5 ms·

You can't pay me to prompt

63 points by shinryuu 9mo ago

sgt 9mo ago
We need developers like these who are able to innovate without being tainted by the echo chamber of AI. LLM's tend to regurgitate known design patterns and familiar UX. Like those typical "keep scrolling down to learn about our app as we show you animations" - gets a bit of.
- sovnade 9mo ago
  Not long before (or it's already happening) LLMs start training on stuff they wrote previously and it becomes the largest echo chamber the internet has ever seen.
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    I’m pretty sure this is already part of the training loop even if it isn’t coming from the internet. It is definitely used for fine tuning and distillation. As for how LLM producers avoid model collapse, they curate and filter.
  - Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
    Which could be damaging, or it could create interesting results if it's more like an evolutionary algorithm than entropy. That is, if it can iterate and improve on itself, instead of just take in all information and treat it equally, we'll get something interesting.
    - sgt 9mo ago
      For the sake of the IT industry, let's hope it's the latter!
- epolanski 9mo ago
  Sure if all you're doing is making it just vomit code then yes. But there's way more LLMs can do, like assist you in connecting dots in complex codebases, find patterns to refactor given some rules, provide ideas, allow you to dig in dependencies to find apis that are undocumented or edge cases that are subtle to find, find information that you might've had to dig up by endless google queries and hard to find GitHub issues, provide support in technologies you have sometimes to use (sed, awk, regexes, Google sheets apis, etc) but you just don't care enough to learn because it happens to use them few times an year allowing you to focus on what matters, etc, etc. I'm frankly tired of those pointless debates conflating LLMs in the context of code just for the same boring arguments of people hating on vibecoding or thinking every developer is delegating everything to AI and pushing slop. If that's your colleagues fire them. They are indeed useless and can be replaced by a prompt. If one cannot see the infinite uses of LLMs even just for supporting, without ever authoring a single line of code or never ever touching a file, it's only been that person limiting it's own growth and productivity. Seriously, this is beyond tiring.
  - sodapopcan 9mo ago
    You hit on something key here: the vast majority of the pro-articles are talking in the context of code vomit or content vomit or other types of vomit. As you say, it is beyond tiring, so we respond. I'm still waiting for that cancer cure! > it's only been that person limiting it's own growth and productivity. Maybe limiting raw productivity, but I sure don't buy that it limits growth. Maybe if all you ever did was copy and paste off of SO, but taking the time to study and deeply understand something is going to be much better for your overall growth. Also collaborating with humans instead of robots is always nice.
    - epolanski 9mo ago
      You can study better and more effectively with more tools at your disposal ;) I've never learned and collaborated as much as in the last years.
      - sodapopcan 9mo ago
        It's all situational, I guess. For example I never learned or collaborated more (or had more fun at work) than when I worked at an XP shop, pairing every single day. I feel the majority of people are just going to have coworkers who have fully stopped asking asking questions. But you aren't wrong. I use AI a bit as a search engine.
        epolanski 9mo ago
        You can still do XP, can't you! I do agree that real people sharing is absolutely crucial, and that AI may have a negative effect it it becomes the main and only way of (non) sharing.
        sodapopcan 9mo ago
        I could if there were a wealth of companies that offered it ;) Not only that, if there was a wealth of people who wanted to do it. It's unsurprising that most people are more willing to collaborate with a machine than a human (if they are even willing at all), but there's obviously nothing I can do about that. > I do agree that real people sharing is absolutely crucial, and that AI may have a negative effect it it becomes the main and only way of (non) sharing. Yes, exactly. Most of the pro-AI articles that show up here are about generative AI which is what the vast majority of people are raging against. This particular nuance is often left out. Although the TFA's About page explicitly states that when they use "AI" they mean "Generative AI." Obviously pretty much all of us having been using "AI" in some form or another for the past 20... 30+ years? But then there are a whole host of other reasons I don't like "AI" that are a little out of scope of this rant.
- CuriouslyC 9mo ago
  To be fair, hero banners lower bounce rates. Nobody would waste the time if it didn't work.
- redox99 9mo ago
  AI will beat humans at all tasks that are not subjective (such as a landing page being pretty), but instead can be determined to be correct or not (does an endpoint return the correct data? how fast?) Just like a chess engine beats any human. People think LLMs are still at the point of programming based on what they learned from the data they scraped. We're well past that. We're at the point of heavy reinforcement learning. LLMs will train on billions of LoC of synthetic code they generate, like chess engines train on self-play games.
  - abcde666777 9mo ago
    Chess has a very specific win condition by which moves can be assessed. Many real world problems are much fuzzier than that and don't reduce neatly to algorithmic validation of 'correctness'.
    - redox99 9mo ago
      That's the breakthrough of ML, it can handle fuzzy. And chess is in some ways similar. Outside of endgame and blunders (where you can just bruteforce), you can't prove one move is superior to another. That's why chess engines used to have human made heuristics.
