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I love Nystrom's writing, and he's so good at it because he's written so much. A huge part of the value of things is how we grow in the making of them, and I wo

by camgunz 9mo ago

I love Nystrom's writing, and he's so good at it because he's written so much. A huge part of the value of things is how we grow in the making of them, and I worry that in a world where we accept generative slop, we'll never have the opportunity to woodshed enough to become excellent at a craft. I'm a good engineer because I've written tons of code, I've taken no shortcuts, and I've focused on improving over my many iterations. This has enabled me to be an effective steward of generative coding (etc) models, but will younger engineers ever get the reps necessary to get where I am? Are there other ways to get this knowledge and taste? Does anyone know or care? We're in the anthropocene now, and while probably everyone who knows what that is understands we have the largest effect on the Earth, it also means we now also have the largest effect on ourselves. We're so, so bad at taking this seriously. We can unleash technology that idiocracies western civilization inside of a generation, I know this because we keep lunging towards it with ever increasing success. But we can't just shamble around and let Darwin awards sort things out. We have nukes and virology labs, not to mention a climate change crisis to deal with. If the US political system falls apart because Americans under 65 spend between 2-3 hours on social media a day, that's a failed state with a lot of firepower to shoot around haphazardly. And why do we keep building things that enfeeble us? Did we need easier access to delivery food and car rides, or did we need easier access to nutritious food and more walkable neighborhoods? Did we need social media with effectively no protections against propaganda/misinformation? We know that cognitive ability and executive function decline with LLM use. Can it really be that we think we're actually too smart and we need to turn it down a notch? There are actual problems to solve, and important software to write. Neither algorithmic feeds nor advertising platforms fall under those categories. LLMs are supposed to solve the problem of "not enough software"--Nystrom points at this explicitly with the Washington Department of Ecology ad. But we never had a "not enough software problem", rather we had a "not enough beneficial software" problem, i.e. we'd be in a way better place if our best minds weren't working on getting more eyeballs on more ads or getting the AI to stop undressing kids. Generative AI isn't empowering us. We don't have people building their own OSes, (real, working) browsers, word processors and spreadsheet programs, their own DAWs or guitar amp modelers, their own Illustrators or Figmas. Instead you have companies squeezing their workers and contractors, while their products enshittify. You can't even run these things without some megacorp's say so, and how are you gonna buy time on the H100 farm when AI took your job? I'm too tired to write a conclusion. I'm pretty sure we're fucked. But hey look, the cars drive themselves.

Terr_ 9mo ago
> And why do we keep building things that enfeeble us? To offer a view which is, well, a different flavor of pessimism: The good news is that we aren't enfeebling ourselves, the bad news is many humans are being enfeebled by a smaller group of humans as a form of economic predation.
mbil 9mo ago
> I've written tons of code, I've taken no shortcuts, and I've focused on improving over my many iterations. This has enabled me to be an effective steward of generative coding (etc) models, but will younger engineers ever get the reps necessary to get where I am? Are there other ways to get this knowledge and taste? I think this will be a problem in the middle term, and I've written about such deskilling before [0]. With the latest crop of foundational coding models and harnesses, and more progress on the way, I'm beginning to wonder if it will matter? If there's a future where agents are designing the code, implementing the code, and reading and reviewing the code... At that point the code is no longer the thing. "Software engineers" will continue to sit at the interface of product and software, but the software will be writing itself. Of course there will be a need for programmers who can actually read and write computer code, the same way there's a need for Fortran and compiler devs today. The skill that all software engineers will need to learn, regardless of level, is how to leverage commoditized reasoning to build products effectively. - how to design systems declaratively and in terms of requirements and constraints - how to configure the systems in such a way that they're automatically testable end-to-end - how to move tacit knowledge out of people's heads and into the context (all of our meetings will be transcribed; questions from the agent will be generated during the meeting resolve ambiguity; the agent will be an omnipresent attendee in all meetings: "Agent: The topic you're discussing overlaps with what Sally said three days ago when she met with Mike. They covered xyz..."; companies that follow remote work best practices will have an advantage here) - how to allocate and orchestrate teams of people and agents [0]: https://matthewbilyeu.com/blog/2025-03-08/ai https://matthewbilyeu.com/blog/2025-03-08/ai
- camgunz 9mo ago
  > I think this will be a problem in the middle term, and I've written about such deskilling before I'm thinking more broadly. Here's an example: barring malnutrition, western people aren't as strong as they used to be. But why is that? We have gyms and home exercise machines. People have never had more access to the latest exercise science and technology. It's because you no longer incidentally get the reps in modern life. We're reaping the rewards of that with obesity and cardiovascular disease, and that's bad enough. Imagine the same thing happening to our minds because we no longer incidentally get cognitive reps in future life. People will be asking chatgpt who to vote for, whether they should have kids, whether they should stay in relationships or which major to choose. People will stop going to doctors because doctors will forget how to doctor after using medical models. Etc. What's a society that's forgotten how to think like? What happens when there are no teachers, doctors, software engineers, lawyers, writers, artists, therapists, because the lack of economic incentive has made it impossible to justify the employment, let alone the training? There is value in the doing. We aren't what we produce or make; we are what we do.

