7 ms·

I’ve heard this metaphor before and I don’t think it works well. For one, a power tool like a bandsaw is a centaur technology. I, the human, am the top half of

I’ve heard this metaphor before and I don’t think it works well. For one, a power tool like a bandsaw is a centaur technology. I, the human, am the top half of the centaur. The tool drives around doing what I tell it to do and helping me to do the task faster (or at all in some cases). A GenAI tool is a reverse-centaur technology. The algorithm does almost all of the work. I’m the bottom half of the centaur helping the machine drive around and deliver the code to production faster. So while I may choose to use hand tools in carpentry, I don’t feel bad using power tools. I don’t feel like the boss is hot to replace me with power tools. Or to lay off half my team because we have power tools now. It’s a bit different.

zozbot234 8mo ago
> I don’t feel like the boss is hot to replace me with power tools. Or to lay off half my team because we have power tools now. That has more to do with how much demand there is for what you're doing. With software eating the world and hardware constraints becoming even more visible due to the chips situation, we can expect that there will be plenty of work for SWE's who are able to drive their coding agents effectively. Being the "top" (reasoning) or the "bottom" half is a matter of choice - if you slack off and are not highly committed to delivering quality product, you end up doing the "bottom" part and leaving the robot in the driver's seat.
zemvpferreira 8mo ago
Have you heard of the Luddites I wonder?
- agentultra 8mo ago
  Yes, I’ve read quite a lot about that bloody and terrible part of history. The Ludddites were workers who lived in an era without any social or state protections for labourers. Capitalists were using child labour to operate the looms because it was cheaper than paying anyone a fair wage. If you didn’t like the conditions you could go work as an indentured servant for the state in the work houses. Luddites used organized protests in the form of collective violence to force action when they had no other leverage. People were literally shot or jailed for this. It was a horrible part of history written by the winners. That’s why everyone thinks Luddites were against technology and progress instead of social reforms and responsibility.
  - zemvpferreira 8mo ago
    In that case I really don't understand how you conclude there's any difference between being on the bottom or the top of the tool. The bare reality is the same: Skilled labourers will be replaced by automation. Woodworking tools (and looms) replaced skilled labourers with less-skilled replacements (such as children), and AI will absolutely replace skilled labourers with less-skilled replacements as well. I ask sincerely, I truly don't understand how this isn't a distinction without a difference. Have you spent time inside a modern furniture factory? Have you seen how few people it takes to make tens of tons of product?
    - agentultra 8mo ago
      I haven’t worked in a furniture factory but I have assembled car seats in a factory for Toyota. The difference matters because the people who worked together to smash the looms created the myth of Ned Ludd to protect their identities from persecution. They used organized violence because they had no leverage otherwise to demand fair wages, safety guarantees, and other labour protections. What they were fighting for wasn’t the abolishment of automation and looms. It was for social reforms that would have given them labour protections. It matters today because AI isn’t a profit line on any balance sheet right now but it is being used to justify mass layoffs and to reduce the leverage of knowledge workers in the marketplace. These tools steal your work without compensation and replace your job with capital so that rent seekers can seek rent. It’s not a repeat of what happened in the Luddite protests but history is rhyming.
      - zemvpferreira 8mo ago
        We agree, which makes me question your original point with the power tool somehow being different even more. Every automation gives more leverage to capital over labour. That's the history of technology. Downstream it makes this great life with indoor plumbing etc possible but automation in any form will always erode skilled labourers as a class. It's all essentially the same in that regard.
        8mo ago
tux1968 8mo ago
It seems like you're doing a lot of work to miss the actual point. Focusing on the minutiae of the analogy is a distraction from the over arching and obvious point. It has nothing to do with how you feel, it has to do with how you will compete in a world with others who feel differently. There were carpenters who refused to use power tools, some still do. They are probably happy -- and that's great, all the power to them. But they're statistically irrelevant, just as artisanal hand-crafted computer coding will be. There was a time when coders rejected high level languages, because the only way they felt good about their code is if they handcrafted the binary codes, and keyed them directly into the computer without an assembler. Times change.
