7 ms·

Diverse perspectives on AI from Rust contributors and maintainers

161 points by weinzierl 7mo ago

_pdp_ 7mo ago
AI ultimately breaks the social contract. Sure, people are not perfect, but there are established common values that we don't need to convey in a prompt. With AI, despite its usefulness, you are never sure if it understands these values. That might be somewhat embedded in the training data, but we all know these properties are much more swayable and unpredictable than those of a human. It was never about the LLM to begin with. If Linus Torvalds makes a contribution to the Linux kernel without actually writing the code himself but assigns it to a coding assistant, for better or worse I will 100% accept it on face value. This is because I trust his judgment (I accept that he is fallible as any other human). But if an unknown contributor does the same, even though the code produced is ultimately high quality, you would think twice before merging. I mean, we already see this in various GitHub projects. There are open-source solutions that whitelist known contributors and it appears that GitHub might be allowing you to control this too. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387
- yabutlivnWoods 7mo ago
  Generational churn breaks social contract. You all using Latin and believing in the old Greek gods to honor the dead? Muricans still owning slaves from Africa? All ways in which old social contracts were broken at one point. We are not VHS cassettes with an obligation to play out a fuzzy memory of history.
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  > AI ultimately breaks the social contract Business schools teach that breaking the social contract is a disruption opportunity for growth, not a negative, The Hacker in Hacker News refers to "growth hacking" now, not hacking code
  - _pdp_ 7mo ago
    It depends who you ask. You cannot say that breaking the social contract (the fabric of society, if you will) is generally a good thing, although I am sure some will find opportunities for growth. After all, the phoenix must burn to emerge, but let's not romanticise the fire.
    - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
      > You cannot say that breaking the social contract (the fabric of society, if you will) is generally a good thing I am not saying it's a good thing, just that it's a common attitude here I suppose it didn't come through in my original post, but I was trying to be critical
- throwaway27448 7mo ago
  An agent is still attached to an accountable human. If it is not, ignore it.
  - jojomodding 7mo ago
    How do you figure out which is the case, at scale?
    - throwaway27448 7mo ago
      You don't.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
    The problem is that it acts as an accountability sink even when it is attached. I've had multiple coworkers over the past few months tell me obvious, verifiable untruths. Six months ago, I would have had a clear term for this: they lied to me. They told me something that wasn't true, that they could not possibly have thought was true, and they did it to manipulate me into doing what they want. I would have demanded and their manager would have agreed that they need to be given a severe talking to. But now I can't call it a lie, both in the sense that I've been instructed not to and in the sense that it subjectively wasn't. They honestly represented what the agent told them was the truth, and they honestly thought that asking an agent to do some exploration was the best way to give me accurate information. What's the replacement norm that will prevent people from "flooding the zone" with false AI-generated claims shaped to get people to do what they want? Even if AI detection tools worked, which I emphasize that they do not, they wouldn't have stopped the incidents that involved human-generated summaries of false AI information.
- _pdp_ 7mo ago
  I forgot to mention why I brought up the idea of who is making the contribution rather than how (i.e., through an LLM). Right now, the biggest issue open-source maintainers are facing is an ever-increasing supply of PRs. Before coding assistants, those PRs didn't get pushed not because they were never written (although obviously there were fewer in quantity) but because contributors were conscious of how their contributions might be perceived. In many cases, the changes never saw the light of day outside of the fork. LLMs don't second-guess whether a change is worth submitting, and they certainly don't feel the social pressure of how their contribution might be received. The filter is completely absent. So I don't think the question is whether machine-generated code is low quality at all, because that is hard to judge, and frankly coding assistants can certainly produce high-quality code (with guidance). The question is who made the contribution. With rising volumes, we will see an increasing amount of rejections. By the way, we do this too internally. We have a script that deletes LLM-generated PRs automatically after some time. It is just easier and more cost-effective than reviewing the contribution. Also, PRs get rejected for the smallest of reasons. If it doesn't pass the smell test moments after the link is opened, it get's deleted.
  - pear01 7mo ago
    > LLMs don't second-guess whether a change is worth submitting, and they certainly don't feel the social pressure of how their contribution might be received. The filter is completely absent. Of course you could have an agent on your side do this, so I take you to mean a LLM that submits a PR and is not instructed to make such a reflection will not intrinsically make it as a human would, that is as a necessary side effect of submitting in the first place (though one might be surprised). It would be curious to have an API that perhaps attempts to validate some attestation about how the submitting LLM's contribution was derived, ie force that reflection at submission time with some reasonable guarantees of veracity even if it had yet to be considered. Perhaps some future API can enforce such a contract among the various LLMs.
