32 ms·

I am leaving the AI party after one drink

121 points by speckx 8mo ago

helenazdenova 8mo ago
[flagged]
peacebeard 8mo ago
Pretty insubstantial high level tour of broad AI pushback. Goes from "It was just not 'elegant.'" [sic] to "I don't want to give up my brain" [sic].
- hilliardfarmer 8mo ago
  Exactly, the article is silly, the perspective, idiotic. She says it's, "addictive" like driving a car is addictive compared to walking???
haolez 8mo ago
I don't have a stake on AI, but more and more I see the following patterns: - people that give in to AI do so because the technical merits suddenly became too big to ignore (even for seasoned developers that were previously against it) - people who avoid AI center their arguments on principles and personal discomfort Just from that, you can kind of see where this is going.
- rustystump 8mo ago
  Most arguments against it are built on some moral principle and not on objective reality of usefulness. Crypto used to be the thing to hate but that made sense as the objective usefulness of crypto was meek. AI models were always crazy useful but prohibitively expensive. Youd need an entire team to build your models. Now you dont.
- tines 8mo ago
  Yeah, things get more and more terrible over time. Your point?
mstank 8mo ago
While I applaud her and wish her well — writing like this reminds me of a couple of things. First my aging father insisting on navigating using his unfortunately fading memory instead of Google maps. Some people just won’t pick up technology out of habit or spite, even if it hinders them. Second, a quote I read here that I’ll paraphrase “you can be the best marathon runner in the world and still lose a race to a guy on a bike.” Know the race you’re racing. It often changes. I think it’s valid and commendable to keep the old ways alive, but also potentially dangerous to not realize they’re old ways.
- wcarss 8mo ago
  I don't think this diminishes your point, but, for a thing like memory, your father may be maintaining it by insisting on relying on it. It may diminish regardless, but its diminishment may slow down. At work, we are in a certain kind of race. In life, we are in a certain other kind. To paraphrase a recent Brandon Sanderson talk about creativity in an era where AI can outpace and possibly soon, out-quality a professional, "The work you do on _you_ can be _the art_."
  - igor47 8mo ago
    Strongly agree! As someone who has been caring for a parent with dementia, it's definitely a use or lose it kind of situation. See also the studies on long term cognitive health in London cab drivers https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-research-taxi-drivers-hippocampus-dementia-link/ https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-resea...
- tines 8mo ago
  [dead]
- drfloyd51 8mo ago
  I had a significant other 20 years ago that would not use a GPS. This resulted in constant fights whenever she travelled. If she got off her route, I got a phone call. I lacked the skills to divine her exact location and what direction she needs to go based on vague descriptions of being on “some highway” for “some amount of time” and she is near mile marker “I don’t know.” After hanging up on me she would eventually stop somewhere or ask someone or figure something out or maybe never come home. Then one day, She was on the way to an OB appointment she almost plowed into a car in front of her while she was looking at her Mapquest pages. Risking our unborn child. Even after pointing out the danger she claimed the guy in front… He did no such thing, I saw everything from my position in the parking lot. I bought a GPS unit “for me” and put it into my car. I just used it. If we travelled in my car she still insisted on her printed maps. I ignored them. (This was very intense.) Then one day we took her car for a trip and I brought my GPS. And “forgot it” in her car. I claimed I would remove it “later”. About two weeks later she gave me the look and said not to laugh. Dead serious. She then said “the GPS is ok “ and can stay in her car. Hallelujah! The life expectancy of my wife and child just went up exponentially. This day, I have no idea what her hangup was. The best I could come up with was she was bad with directions. Was probably taught how to read a map. And her father probably instilled her sense of pride for the ability to read a map. And choosing to use a GPS was retroactively wasting her time learning how to use maps. And devaluing a skill she worked hard to learn. I don’t care. I just wanted my family to live.
legitster 8mo ago
> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave? Do you buy food from a grocery store? Do you own power tools? The entire point of civilization and society is that we are all "addicted" to technology and progress. But the invention of the plow did not, in fact, make us lazier or stop using our brain. We just moved on to the next problems. Maybe the Amish are have it right and we should just be happy with a certain level of technology. But none of us have "lost" the ability to go backwards if we really wanted. You can finally ask a computer to think and solve problems, and it will! People act like this is a brave new world, but this is literally what computers were supposed to be doing for us 50 years ago! If somebody finally came out with a fusion reactor tomorrow I would half expect people to suddenly come out and say "Oh, I don't think I can support this. What about the soul of solar panels? I think cheap electricity is going to make things too easy."
- tines 8mo ago
  The problem is that you're likening fundamentally unlike things. AI isn't like a microwave or an automatic car or a power tool. It does not augment you. As I said elsewhere: AI is not a bicycle for the mind, it's an easy chair. You will lose more than you ever gain.
  - sunir 8mo ago
    Dubious. Ai psychosis is the opposite. It’s about being empowered to explore ideas much further but with a maladaptive tool designed to be an appeaser by reinforcement learning.
  - TechSquidTV 8mo ago
    Im hearing a lot of opinion, but nothing convincing.
    - 8mo ago
cowlby 8mo ago
Who else struggles with both sides of this? My engineer side values curiosity, brain power, and artistanship. My capitalist side says it's always the product not the process. My formula is something like this: product = money, process = happiness, money != happiness, no money = unhappiness. I think the optimal solution is min/maxing this thing. Find the AI process that minimizes unhappiness, and maximizes money.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- thewoodsman 8mo ago