- mpalmer 9mo ago
  Counterpoint: Swearing off AI doesn't ipso facto make you a good developer, and there are plenty of skilled people who can innovate and use AI at the same time.
stavros 9mo ago
Aren't we all tired by this anti-AI stuff? Use it if you want to, don't use it if you don't want to, I just don't really want to hear about your personal opinion on it any more.
- blurbleblurble 9mo ago
  Very tired
- robin_reala 9mo ago
  You deliberately read an article entitled “You can’t pay me to prompt” then complained about having to hear about anti-AI blog posts?
  - SecretDreams 9mo ago
    They said they're tired of anti-AI commentary, not that they're tired of complaining about anti-AI commentary!
    - spooneybarger 9mo ago
      Well played sir. Well played
- jrjeksjd8d 9mo ago
  My CEO sent a company-wide email this week saying "AI use is mandatory for all developers". Until this kind of mandatory bullshit stops I'm happy to see other people fighting the good fight and publicly saying that they want to keep doing a job they actually enjoy. Many of my coworkers have embraced AI coding and the quality of our product has suffered for it. They deliver bad, hard-to-support software that technically checks some boxes and then rush on to produce more slop. It feels like a regression to the days of measuring LOC as a proxy for productivity.
  - gedy 9mo ago
    I'm seeing the top-down AI usage pushed from the same types of leaders and companies who love to outsource and are happy with shit shovelled over the wall then devs firefight production bugs forever. It's just a good reminder they don't care a bit about quality.
knallfrosch 9mo ago
> Did you noticed the new badge stamped atop my website? No, because the banner is cut off on my phone. I don't really understand the policy either. I assumed this was a contractor's website. I've never met one who accepted tool recommendations and never a company who cared. Use Solaris and emacs for all I care.
- GeorgeOldfield 9mo ago
  it's a random dude too
nuancebydefault 9mo ago
The thing is, not using AI costs so much effort that it is almost impossible to correctly say "I don't use AI" . It is like saying 20 years ago "i don't use a search engine."
gste 9mo ago
All you're doing is marking yourself as an untainted source of training data
CuriouslyC 9mo ago
I'm 100% in favor of people doing what they love, if that's hand coding, have a ball. I'm sick to death of people trying to grandstand, flag wave and chest pound about "the evils of AI" and "the failings of AI." You hate billionaires and you're afraid of losing your job, I get it, stop trying to propagandize and just do the thing you love to do as if AI didn't exist. If I meet someone who hand carves stuff, if it's good I'm into it. If they start to rave about the evils of machines I nope tf out and never return.
- trollbridge 9mo ago
  The endless prattle about "you must embrace AI now or be locked out forever" is much more tiresome. If AI is really going to be so ubiquitous (and also replace all current skill categories), then I can just wait a year or two for AI to improve and go learn it then, right?
  - CuriouslyC 9mo ago
    As someone who's said something like that several times, I'm fine with never saying it again. I did it because I really do believe the bottom of the job market is going to fall out for engineers that aren't capable with AI and I was trying to be helpful, but if the people hand coding are aware of the risks and accept them, shrug you do you.
    - trollbridge 9mo ago
      It just doesn't make sense. "There's this new big thing coming that does all your work for you." "Okay?" "So it's imperative that you learn how to do this new thing or you'll never be able to work again." In reality, the skills needed to use AI effectively are the same ones needed to be a competent programmer in the era of Visual Basic, or CASE, or in the era of COBOL, or any of the other things promised to eliminate junior programmers. The idea of an engineer "not capable with AI" yet who can somehow hand-write code also baffles me. Do these people actually exist?
hiAndrewQuinn 9mo ago
>This is a practical policy allowing me to maintain my own professional standards and remain employable in a difficult economy. I'm interested to hear more about the rationale behind the "remain employable" part of this line. All things equal, we would normally expect someone deliberately saying they won't use a certain tool to perform a certain job as limiting their employment opportunities, not expanding it. The classic example is people who refuse to drive for work; there are good non-employment reasons for this (driving is the most dangerous thing many people do on a daily basis) but it's hard to argue that it doesn't restrict where one can work. I think the most likely rationale is that the author thinks that posting a no-AI policy for professional work is itself seen as a signal of certain things about them, their skill level, etc., and that wins out for the kinds of clients they wish to take on. This doesn't have to be a long- or even medium-run bet to make, given that it's cheap to backtrack on such a policy down the line. Either way it's clear from reading the measured prose that there's an iceberg of thinking behind what's visible here and they are probably smarter than I am.
- NateEag 9mo ago
  They're saying that if they completely refused to touch any system that has been touched by AI, they would be unable to find paying work. Thus, they won't use it directly themselves, but are willing to work with people who do.
  - lostmsu 9mo ago
    This is not wrong, but the comment you replied to implies the author of the comment understood that perfectly already.
andrewstuart 9mo ago