- pear01 7mo ago
  Prioritizing or deferring to existing contributors happens in pretty much every human endeavor. As you point out this of course predates the age of LLM, in many ways it's basic human tribal behavior. This does have its own set of costs and limitations however. Judgement is hard to measure. Humans create sorting bonds that may optimize for prestige or personal ties over strict qualifications or ability. The tribe is useful, but it can also be ugly. Perhaps in a not too distant future, in some domains or projects these sorts of instincts will be rendered obsolete by projects willing to accept any contribution that satisfies enough constraints, thereby trading human judgement for the desired mix of velocity and safety. Perhaps as the agents themselves improve this tension becomes less an act of external constraint but an internal guide. And what would this be, if not a simulation of judgement itself? You could also do it in stages, ie have a delegated agent promote people to some purgatory where there is at least some hope of human intervention to attain the same rights and privileges as pre-existing contributors, that is if said agent deems your attempt worthy enough. Or maybe to fight spam an earnest contributor will have to fork over some digital currency, to essentially pay the cost of requesting admission. All of these scenarios are rather familiar in terms of the history of human social arrangements. That is just to say, there is no destruction of the social contract here. Only another incremental evolution.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
ghosty141 7mo ago
The title is misleading. It says in one of the first sentences: > The comments within do not represent “the Rust project’s view” but rather the views of the individuals who made them. The Rust project does not, at present, have a coherent view or position around the usage of AI tools; this document is one step towards hopefully forming one. So calling this "Rust Project Perspectives on AI" is not quite right.
- JoshTriplett 7mo ago
  Correct. This is one internal draft by someone quoting some other people's positions but not speaking for any other positions.
  - mtndew4brkfst 7mo ago
    Not speaking for others, but Niko's writing is IMO strongly shading the wording used to describe positions that do or don't align with his own views.
- chriscbr 7mo ago
  Maybe "Rust maintainers' perspectives on AI" or "Rust contributors' perspectives on AI" would be better?
- eholk 7mo ago
  I took it as meaning "perspectives of people in the Rust Project about AI."
gregfrank 7mo ago
[dead]
andai 7mo ago
>It takes care and careful engineering to produce good results. One must work to keep the models within the flight envelope. One has to carefully structure the problem, provide the right context and guidance, and give appropriate tools and a good environment. One must think about optimizing the context window; one must be aware of its limitations. In other words, one has to lean into the exact opposite tendencies of those which generally make people reach for AI ;)
- throwaway27448 7mo ago
  I'm not sure there is a "normal" tendency to reach for AI. But there is certainly parallel in that, say, javascript and PHP have a reputation of being preferred by barely able people who make interesting and useful things with atrocious code.
  - drzaiusx11 7mo ago
    I've seen rust codebases that would make you cry along with perfectly well architected applications written in both perl and php. You're just playing into common language silo stereotypes. A competent developer can author code in their language of choice whatever that may be. I'm not sure "reaching for AI" implies anything besides that some folk prefer that tool for their work. I personally don't have a tendency to reach for AI, but that doesn't somehow imply they or I are "lesser" because of it.
    - whattheheckheck 7mo ago
      It does to executives who sign the checks to ai usage contracts
      - drzaiusx11 7mo ago
        The implication being that execs want folks who "reach for AI" to meet some arbitrary contract targets? Sounds like optimizing for the wrong things but I've seen crazier schemes. In my opinion the end goal of those execs pushing AI is the age old goal of seizing the means of production (of software in this case) by reducing the worker to a machine. It'll likely play out in their favor honestly, as it has many times in the past.
olalonde 7mo ago
I feel bad for people who reject LLMs on moral grounds. They'll likely fall behind, while also having to live in a world increasingly built around something they see as immoral.
- monkaiju 7mo ago
  > They'll likely fall behind So far this doesn't seem to be the case, despite it being repeated endlessly over the last few years. >while also having to live in a world increasingly built around something they see as immoral Should people just decide that things they think are immoral are actually fine and get over it? Doesnt really seem coherent...
  - ronsor 7mo ago
    When the moral perspective isn't that sound and isn't that important, yeah, they usually do. Everyone gets tired of complaining.
  - olalonde 7mo ago
    > So far this doesn't seem to be the case, despite it being repeated endlessly over the last few years. For most professional roles today, using LLMs is a must. It's probably as important as using Google, if not more. > Should people just decide that things they think are immoral are actually fine and get over it? Doesnt really seem coherent... No, hence why I feel bad for them.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bigstrat2003 7mo ago
      > For most professional roles today, using LLMs is a must. It's probably as important as using Google, if not more. That is not remotely true.