by camgunz 9mo ago

Terr_ 9mo ago

> And why do we keep building things that enfeeble us? To offer a view which is, well, a different flavor of pessimism: The good news is that we aren't enfeebling ourselves, the bad news is many humans are being enfeebled by a smaller group of humans as a form of economic predation.

mbil 9mo ago

> I've written tons of code, I've taken no shortcuts, and I've focused on improving over my many iterations. This has enabled me to be an effective steward of generative coding (etc) models, but will younger engineers ever get the reps necessary to get where I am? Are there other ways to get this knowledge and taste? I think this will be a problem in the middle term, and I've written about such deskilling before [0]. With the latest crop of foundational coding models and harnesses, and more progress on the way, I'm beginning to wonder if it will matter? If there's a future where agents are designing the code, implementing the code, and reading and reviewing the code... At that point the code is no longer the thing. "Software engineers" will continue to sit at the interface of product and software, but the software will be writing itself. Of course there will be a need for programmers who can actually read and write computer code, the same way there's a need for Fortran and compiler devs today. The skill that all software engineers will need to learn, regardless of level, is how to leverage commoditized reasoning to build products effectively. - how to design systems declaratively and in terms of requirements and constraints - how to configure the systems in such a way that they're automatically testable end-to-end - how to move tacit knowledge out of people's heads and into the context (all of our meetings will be transcribed; questions from the agent will be generated during the meeting resolve ambiguity; the agent will be an omnipresent attendee in all meetings: "Agent: The topic you're discussing overlaps with what Sally said three days ago when she met with Mike. They covered xyz..."; companies that follow remote work best practices will have an advantage here) - how to allocate and orchestrate teams of people and agents [0]: https://matthewbilyeu.com/blog/2025-03-08/ai https://matthewbilyeu.com/blog/2025-03-08/ai

camgunz 9mo ago
> I think this will be a problem in the middle term, and I've written about such deskilling before I'm thinking more broadly. Here's an example: barring malnutrition, western people aren't as strong as they used to be. But why is that? We have gyms and home exercise machines. People have never had more access to the latest exercise science and technology. It's because you no longer incidentally get the reps in modern life. We're reaping the rewards of that with obesity and cardiovascular disease, and that's bad enough. Imagine the same thing happening to our minds because we no longer incidentally get cognitive reps in future life. People will be asking chatgpt who to vote for, whether they should have kids, whether they should stay in relationships or which major to choose. People will stop going to doctors because doctors will forget how to doctor after using medical models. Etc. What's a society that's forgotten how to think like? What happens when there are no teachers, doctors, software engineers, lawyers, writers, artists, therapists, because the lack of economic incentive has made it impossible to justify the employment, let alone the training? There is value in the doing. We aren't what we produce or make; we are what we do.