I just can’t get my head around why a developer wouldn’t want to use AI assisted programming. It’s an absolute joy to be able to achieve essentially anything (within reason), things that previously I’d have known how to design but not build in any reasonable timeframe. Who are these anti AI programmers? Computing and programming has just been unlocked and they’re not interested. I’ve always had far more ideas than I’d ever be able to build and now I can get at least some of them built very quickly. I just don’t understand why this would t be exciting to a developer. 20 years ahead it will be completely taken for granted that computers can program themselves and we will look back on that painful era when every line of code had to be hand written by wizards and it will look ancient and quaint. Join the party, join the revolution it’s incredible fun to be able to create beyond your hand coding skills.
- CuriouslyC 9mo ago
  AFAICT, it comes down to people who enjoy the outcome vs people who enjoy the craft. Some people just love programming, and it doesn't matter what they're coding, making little virtual machines gives them joy. You (and I) are more outcome driven.
  - andrewstuart 9mo ago
    This is true. I learned to program because I want to create. I love creation and creating computer software. A vision appears in my head for a software idea and I have to build it, I am utterly compelled. So I had to learn to program. I quite like programming it’s good to feel clever. But my deepest joy is creating and it’s like a gift from heaven to get LLMs that can help me realize even my most ambitious creative visions. It’s the outcome I want, not the experience of getting there. I absolutely love what LLMs have brought to programming - accelerated creation.
  - allenu 9mo ago
    I agree that this is a component of it, but there are some other things at play here which I think is what makes the debate so furious. For one, I think there's a sense of unfairness that people are expressing as well. A skill that took considerable time to learn and build up can be reproduced with a machine and that just feels unfair. Another, is obviously companies mandating employees use AI in their work. And then there's the environmental cost in training. Then there are the cases where it's being just for slop or submitting PRs that have not even been reviewed by their creator. In my opinion, all of these factors make people refuse to see that some of us actually do find use for these tools and that we're not vibe-coding everything in some mad rush to ship trash.
3rodents 9mo ago
https://notbyai.fyi/ https://notbyai.fyi/ “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is trained using human-created content. If humans stop producing new content and rely solely on AI, online content across the world may become repetitive and stagnant. If your content is not AI-generated, add the badge to your work.”
- whilenot-dev 9mo ago
  With a pricing page[0] for a badge? ...a badge that acts as good indicator for AI web crawlers to prioritize such websites? [0]: https://notbyai.fyi/pricing https://notbyai.fyi/pricing
  - 3rodents 9mo ago
    it’s free, you only need to pay for commercial projects :)
    - whilenot-dev 9mo ago
      Also with a "90% Rule"[0]... what a rubbish idea, I'm sorry. I'd rather just create my own badge for anything commercial, non-profit, or personal. [0]: https://notbyai.fyi/help/what-is-the-not-by-ai-90-rule.php https://notbyai.fyi/help/what-is-the-not-by-ai-90-rule.php
jonathanstrange 9mo ago
Luckily, current AI technology is still in its infancy and not good enough. That being said, none of this will matter in the long run. I just don't see a way how AI could not completely replace most jobs done in front of a computer. For example, there is no reason why programs wouldn't be created and modified on the fly in the future. It's just logical to offer this functionality once agentive AI has gotten good enough. However, nothing indicates that this will happen soon, we're talking about a timeline of a decade and longer. Maybe pricing as well as a hardware and energy shortage will further slow down the transition. Right now, AI doesn't seem to be profitable for the companies offering it. Feel free to downvote this comment but make sure you re-visit this post in 10 years from now.
sfortis 9mo ago
A senior developer + AI = superpowers. But some people have extremely strong resistance to change.
- amelius 9mo ago
  I think that a large percentage of programmers hate to read other people's code, and that's where the aversion comes from. It's much more fun to write code than to review code.
  - kranner 9mo ago
    I think it's also the case that AI code can be insanely bad despite being well-formatted and sometimes very good when it comes to specific functionality. But you have to keep watching out for code that doesn't do anything or replicates existing functionality or devolves into complete loose ends. Actual human code is much more pleasant by comparison.
Gluber 9mo ago
My take on AI ( at least for coding ) is the same as for dynamic languages ( python,ruby etc ) 1. Its a great tool to reduce boilerplate 2. Its great for experimenting with ideas without the overhead that comes with starting a new non trivial project 3. Its great for one offs, demos or anything like that. 4. It helps me to work on some personal side projects that would have never seen the light of day otherwise. The downsides: 1. As with dynamic languages its a great tool for EXPERT engineers ( not that i am calling me one ) but is often used by Juniors/Entree Level engineers who do not understand the problem, can't tell it exactly what to do, and can't judge the result. And thus it leads to codebases riddled with issues that are hard to find and since they produce a lot of code are a huge liability. "But look what i made" .... no... no you didn't you don't even understand why its doing something.
arealaccount 9mo ago
But the badge looks like it was created by Chat
dvh 9mo ago
It reminds me of elevator boys protests in early 1900s against automatic elevators (now called elevators)
jairojair 9mo ago
> You Can’t Pay Me To Prompt! As a software engineer, you don’t get paid for simply writing code, people pay u for problem-solving.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
markthered 9mo ago
Does the author ever use Google and read its summary?