- YorickPeterse 7mo ago
  This is just the typical FOMO nonsense pushed by AI fans. It's the exact same as seen with many past hypes, and every time the result is a lot more nuanced than those fans claim. It wasn't that long ago that people were claiming MongoDB was going to revolutionize the world and make relational databases obsolete, or how cryptocurrencies were going to change the world, or NFTs, and the list goes on.
yonran 7mo ago
Seems like a lot of people’s problems with AI come from talking to the dumber models and having it not provide sufficient proof that it fixed a bug. Maybe instead of banning AI, projects should set a minimum smarts level. e.g. to contribute, you must use gpt-5.4-codex high or better for either writing it or code reviewing it.
- throwatdem12311 7mo ago
  doesn’t matter if you use the best model I use Opus 4.6 almost exclusively and it still generates nonsense if I don’t guide it.
henry_bone 7mo ago
The industry and the wider world are full steam ahead with AI, but the following takes (from the article) are the ones that resonate with me. I don't use AI directly in my work for reasons similar to those expressed here[1]. For the record, I'll use it as a better web search or intro to a set of ideas or topic. But i no longer use it to generate code or solutions. 1. https://nikomatsakis.github.io/rust-project-perspectives-on-ai/feb27-summary.html#leaning-on-ai-can-cause-one-to-lose-ones-connection-to-the-code https://nikomatsakis.github.io/rust-project-perspectives-on-...
- jwpapi 7mo ago
  I just completely shifted my mindo n that as well. I used to think I can just ai code everything, but it just worked because I started at a good codebase that I built after a while it was the AIs codebase and neither it, nor me could really work in it, till I entangled it.
ysleepy 7mo ago
I enjoyed reading theses perspectives, they are reasoned and insightful. I'm undecided about my stance for gen AI in code. We can't just look at the first order and immediate effects, but also at the social, architectural, power and responsibility aspects. For another area, prose, literature, emails, I am firm in my rejection of gen AI. I read to connect with other humans, the price of admission is spending the time. For code, I am not as certain, nowadays I don't regularly see it as an artwork or human expression, it is a technical artifact where craftsmanship can be visible. Will gen AI be the equivalent of a compiler and in 20 years everyone depends on their proprietary compiler/IDE company? Can it even advance beyond patterns/approaches that we have built until then? I have many more questions and few answers and both embracing and rejecting feels foolish.
- tracerbulletx 7mo ago
  I'm worried about a few big companies owning the means of production for software and tightening the screws.
  - kvirani 7mo ago
    This is my immediate concern as well. Sam said in an interview that he sees "intelligence" as a utility that companies like OpenAI would own and rent out.
    - arcanemachiner 7mo ago
      Hopefully it continues to get commoditized to the point where no monopoly can get a stranglehold on it, since the end product ("intelligence") can be swapped out with little concern over who is providing it.
      - georgemcbay 7mo ago
        > Hopefully it continues to get commoditized to the point where no monopoly can get a stranglehold on it I believe this is the natural end-state for LLM based AI but the danger of these companies even briefly being worth trillions of dollars is that they are likely to start caring about (and throwing lobbying money around) AI-related intellectual property concerns that they've never shown to anyone else while building their models and I don't think it is far fetched to assume they will attempt all manner of underhanded regulatory capture in the window prior to when commoditization would otherwise occur naturally. All three of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have already complained about their LLMs being ripped off. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-02-13/openai-accuses-chinas-deepseek-of-stealing-ai-technology https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-02-13/openai-acc... https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/distillation-experimentation-integration-ai-adversarial-use?e=48754805 https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dis... https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-china-deepseek-theft-claude-distillation-copyright-national-security/ https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-china-deepseek-thef...
rusty1 7mo ago
What a sober read. Hey one of my old colleagues is on there. They are also one of the best engineers I have ever encountered - period. Nice person too. I don't know what most people are doing in their day to day with AI but this is the closest to reality I have seen thus far. I have seen posts on here about how they have 4 agents making 50kloc a day or something and I can't reliably get a complete spec to output 50 lines of commit worthy code. Emphasis on reliable and commit worthy. I won't go into pros and cons, but I just don't see how everyone is even operating like this, especially with a team of people and any semblance of legacy code. Note, by legacy I do not mean old bad code, I mean pre existing code from various contributors. For research on crates/integrations, I see some benefits, but sometimes I think it is because search engines have been enshittified and inundated with the top 100 results of nearly all queries being AI slop. 10 out of 10 times I would rather ping a person. Lately I have been assuming most pro-ai articles are written by LLMs or advertising campaigns and ignore it. It's working well so far. Still a top performer on my team...
userbinator 7mo ago
Anything that uses the phrase "diverse perspectives" is not worth reading.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