- cmiles74 8mo ago
  In my opinion, it is far too early to claim that developers developing like it was maybe three years ago are statistically irrelevant. Microsoft has gone in on AI tooling in a big way and they just nominated a "software quality czar".
  - tux1968 8mo ago
    I used the future tense. Maybe it will be one hundred years from now, who knows; but the main point still stands. It would just be nice to move the conversation beyond "but I enjoy coding!".
- andyfilms1 8mo ago
  I don't think he's missing the point at all. A band saw is an immutable object with a fixed, deterministic capability--in other words, a tool. An LLM is a slot machine. You can pull keep pulling the lever, but you'll get different results every time. A slot machine is technically a machine that can produce money, but nobody would ever say it's a tool for producing money.
  - tux1968 8mo ago
    People keep trotting this argument out. But a band saw is not deterministic either, it can snap in the middle of a cut and destroy what you're working on. The point is, we only treat it like it's deterministic, because most of the time it's reliable enough that it just does what we want. AI technology will definitely get to the same level eventually. Clinging on to the fact that it isn't yet at that level today, is just cope, not a principled argument.
davewritescode 8mo ago
Have you never run a team of software engineers as a lead? Agentic coding comes naturally to a lot of people because that's PRECISELY what you do when you're leading a team, herding multiple brains to point them in the same direction so when you combine all their work it becomes something that is greater than the sum of it's parts. Lots of the complains about agents sound identical to things I've heard and even said myself about junior engineers. That said, there's always going to need to be people who can reach below the abstraction and agentic coding loops deprive you of the ability to get those reps in.
- queenkjuul 8mo ago
  People say this about juniors but I've never seen a junior make some of the bone headed mistakes AI loves to make. Either I'm very lucky or other people have really stupid juniors on their teams lol. Regardless, personally, there's no comparison between an LLM and a junior; always rather work with a junior.
  - finaard 8mo ago
    I've wrote this a few times, but LLM interactions often remind me of my days at Nokia - a lot of the interactions are exactly like what I remember with some of their cheap subcons there. I even have exactly the same discussion after it messed up, like "My code is working, ignore that failing test, that was always broking, and I definitey didn't break it just now".
- aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
  > Have you never run a team of software engineers as a lead? I expect juniors to improve fast to get really good. AI is incapable of applying the teaching that I expcect juniors to internalize to any future code that it writes.
Geonode 8mo ago
Furniture factories are a lot more automated than you're implying with this metaphor.
parthdesai 8mo ago
My analogy is more akin to using Google Maps (or any other navigation tool). Prior to GPS and a navigation device, you would either print out the route ahead of time, and even then, you would stop at places and ask people about directions. Post Google Maps, you follow it, and then if you know there's a better route, you choose to take a different path and Google Maps will adjust the route accordingly.
- aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
  Google Maps is still insanely bad for hiking and cycling, so I combine the old-fashioned map method with an outdoor GPS onto which I load a precomputed GPX track for the route that I want to take.
woeirua 8mo ago
You only feel that way about power tools because the transition for carpentry happened long ago. Carpenters viewed power tools much as we do LLMs today. Furniture factories, equivalent of dark agentic code factories, caused much despair to them too. Humans are involved with assembly only because the last bits are maniacally difficult to get right. Humans might be involved with software still for many years, but it probably will look like doing final assembly and QA of pre-assembled components.
adamesque 8mo ago
I think many deployments of modern technology do turn us into reverse centaurs, and we should rail righteously against those. But I don’t at all believe that AI-assisted coding is doomed to do this to us and believe thinking so is a misread of the metaphor. (As is lumping all of “GenAI” together.)
pawelwentpawel 8mo ago
I think this argument would work if hand-written code would convey some kind of status, like an expensive pair of Japanese selvage jeans. For now though, it doesn't seem to me that people paying for software care if it was written by a human or an AI tool.
singingbard 8mo ago