63 points by shinryuu 9mo ago

sgt 9mo ago

We need developers like these who are able to innovate without being tainted by the echo chamber of AI. LLM's tend to regurgitate known design patterns and familiar UX. Like those typical "keep scrolling down to learn about our app as we show you animations" - gets a bit of.

sovnade 9mo ago
Not long before (or it's already happening) LLMs start training on stuff they wrote previously and it becomes the largest echo chamber the internet has ever seen.
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
  I’m pretty sure this is already part of the training loop even if it isn’t coming from the internet. It is definitely used for fine tuning and distillation. As for how LLM producers avoid model collapse, they curate and filter.
- Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
  Which could be damaging, or it could create interesting results if it's more like an evolutionary algorithm than entropy. That is, if it can iterate and improve on itself, instead of just take in all information and treat it equally, we'll get something interesting.
  - sgt 9mo ago
    For the sake of the IT industry, let's hope it's the latter!
epolanski 9mo ago
Sure if all you're doing is making it just vomit code then yes. But there's way more LLMs can do, like assist you in connecting dots in complex codebases, find patterns to refactor given some rules, provide ideas, allow you to dig in dependencies to find apis that are undocumented or edge cases that are subtle to find, find information that you might've had to dig up by endless google queries and hard to find GitHub issues, provide support in technologies you have sometimes to use (sed, awk, regexes, Google sheets apis, etc) but you just don't care enough to learn because it happens to use them few times an year allowing you to focus on what matters, etc, etc. I'm frankly tired of those pointless debates conflating LLMs in the context of code just for the same boring arguments of people hating on vibecoding or thinking every developer is delegating everything to AI and pushing slop. If that's your colleagues fire them. They are indeed useless and can be replaced by a prompt. If one cannot see the infinite uses of LLMs even just for supporting, without ever authoring a single line of code or never ever touching a file, it's only been that person limiting it's own growth and productivity. Seriously, this is beyond tiring.
- sodapopcan 9mo ago
  You hit on something key here: the vast majority of the pro-articles are talking in the context of code vomit or content vomit or other types of vomit. As you say, it is beyond tiring, so we respond. I'm still waiting for that cancer cure! > it's only been that person limiting it's own growth and productivity. Maybe limiting raw productivity, but I sure don't buy that it limits growth. Maybe if all you ever did was copy and paste off of SO, but taking the time to study and deeply understand something is going to be much better for your overall growth. Also collaborating with humans instead of robots is always nice.
  - epolanski 9mo ago
    You can study better and more effectively with more tools at your disposal ;) I've never learned and collaborated as much as in the last years.
    - sodapopcan 9mo ago
      It's all situational, I guess. For example I never learned or collaborated more (or had more fun at work) than when I worked at an XP shop, pairing every single day. I feel the majority of people are just going to have coworkers who have fully stopped asking asking questions. But you aren't wrong. I use AI a bit as a search engine.
      - epolanski 9mo ago
        You can still do XP, can't you! I do agree that real people sharing is absolutely crucial, and that AI may have a negative effect it it becomes the main and only way of (non) sharing.
        sodapopcan 9mo ago