161 points by weinzierl 7mo ago

_pdp_ 7mo ago

AI ultimately breaks the social contract. Sure, people are not perfect, but there are established common values that we don't need to convey in a prompt. With AI, despite its usefulness, you are never sure if it understands these values. That might be somewhat embedded in the training data, but we all know these properties are much more swayable and unpredictable than those of a human. It was never about the LLM to begin with. If Linus Torvalds makes a contribution to the Linux kernel without actually writing the code himself but assigns it to a coding assistant, for better or worse I will 100% accept it on face value. This is because I trust his judgment (I accept that he is fallible as any other human). But if an unknown contributor does the same, even though the code produced is ultimately high quality, you would think twice before merging. I mean, we already see this in various GitHub projects. There are open-source solutions that whitelist known contributors and it appears that GitHub might be allowing you to control this too. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387

yabutlivnWoods 7mo ago
Generational churn breaks social contract. You all using Latin and believing in the old Greek gods to honor the dead? Muricans still owning slaves from Africa? All ways in which old social contracts were broken at one point. We are not VHS cassettes with an obligation to play out a fuzzy memory of history.
bluefirebrand 7mo ago
> AI ultimately breaks the social contract Business schools teach that breaking the social contract is a disruption opportunity for growth, not a negative, The Hacker in Hacker News refers to "growth hacking" now, not hacking code
- _pdp_ 7mo ago
  It depends who you ask. You cannot say that breaking the social contract (the fabric of society, if you will) is generally a good thing, although I am sure some will find opportunities for growth. After all, the phoenix must burn to emerge, but let's not romanticise the fire.
  - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
    > You cannot say that breaking the social contract (the fabric of society, if you will) is generally a good thing I am not saying it's a good thing, just that it's a common attitude here I suppose it didn't come through in my original post, but I was trying to be critical
throwaway27448 7mo ago
An agent is still attached to an accountable human. If it is not, ignore it.
- jojomodding 7mo ago
  How do you figure out which is the case, at scale?
  - throwaway27448 7mo ago
    You don't.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
  The problem is that it acts as an accountability sink even when it is attached. I've had multiple coworkers over the past few months tell me obvious, verifiable untruths. Six months ago, I would have had a clear term for this: they lied to me. They told me something that wasn't true, that they could not possibly have thought was true, and they did it to manipulate me into doing what they want. I would have demanded and their manager would have agreed that they need to be given a severe talking to. But now I can't call it a lie, both in the sense that I've been instructed not to and in the sense that it subjectively wasn't. They honestly represented what the agent told them was the truth, and they honestly thought that asking an agent to do some exploration was the best way to give me accurate information. What's the replacement norm that will prevent people from "flooding the zone" with false AI-generated claims shaped to get people to do what they want? Even if AI detection tools worked, which I emphasize that they do not, they wouldn't have stopped the incidents that involved human-generated summaries of false AI information.
_pdp_ 7mo ago