To me, they all the same because they are all tools that stand between “my vision” and “it being built.” e.g. when I built a truck camper, maybe 50% was woodworking but I had to do electrical, plumbing, metalworking, plastic printing, and even networking infra. The satisfaction was not from using power tools (or hand tools too) — those were chores — it was that I designed the entire thing from scratch by myself, it worked, was reliable through the years, and it looked professional. LLMs serve the same purpose for me.
thwarted 8mo ago
There's DeWALT, Craftsman, Stanley, etc carpentry/mechanic power tool brands who make a wide variety of all manner of tools and tooling; the equivalents in computers (at least UNIXy) are coreutils (fileutils, shellutils, and textutils), netpbm, sed, awk, the contents of /usr/bin, and all their alternative, updated brands like fd, the silver searcher, and ripgrep are, or the progression of increased sharpening in revision control tools from rcs, sccs, svn, to mercurial and git; or telnet-ssh, rcp-rsync, netcat-socat. Even perl and python qualify as multi-tool versions of separate power tools. I'd even include language compilers and interpreters in general as extremely sharp and powerful power multi-tools, the machine shop that lets you create more power tools. When you use these, you're working with your hands. GenAI is none of that, it's not a power tool, even though it can use power tools or generate output like the above power tools do. GenAI is hiring someone else to build a bird house or a spice rack, and then saying you had a hand in the results. It's asking the replicator for "tea, earl grey, hot". It's like how we elevate CEOs just because they're the face of the company, as if they actually did the work and were solely responsible for the output. There's skill in organization and direction, not all CEOs get undeserved recognition, but it's the rare CEO who's getting their hands dirty creating something or some process, power tools or not. GenAI lets you, everyone, be the CEO.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  That may be true - and? Does money appear in my account at the end of every two weeks or formally RSUs appear in my brokerage account at the end of every vesting period? At the end of the day, that’s what supports my addiction to food and shelter.
  - thwarted 8mo ago
    The "I gotta eat" comment contingent is worse than the "rewrite it in rust" comment contingent. Not every conversation about GenAI and slop is about your eating habits. These are astroturfed bot comments, aren't they?
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
The “work” is not creating for and while loops. The work for me is: 1. Looking at the contract and talking to sales about any nuances from the client 2. Talking to the client (use stakeholder if you are working for a product company) about their business requirements and their constraints 3. Designing the architecture. 4. Presenting the architecture and design and iterating 5. Doing the implementation and iterating. This was the job of myself and a team depending on the size of the project. I can do a lot more by myself now in 40 hours a week with an LLM. 6. Reviewing the implementation 7. User acceptance testing 8. Documentation and handover. I’ve done some form of this from the day I started working 25 years ago. I was fortunate to never be a “junior developer”. I came into my first job with 10 years of hobbyist experience and implementing a multi user data entry system. I always considered coding as a necessary evil to see my vision come to fruition.
paulddraper 8mo ago
Would a CNC satisfy your requirements?
kcexn 8mo ago
Maybe. I'm not sure its that different though? If one person can do the work of two because of power tools, then why keep both? Same with AI. How people feel about it doesn't seem relevant. Maybe the right example is the role of tractors in agriculture. Prior to tractors you had lots of people do the work, or maybe animals. But tractors and engines eliminate a whole class of labor. You could still till a field by hand or with a horse if you want, but it's probably not commercially viable.
- agentultra 8mo ago
  First, creating power tools didn’t cause mass layoffs of carpenters and construction workers. There continued to be a demand for skilled workers. Second, power tools work with the user’s intent. The user does the planning, the measuring, the cutting and all the activities of building. They might choose to use a dovetail saw instead of fasteners to make a joint. Third, programming languages are specifications given to a compiler to generate more code. A single programmer can scale to many more customers than a labourer using tools. The classification of centaur vs reverse-centaur tools came to me by way of Corey Doctorow. There might be ways to use the technology that doesn’t make us into reverse centaurs but we haven’t discovered that yet. What we have in its current form isn’t a tool.
  - kcexn 8mo ago
    Did power tools not cause layoffs? That seems like a dubious claim to me. Building a house today takes far fewer people than 100 years ago. Seems unlikely that all the extra labor found other things to do in construction.