        I could if there were a wealth of companies that offered it ;) Not only that, if there was a wealth of people who wanted to do it. It's unsurprising that most people are more willing to collaborate with a machine than a human (if they are even willing at all), but there's obviously nothing I can do about that. > I do agree that real people sharing is absolutely crucial, and that AI may have a negative effect it it becomes the main and only way of (non) sharing. Yes, exactly. Most of the pro-AI articles that show up here are about generative AI which is what the vast majority of people are raging against. This particular nuance is often left out. Although the TFA's About page explicitly states that when they use "AI" they mean "Generative AI." Obviously pretty much all of us having been using "AI" in some form or another for the past 20... 30+ years? But then there are a whole host of other reasons I don't like "AI" that are a little out of scope of this rant.
CuriouslyC 9mo ago
To be fair, hero banners lower bounce rates. Nobody would waste the time if it didn't work.
redox99 9mo ago
AI will beat humans at all tasks that are not subjective (such as a landing page being pretty), but instead can be determined to be correct or not (does an endpoint return the correct data? how fast?) Just like a chess engine beats any human. People think LLMs are still at the point of programming based on what they learned from the data they scraped. We're well past that. We're at the point of heavy reinforcement learning. LLMs will train on billions of LoC of synthetic code they generate, like chess engines train on self-play games.
- abcde666777 9mo ago
  Chess has a very specific win condition by which moves can be assessed. Many real world problems are much fuzzier than that and don't reduce neatly to algorithmic validation of 'correctness'.
  - redox99 9mo ago
    That's the breakthrough of ML, it can handle fuzzy. And chess is in some ways similar. Outside of endgame and blunders (where you can just bruteforce), you can't prove one move is superior to another. That's why chess engines used to have human made heuristics.
mpalmer 9mo ago
Counterpoint: Swearing off AI doesn't ipso facto make you a good developer, and there are plenty of skilled people who can innovate and use AI at the same time.

stavros 9mo ago

Aren't we all tired by this anti-AI stuff? Use it if you want to, don't use it if you don't want to, I just don't really want to hear about your personal opinion on it any more.

blurbleblurble 9mo ago
Very tired
robin_reala 9mo ago
You deliberately read an article entitled “You can’t pay me to prompt” then complained about having to hear about anti-AI blog posts?
- SecretDreams 9mo ago
  They said they're tired of anti-AI commentary, not that they're tired of complaining about anti-AI commentary!
  - spooneybarger 9mo ago
    Well played sir. Well played
jrjeksjd8d 9mo ago
My CEO sent a company-wide email this week saying "AI use is mandatory for all developers". Until this kind of mandatory bullshit stops I'm happy to see other people fighting the good fight and publicly saying that they want to keep doing a job they actually enjoy. Many of my coworkers have embraced AI coding and the quality of our product has suffered for it. They deliver bad, hard-to-support software that technically checks some boxes and then rush on to produce more slop. It feels like a regression to the days of measuring LOC as a proxy for productivity.
- gedy 9mo ago
  I'm seeing the top-down AI usage pushed from the same types of leaders and companies who love to outsource and are happy with shit shovelled over the wall then devs firefight production bugs forever. It's just a good reminder they don't care a bit about quality.

knallfrosch 9mo ago

> Did you noticed the new badge stamped atop my website? No, because the banner is cut off on my phone. I don't really understand the policy either. I assumed this was a contractor's website. I've never met one who accepted tool recommendations and never a company who cared. Use Solaris and emacs for all I care.