I forgot to mention why I brought up the idea of who is making the contribution rather than how (i.e., through an LLM). Right now, the biggest issue open-source maintainers are facing is an ever-increasing supply of PRs. Before coding assistants, those PRs didn't get pushed not because they were never written (although obviously there were fewer in quantity) but because contributors were conscious of how their contributions might be perceived. In many cases, the changes never saw the light of day outside of the fork. LLMs don't second-guess whether a change is worth submitting, and they certainly don't feel the social pressure of how their contribution might be received. The filter is completely absent. So I don't think the question is whether machine-generated code is low quality at all, because that is hard to judge, and frankly coding assistants can certainly produce high-quality code (with guidance). The question is who made the contribution. With rising volumes, we will see an increasing amount of rejections. By the way, we do this too internally. We have a script that deletes LLM-generated PRs automatically after some time. It is just easier and more cost-effective than reviewing the contribution. Also, PRs get rejected for the smallest of reasons. If it doesn't pass the smell test moments after the link is opened, it get's deleted.
- pear01 7mo ago
  > LLMs don't second-guess whether a change is worth submitting, and they certainly don't feel the social pressure of how their contribution might be received. The filter is completely absent. Of course you could have an agent on your side do this, so I take you to mean a LLM that submits a PR and is not instructed to make such a reflection will not intrinsically make it as a human would, that is as a necessary side effect of submitting in the first place (though one might be surprised). It would be curious to have an API that perhaps attempts to validate some attestation about how the submitting LLM's contribution was derived, ie force that reflection at submission time with some reasonable guarantees of veracity even if it had yet to be considered. Perhaps some future API can enforce such a contract among the various LLMs.
pear01 7mo ago
Prioritizing or deferring to existing contributors happens in pretty much every human endeavor. As you point out this of course predates the age of LLM, in many ways it's basic human tribal behavior. This does have its own set of costs and limitations however. Judgement is hard to measure. Humans create sorting bonds that may optimize for prestige or personal ties over strict qualifications or ability. The tribe is useful, but it can also be ugly. Perhaps in a not too distant future, in some domains or projects these sorts of instincts will be rendered obsolete by projects willing to accept any contribution that satisfies enough constraints, thereby trading human judgement for the desired mix of velocity and safety. Perhaps as the agents themselves improve this tension becomes less an act of external constraint but an internal guide. And what would this be, if not a simulation of judgement itself? You could also do it in stages, ie have a delegated agent promote people to some purgatory where there is at least some hope of human intervention to attain the same rights and privileges as pre-existing contributors, that is if said agent deems your attempt worthy enough. Or maybe to fight spam an earnest contributor will have to fork over some digital currency, to essentially pay the cost of requesting admission. All of these scenarios are rather familiar in terms of the history of human social arrangements. That is just to say, there is no destruction of the social contract here. Only another incremental evolution.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

ghosty141 7mo ago

The title is misleading. It says in one of the first sentences: > The comments within do not represent “the Rust project’s view” but rather the views of the individuals who made them. The Rust project does not, at present, have a coherent view or position around the usage of AI tools; this document is one step towards hopefully forming one. So calling this "Rust Project Perspectives on AI" is not quite right.