zozbot234 8mo ago

> I don’t feel like the boss is hot to replace me with power tools. Or to lay off half my team because we have power tools now. That has more to do with how much demand there is for what you're doing. With software eating the world and hardware constraints becoming even more visible due to the chips situation, we can expect that there will be plenty of work for SWE's who are able to drive their coding agents effectively. Being the "top" (reasoning) or the "bottom" half is a matter of choice - if you slack off and are not highly committed to delivering quality product, you end up doing the "bottom" part and leaving the robot in the driver's seat.

zemvpferreira 8mo ago

Have you heard of the Luddites I wonder?

agentultra 8mo ago
Yes, I’ve read quite a lot about that bloody and terrible part of history. The Ludddites were workers who lived in an era without any social or state protections for labourers. Capitalists were using child labour to operate the looms because it was cheaper than paying anyone a fair wage. If you didn’t like the conditions you could go work as an indentured servant for the state in the work houses. Luddites used organized protests in the form of collective violence to force action when they had no other leverage. People were literally shot or jailed for this. It was a horrible part of history written by the winners. That’s why everyone thinks Luddites were against technology and progress instead of social reforms and responsibility.
- zemvpferreira 8mo ago
  In that case I really don't understand how you conclude there's any difference between being on the bottom or the top of the tool. The bare reality is the same: Skilled labourers will be replaced by automation. Woodworking tools (and looms) replaced skilled labourers with less-skilled replacements (such as children), and AI will absolutely replace skilled labourers with less-skilled replacements as well. I ask sincerely, I truly don't understand how this isn't a distinction without a difference. Have you spent time inside a modern furniture factory? Have you seen how few people it takes to make tens of tons of product?
  - agentultra 8mo ago
    I haven’t worked in a furniture factory but I have assembled car seats in a factory for Toyota. The difference matters because the people who worked together to smash the looms created the myth of Ned Ludd to protect their identities from persecution. They used organized violence because they had no leverage otherwise to demand fair wages, safety guarantees, and other labour protections. What they were fighting for wasn’t the abolishment of automation and looms. It was for social reforms that would have given them labour protections. It matters today because AI isn’t a profit line on any balance sheet right now but it is being used to justify mass layoffs and to reduce the leverage of knowledge workers in the marketplace. These tools steal your work without compensation and replace your job with capital so that rent seekers can seek rent. It’s not a repeat of what happened in the Luddite protests but history is rhyming.
    - zemvpferreira 8mo ago
      We agree, which makes me question your original point with the power tool somehow being different even more. Every automation gives more leverage to capital over labour. That's the history of technology. Downstream it makes this great life with indoor plumbing etc possible but automation in any form will always erode skilled labourers as a class. It's all essentially the same in that regard.
      - 8mo ago

tux1968 8mo ago

It seems like you're doing a lot of work to miss the actual point. Focusing on the minutiae of the analogy is a distraction from the over arching and obvious point. It has nothing to do with how you feel, it has to do with how you will compete in a world with others who feel differently. There were carpenters who refused to use power tools, some still do. They are probably happy -- and that's great, all the power to them. But they're statistically irrelevant, just as artisanal hand-crafted computer coding will be. There was a time when coders rejected high level languages, because the only way they felt good about their code is if they handcrafted the binary codes, and keyed them directly into the computer without an assembler. Times change.