GeorgeOldfield 9mo ago
it's a random dude too

nuancebydefault 9mo ago

The thing is, not using AI costs so much effort that it is almost impossible to correctly say "I don't use AI" . It is like saying 20 years ago "i don't use a search engine."

gste 9mo ago

All you're doing is marking yourself as an untainted source of training data

CuriouslyC 9mo ago

I'm 100% in favor of people doing what they love, if that's hand coding, have a ball. I'm sick to death of people trying to grandstand, flag wave and chest pound about "the evils of AI" and "the failings of AI." You hate billionaires and you're afraid of losing your job, I get it, stop trying to propagandize and just do the thing you love to do as if AI didn't exist. If I meet someone who hand carves stuff, if it's good I'm into it. If they start to rave about the evils of machines I nope tf out and never return.

trollbridge 9mo ago
The endless prattle about "you must embrace AI now or be locked out forever" is much more tiresome. If AI is really going to be so ubiquitous (and also replace all current skill categories), then I can just wait a year or two for AI to improve and go learn it then, right?
- CuriouslyC 9mo ago
  As someone who's said something like that several times, I'm fine with never saying it again. I did it because I really do believe the bottom of the job market is going to fall out for engineers that aren't capable with AI and I was trying to be helpful, but if the people hand coding are aware of the risks and accept them, shrug you do you.
  - trollbridge 9mo ago
    It just doesn't make sense. "There's this new big thing coming that does all your work for you." "Okay?" "So it's imperative that you learn how to do this new thing or you'll never be able to work again." In reality, the skills needed to use AI effectively are the same ones needed to be a competent programmer in the era of Visual Basic, or CASE, or in the era of COBOL, or any of the other things promised to eliminate junior programmers. The idea of an engineer "not capable with AI" yet who can somehow hand-write code also baffles me. Do these people actually exist?

hiAndrewQuinn 9mo ago

>This is a practical policy allowing me to maintain my own professional standards and remain employable in a difficult economy. I'm interested to hear more about the rationale behind the "remain employable" part of this line. All things equal, we would normally expect someone deliberately saying they won't use a certain tool to perform a certain job as limiting their employment opportunities, not expanding it. The classic example is people who refuse to drive for work; there are good non-employment reasons for this (driving is the most dangerous thing many people do on a daily basis) but it's hard to argue that it doesn't restrict where one can work. I think the most likely rationale is that the author thinks that posting a no-AI policy for professional work is itself seen as a signal of certain things about them, their skill level, etc., and that wins out for the kinds of clients they wish to take on. This doesn't have to be a long- or even medium-run bet to make, given that it's cheap to backtrack on such a policy down the line. Either way it's clear from reading the measured prose that there's an iceberg of thinking behind what's visible here and they are probably smarter than I am.

NateEag 9mo ago
They're saying that if they completely refused to touch any system that has been touched by AI, they would be unable to find paying work. Thus, they won't use it directly themselves, but are willing to work with people who do.
- lostmsu 9mo ago
  This is not wrong, but the comment you replied to implies the author of the comment understood that perfectly already.

andrewstuart 9mo ago

I just can’t get my head around why a developer wouldn’t want to use AI assisted programming. It’s an absolute joy to be able to achieve essentially anything (within reason), things that previously I’d have known how to design but not build in any reasonable timeframe. Who are these anti AI programmers? Computing and programming has just been unlocked and they’re not interested. I’ve always had far more ideas than I’d ever be able to build and now I can get at least some of them built very quickly. I just don’t understand why this would t be exciting to a developer. 20 years ahead it will be completely taken for granted that computers can program themselves and we will look back on that painful era when every line of code had to be hand written by wizards and it will look ancient and quaint. Join the party, join the revolution it’s incredible fun to be able to create beyond your hand coding skills.