JoshTriplett 7mo ago
Correct. This is one internal draft by someone quoting some other people's positions but not speaking for any other positions.
- mtndew4brkfst 7mo ago
  Not speaking for others, but Niko's writing is IMO strongly shading the wording used to describe positions that do or don't align with his own views.
chriscbr 7mo ago
Maybe "Rust maintainers' perspectives on AI" or "Rust contributors' perspectives on AI" would be better?
eholk 7mo ago
I took it as meaning "perspectives of people in the Rust Project about AI."

gregfrank 7mo ago

[dead]

andai 7mo ago

>It takes care and careful engineering to produce good results. One must work to keep the models within the flight envelope. One has to carefully structure the problem, provide the right context and guidance, and give appropriate tools and a good environment. One must think about optimizing the context window; one must be aware of its limitations. In other words, one has to lean into the exact opposite tendencies of those which generally make people reach for AI ;)

throwaway27448 7mo ago
I'm not sure there is a "normal" tendency to reach for AI. But there is certainly parallel in that, say, javascript and PHP have a reputation of being preferred by barely able people who make interesting and useful things with atrocious code.
- drzaiusx11 7mo ago
  I've seen rust codebases that would make you cry along with perfectly well architected applications written in both perl and php. You're just playing into common language silo stereotypes. A competent developer can author code in their language of choice whatever that may be. I'm not sure "reaching for AI" implies anything besides that some folk prefer that tool for their work. I personally don't have a tendency to reach for AI, but that doesn't somehow imply they or I are "lesser" because of it.
  - whattheheckheck 7mo ago
    It does to executives who sign the checks to ai usage contracts
    - drzaiusx11 7mo ago
      The implication being that execs want folks who "reach for AI" to meet some arbitrary contract targets? Sounds like optimizing for the wrong things but I've seen crazier schemes. In my opinion the end goal of those execs pushing AI is the age old goal of seizing the means of production (of software in this case) by reducing the worker to a machine. It'll likely play out in their favor honestly, as it has many times in the past.

olalonde 7mo ago

I feel bad for people who reject LLMs on moral grounds. They'll likely fall behind, while also having to live in a world increasingly built around something they see as immoral.

monkaiju 7mo ago
> They'll likely fall behind So far this doesn't seem to be the case, despite it being repeated endlessly over the last few years. >while also having to live in a world increasingly built around something they see as immoral Should people just decide that things they think are immoral are actually fine and get over it? Doesnt really seem coherent...
- ronsor 7mo ago
  When the moral perspective isn't that sound and isn't that important, yeah, they usually do. Everyone gets tired of complaining.
- olalonde 7mo ago
  > So far this doesn't seem to be the case, despite it being repeated endlessly over the last few years. For most professional roles today, using LLMs is a must. It's probably as important as using Google, if not more. > Should people just decide that things they think are immoral are actually fine and get over it? Doesnt really seem coherent... No, hence why I feel bad for them.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bigstrat2003 7mo ago
    > For most professional roles today, using LLMs is a must. It's probably as important as using Google, if not more. That is not remotely true.
YorickPeterse 7mo ago
This is just the typical FOMO nonsense pushed by AI fans. It's the exact same as seen with many past hypes, and every time the result is a lot more nuanced than those fans claim. It wasn't that long ago that people were claiming MongoDB was going to revolutionize the world and make relational databases obsolete, or how cryptocurrencies were going to change the world, or NFTs, and the list goes on.

yonran 7mo ago

Seems like a lot of people’s problems with AI come from talking to the dumber models and having it not provide sufficient proof that it fixed a bug. Maybe instead of banning AI, projects should set a minimum smarts level. e.g. to contribute, you must use gpt-5.4-codex high or better for either writing it or code reviewing it.