cmiles74 8mo ago
In my opinion, it is far too early to claim that developers developing like it was maybe three years ago are statistically irrelevant. Microsoft has gone in on AI tooling in a big way and they just nominated a "software quality czar".
- tux1968 8mo ago
  I used the future tense. Maybe it will be one hundred years from now, who knows; but the main point still stands. It would just be nice to move the conversation beyond "but I enjoy coding!".
andyfilms1 8mo ago
I don't think he's missing the point at all. A band saw is an immutable object with a fixed, deterministic capability--in other words, a tool. An LLM is a slot machine. You can pull keep pulling the lever, but you'll get different results every time. A slot machine is technically a machine that can produce money, but nobody would ever say it's a tool for producing money.
- tux1968 8mo ago
  People keep trotting this argument out. But a band saw is not deterministic either, it can snap in the middle of a cut and destroy what you're working on. The point is, we only treat it like it's deterministic, because most of the time it's reliable enough that it just does what we want. AI technology will definitely get to the same level eventually. Clinging on to the fact that it isn't yet at that level today, is just cope, not a principled argument.

davewritescode 8mo ago

Have you never run a team of software engineers as a lead? Agentic coding comes naturally to a lot of people because that's PRECISELY what you do when you're leading a team, herding multiple brains to point them in the same direction so when you combine all their work it becomes something that is greater than the sum of it's parts. Lots of the complains about agents sound identical to things I've heard and even said myself about junior engineers. That said, there's always going to need to be people who can reach below the abstraction and agentic coding loops deprive you of the ability to get those reps in.

queenkjuul 8mo ago
People say this about juniors but I've never seen a junior make some of the bone headed mistakes AI loves to make. Either I'm very lucky or other people have really stupid juniors on their teams lol. Regardless, personally, there's no comparison between an LLM and a junior; always rather work with a junior.
- finaard 8mo ago
  I've wrote this a few times, but LLM interactions often remind me of my days at Nokia - a lot of the interactions are exactly like what I remember with some of their cheap subcons there. I even have exactly the same discussion after it messed up, like "My code is working, ignore that failing test, that was always broking, and I definitey didn't break it just now".
aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
> Have you never run a team of software engineers as a lead? I expect juniors to improve fast to get really good. AI is incapable of applying the teaching that I expcect juniors to internalize to any future code that it writes.

Geonode 8mo ago

Furniture factories are a lot more automated than you're implying with this metaphor.

parthdesai 8mo ago

My analogy is more akin to using Google Maps (or any other navigation tool). Prior to GPS and a navigation device, you would either print out the route ahead of time, and even then, you would stop at places and ask people about directions. Post Google Maps, you follow it, and then if you know there's a better route, you choose to take a different path and Google Maps will adjust the route accordingly.

aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
Google Maps is still insanely bad for hiking and cycling, so I combine the old-fashioned map method with an outdoor GPS onto which I load a precomputed GPX track for the route that I want to take.

woeirua 8mo ago

You only feel that way about power tools because the transition for carpentry happened long ago. Carpenters viewed power tools much as we do LLMs today. Furniture factories, equivalent of dark agentic code factories, caused much despair to them too. Humans are involved with assembly only because the last bits are maniacally difficult to get right. Humans might be involved with software still for many years, but it probably will look like doing final assembly and QA of pre-assembled components.

adamesque 8mo ago

I think many deployments of modern technology do turn us into reverse centaurs, and we should rail righteously against those. But I don’t at all believe that AI-assisted coding is doomed to do this to us and believe thinking so is a misread of the metaphor. (As is lumping all of “GenAI” together.)

pawelwentpawel 8mo ago

I think this argument would work if hand-written code would convey some kind of status, like an expensive pair of Japanese selvage jeans. For now though, it doesn't seem to me that people paying for software care if it was written by a human or an AI tool.

singingbard 8mo ago

To me, they all the same because they are all tools that stand between “my vision” and “it being built.” e.g. when I built a truck camper, maybe 50% was woodworking but I had to do electrical, plumbing, metalworking, plastic printing, and even networking infra. The satisfaction was not from using power tools (or hand tools too) — those were chores — it was that I designed the entire thing from scratch by myself, it worked, was reliable through the years, and it looked professional. LLMs serve the same purpose for me.

