutch of analogies and hoping everything will play out in the same way. If AI becomes as good and as intelligent as a human swe than your job is going out the fucking window and replaced by a single Prompter. That’s common sense. Look at the actual trendline of the actual topic: AI taking over our jobs and not automation in other sectors of engineering or other types of automation in software. What happened with AI in the last decade? We went from zero to movies, music and coding. What does your common sense tell you the next decade will bring? If the improvement of AI from the last decade keeps going or keeps accelerating, the conclusion is obvious. Sometimes the delusion a lot of swes have is jarring. Like literally if AGI existed thousands of jobs will be displaced. That’s common sense, but you still see tons of people clinging to some irrelevant analogy as if that exact analogy will play out against common sense.