throwatdem12311 7mo ago
doesn’t matter if you use the best model I use Opus 4.6 almost exclusively and it still generates nonsense if I don’t guide it.

henry_bone 7mo ago

The industry and the wider world are full steam ahead with AI, but the following takes (from the article) are the ones that resonate with me. I don't use AI directly in my work for reasons similar to those expressed here[1]. For the record, I'll use it as a better web search or intro to a set of ideas or topic. But i no longer use it to generate code or solutions. 1. https://nikomatsakis.github.io/rust-project-perspectives-on-ai/feb27-summary.html#leaning-on-ai-can-cause-one-to-lose-ones-connection-to-the-code https://nikomatsakis.github.io/rust-project-perspectives-on-...

jwpapi 7mo ago
I just completely shifted my mindo n that as well. I used to think I can just ai code everything, but it just worked because I started at a good codebase that I built after a while it was the AIs codebase and neither it, nor me could really work in it, till I entangled it.

ysleepy 7mo ago

I enjoyed reading theses perspectives, they are reasoned and insightful. I'm undecided about my stance for gen AI in code. We can't just look at the first order and immediate effects, but also at the social, architectural, power and responsibility aspects. For another area, prose, literature, emails, I am firm in my rejection of gen AI. I read to connect with other humans, the price of admission is spending the time. For code, I am not as certain, nowadays I don't regularly see it as an artwork or human expression, it is a technical artifact where craftsmanship can be visible. Will gen AI be the equivalent of a compiler and in 20 years everyone depends on their proprietary compiler/IDE company? Can it even advance beyond patterns/approaches that we have built until then? I have many more questions and few answers and both embracing and rejecting feels foolish.

tracerbulletx 7mo ago
I'm worried about a few big companies owning the means of production for software and tightening the screws.
- kvirani 7mo ago
  This is my immediate concern as well. Sam said in an interview that he sees "intelligence" as a utility that companies like OpenAI would own and rent out.
  - arcanemachiner 7mo ago
    Hopefully it continues to get commoditized to the point where no monopoly can get a stranglehold on it, since the end product ("intelligence") can be swapped out with little concern over who is providing it.
    - georgemcbay 7mo ago
      > Hopefully it continues to get commoditized to the point where no monopoly can get a stranglehold on it I believe this is the natural end-state for LLM based AI but the danger of these companies even briefly being worth trillions of dollars is that they are likely to start caring about (and throwing lobbying money around) AI-related intellectual property concerns that they've never shown to anyone else while building their models and I don't think it is far fetched to assume they will attempt all manner of underhanded regulatory capture in the window prior to when commoditization would otherwise occur naturally. All three of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have already complained about their LLMs being ripped off. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-02-13/openai-accuses-chinas-deepseek-of-stealing-ai-technology https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-02-13/openai-acc... https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/distillation-experimentation-integration-ai-adversarial-use?e=48754805 https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dis... https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-china-deepseek-theft-claude-distillation-copyright-national-security/ https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-china-deepseek-thef...

rusty1 7mo ago

What a sober read. Hey one of my old colleagues is on there. They are also one of the best engineers I have ever encountered - period. Nice person too. I don't know what most people are doing in their day to day with AI but this is the closest to reality I have seen thus far. I have seen posts on here about how they have 4 agents making 50kloc a day or something and I can't reliably get a complete spec to output 50 lines of commit worthy code. Emphasis on reliable and commit worthy. I won't go into pros and cons, but I just don't see how everyone is even operating like this, especially with a team of people and any semblance of legacy code. Note, by legacy I do not mean old bad code, I mean pre existing code from various contributors. For research on crates/integrations, I see some benefits, but sometimes I think it is because search engines have been enshittified and inundated with the top 100 results of nearly all queries being AI slop. 10 out of 10 times I would rather ping a person. Lately I have been assuming most pro-ai articles are written by LLMs or advertising campaigns and ignore it. It's working well so far. Still a top performer on my team...

userbinator 7mo ago

Anything that uses the phrase "diverse perspectives" is not worth reading.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]