thwarted 8mo ago

There's DeWALT, Craftsman, Stanley, etc carpentry/mechanic power tool brands who make a wide variety of all manner of tools and tooling; the equivalents in computers (at least UNIXy) are coreutils (fileutils, shellutils, and textutils), netpbm, sed, awk, the contents of /usr/bin, and all their alternative, updated brands like fd, the silver searcher, and ripgrep are, or the progression of increased sharpening in revision control tools from rcs, sccs, svn, to mercurial and git; or telnet-ssh, rcp-rsync, netcat-socat. Even perl and python qualify as multi-tool versions of separate power tools. I'd even include language compilers and interpreters in general as extremely sharp and powerful power multi-tools, the machine shop that lets you create more power tools. When you use these, you're working with your hands. GenAI is none of that, it's not a power tool, even though it can use power tools or generate output like the above power tools do. GenAI is hiring someone else to build a bird house or a spice rack, and then saying you had a hand in the results. It's asking the replicator for "tea, earl grey, hot". It's like how we elevate CEOs just because they're the face of the company, as if they actually did the work and were solely responsible for the output. There's skill in organization and direction, not all CEOs get undeserved recognition, but it's the rare CEO who's getting their hands dirty creating something or some process, power tools or not. GenAI lets you, everyone, be the CEO.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
That may be true - and? Does money appear in my account at the end of every two weeks or formally RSUs appear in my brokerage account at the end of every vesting period? At the end of the day, that’s what supports my addiction to food and shelter.
- thwarted 8mo ago
  The "I gotta eat" comment contingent is worse than the "rewrite it in rust" comment contingent. Not every conversation about GenAI and slop is about your eating habits. These are astroturfed bot comments, aren't they?
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago

The “work” is not creating for and while loops. The work for me is: 1. Looking at the contract and talking to sales about any nuances from the client 2. Talking to the client (use stakeholder if you are working for a product company) about their business requirements and their constraints 3. Designing the architecture. 4. Presenting the architecture and design and iterating 5. Doing the implementation and iterating. This was the job of myself and a team depending on the size of the project. I can do a lot more by myself now in 40 hours a week with an LLM. 6. Reviewing the implementation 7. User acceptance testing 8. Documentation and handover. I’ve done some form of this from the day I started working 25 years ago. I was fortunate to never be a “junior developer”. I came into my first job with 10 years of hobbyist experience and implementing a multi user data entry system. I always considered coding as a necessary evil to see my vision come to fruition.

paulddraper 8mo ago

Would a CNC satisfy your requirements?

kcexn 8mo ago

Maybe. I'm not sure its that different though? If one person can do the work of two because of power tools, then why keep both? Same with AI. How people feel about it doesn't seem relevant. Maybe the right example is the role of tractors in agriculture. Prior to tractors you had lots of people do the work, or maybe animals. But tractors and engines eliminate a whole class of labor. You could still till a field by hand or with a horse if you want, but it's probably not commercially viable.

agentultra 8mo ago
First, creating power tools didn’t cause mass layoffs of carpenters and construction workers. There continued to be a demand for skilled workers. Second, power tools work with the user’s intent. The user does the planning, the measuring, the cutting and all the activities of building. They might choose to use a dovetail saw instead of fasteners to make a joint. Third, programming languages are specifications given to a compiler to generate more code. A single programmer can scale to many more customers than a labourer using tools. The classification of centaur vs reverse-centaur tools came to me by way of Corey Doctorow. There might be ways to use the technology that doesn’t make us into reverse centaurs but we haven’t discovered that yet. What we have in its current form isn’t a tool.
- kcexn 8mo ago
  Did power tools not cause layoffs? That seems like a dubious claim to me. Building a house today takes far fewer people than 100 years ago. Seems unlikely that all the extra labor found other things to do in construction.