CuriouslyC 9mo ago
AFAICT, it comes down to people who enjoy the outcome vs people who enjoy the craft. Some people just love programming, and it doesn't matter what they're coding, making little virtual machines gives them joy. You (and I) are more outcome driven.
- andrewstuart 9mo ago
  This is true. I learned to program because I want to create. I love creation and creating computer software. A vision appears in my head for a software idea and I have to build it, I am utterly compelled. So I had to learn to program. I quite like programming it’s good to feel clever. But my deepest joy is creating and it’s like a gift from heaven to get LLMs that can help me realize even my most ambitious creative visions. It’s the outcome I want, not the experience of getting there. I absolutely love what LLMs have brought to programming - accelerated creation.
- allenu 9mo ago
  I agree that this is a component of it, but there are some other things at play here which I think is what makes the debate so furious. For one, I think there's a sense of unfairness that people are expressing as well. A skill that took considerable time to learn and build up can be reproduced with a machine and that just feels unfair. Another, is obviously companies mandating employees use AI in their work. And then there's the environmental cost in training. Then there are the cases where it's being just for slop or submitting PRs that have not even been reviewed by their creator. In my opinion, all of these factors make people refuse to see that some of us actually do find use for these tools and that we're not vibe-coding everything in some mad rush to ship trash.

3rodents 9mo ago

https://notbyai.fyi/ https://notbyai.fyi/ “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is trained using human-created content. If humans stop producing new content and rely solely on AI, online content across the world may become repetitive and stagnant. If your content is not AI-generated, add the badge to your work.”

whilenot-dev 9mo ago
With a pricing page[0] for a badge? ...a badge that acts as good indicator for AI web crawlers to prioritize such websites? [0]: https://notbyai.fyi/pricing https://notbyai.fyi/pricing
- 3rodents 9mo ago
  it’s free, you only need to pay for commercial projects :)
  - whilenot-dev 9mo ago
    Also with a "90% Rule"[0]... what a rubbish idea, I'm sorry. I'd rather just create my own badge for anything commercial, non-profit, or personal. [0]: https://notbyai.fyi/help/what-is-the-not-by-ai-90-rule.php https://notbyai.fyi/help/what-is-the-not-by-ai-90-rule.php

jonathanstrange 9mo ago

Luckily, current AI technology is still in its infancy and not good enough. That being said, none of this will matter in the long run. I just don't see a way how AI could not completely replace most jobs done in front of a computer. For example, there is no reason why programs wouldn't be created and modified on the fly in the future. It's just logical to offer this functionality once agentive AI has gotten good enough. However, nothing indicates that this will happen soon, we're talking about a timeline of a decade and longer. Maybe pricing as well as a hardware and energy shortage will further slow down the transition. Right now, AI doesn't seem to be profitable for the companies offering it. Feel free to downvote this comment but make sure you re-visit this post in 10 years from now.

sfortis 9mo ago

A senior developer + AI = superpowers. But some people have extremely strong resistance to change.

amelius 9mo ago
I think that a large percentage of programmers hate to read other people's code, and that's where the aversion comes from. It's much more fun to write code than to review code.
- kranner 9mo ago
  I think it's also the case that AI code can be insanely bad despite being well-formatted and sometimes very good when it comes to specific functionality. But you have to keep watching out for code that doesn't do anything or replicates existing functionality or devolves into complete loose ends. Actual human code is much more pleasant by comparison.

Gluber 9mo ago

My take on AI ( at least for coding ) is the same as for dynamic languages ( python,ruby etc ) 1. Its a great tool to reduce boilerplate 2. Its great for experimenting with ideas without the overhead that comes with starting a new non trivial project 3. Its great for one offs, demos or anything like that. 4. It helps me to work on some personal side projects that would have never seen the light of day otherwise. The downsides: 1. As with dynamic languages its a great tool for EXPERT engineers ( not that i am calling me one ) but is often used by Juniors/Entree Level engineers who do not understand the problem, can't tell it exactly what to do, and can't judge the result. And thus it leads to codebases riddled with issues that are hard to find and since they produce a lot of code are a huge liability. "But look what i made" .... no... no you didn't you don't even understand why its doing something.

arealaccount 9mo ago

But the badge looks like it was created by Chat

dvh 9mo ago

It reminds me of elevator boys protests in early 1900s against automatic elevators (now called elevators)

jairojair 9mo ago

> You Can’t Pay Me To Prompt! As a software engineer, you don’t get paid for simply writing code, people pay u for problem-solving.

deleted 9mo ago

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markthered 9mo ago

Does the author ever use Google and read its summary?