  I definitely struggle with both sides, or maybe multiple sides. On the one hand most of my daily output at my job is coming from AI these days. On the other hand I find the explosion of AI-generated "writing" (and other forms of art) to be aesthetically abhorrent. And I've just recently started a ... weird sort of metaphysics / spirituality / but also AI related writing project, so the difference between creation with and without AI is in really sharp focus for me right now. I wrote an article about this, but honestly I don't think I really captured the totality of my feelings. I really haven't decided where I land. I'm definitely using the tools for economic purposes, and I even have some "pure-fun" side project stuff where I'm getting value from it. Here's the article if that sounds interesting, would love to discuss the whole topic with anyone who's finding themselves of two (or more) minds on these sorts of issues: https://hermeticwoodsman.substack.com/p/why-i-let-ai-write-my-code-but-not https://hermeticwoodsman.substack.com/p/why-i-let-ai-write-m...
- prewett 8mo ago
  > My capitalist side says it's always the product not the process. Your capitalist side needs to read some Deming. "Your system is perfectly tuned to produce the results that you are getting." Obviously, then, if you want better results, you need to improve your system. Also "the product" is ambiguous. Is it the overall product, like how the product sits in the market, how the user interacts with it to achieve their goals, the manufacturability of the product, etc.? That is Steve Jobs sort of focus on the product, and it is really more of a system (how does the product relate to its user, environment, etc). However, AI doesn't produce that product, nor does any individual engineer. If "the product" means "the result of a task", you don't want to optimize that. That's how you get Microsoft and enterprise products. Nothing works well together, and using it is like cutting a steak with a spoon, but it has a truckload of features.
trinsic2 8mo ago
Yeah I think this article put a finger on what I was feeling after using Claude Code for the first time to convert an PDF to an Markdown document[0]. I think I will update my article on these thoughts. Thanks for touching on something I had been feeling. It also feel like I was cheating. I also used CC to update the version of my SSG and that was good because I did not want to spend my time dealing with that. But there are certain projects that I can see myself not feeling good about if I used the tool to help me with. [0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-my-first-llm-experiment/ https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-my-fir...
basket_horse 8mo ago
Why can’t people just acknowledge AI is good at some things and bad at others. Why does every post say AI is either groundbreaking or terrible. Get a grip people. It’s a tool.
- api 8mo ago
  Nuanced opinions don't get clicks and don't fit in tweets. Algorithms hate context. We've created a communications system bottlenecked by virality and short form text and video in which all nuance and context is stripped from everything. This, far far more than anything AI is doing, is what's making us dumber.
  - rustystump 8mo ago
    Thank you. I always thought the “we are getting dumber” was happening way before AI. There is now like 3-4 social media giants where anything viral is reposted across them all so it is really like one global “feed” of information.
    - api 8mo ago
      Addictive social media has done infinitely more to zombify and destroy the attention spans of people than AI. AI is more of a double edged sword I think. Depends a lot on how people use it. I think it's actually more likely to have positive effects on cognition than social media and especially scrollers like TikTok. Don't get me started on gambling.
- DerArzt 8mo ago
  People can do that, but they can't always get that point across to the decision makers at work (after enough smoke, they seem to enjoy the warm breeze between their butt cheeks).
jr3592 8mo ago
I love posts like this. AI is easily the most disruptive thing to hit our industry in over a decade and it feels like one of those "this changes everything" moments. Reading how it's impacting others is cathartic and helps shape my own understanding. Here are some thoughts I have from reading this article: > The AI can’t “see” the output, so some responsive refinements were just not correct. Within one CSS rule block there were redundant declarations. This 1,000%. Vibe coding has its issue and for me personally, frontend polish, responsiveness, and overall quality is the #1 most glaring of them that simply re-prompting often can't solve. Even with the ability to screen shot your UI that hasn't solved things like glitchy animations. If you want to do anything even remotely above a junior level like scroll animations, page transitions, etc. good luck. AI will certainly try to do it for you, but inevitably it will not work perfectly and you will need to manually refine or even re-write code. When the code base isn't yours, that makes these re-writes a lot less fun. > The guilty conscience at the same time, like I was cheating. I realized that when I move on like this, my project will never truly feel like my own. I've wrestled with this over the last year, and still do to some extent. I'm trying to shift my perspective and envision myself as a brand new developer maybe 16 or 17 years of age. Would I think this isn't my work? I doubt it. I'd probably just (correctly) assume that this is the state of the art, this is how you do it. Unfortunately this doesn't fix a bigger problem... I just don't enjoy vibe coding as a craft. There's something special about sitting down in the morning with your coffee and taking on a difficult programming problem. You start writing some code, the solutions start to formalize in your mind, there's a strong back-and-forth effect where as you code, the concepts crystalize further... small wins fuel a wonderful dopamine hit experience... intellisense completions, compilation completions, page refreshes, etc. are now all replaced with dull moments often waiting for the agent to return its response, which you now read. > I’m curious (and a little bit scared) to see where we will go from here. I hope that in the end I can be part of a community that values craftsmanship, individuality and honest, high-quality work. I really hope so too... But speaking honestly, I think this ship is sailing away quite quickly. Time is money, and it always has been this way. Very few organizations can afford the luxury of time when building, designing, etc. I see no chance for this genie to go back in the bottle, and I believe it has (and will continue) to fundamentally change the nature of our work. Over time as these models improve, there's a chance it could dramatically reduce the overall need for developers... It will start with low level teams as we're seeing already, but could expand. I have been saying this to everyone -- what's your exit strategy? I'm not saying you need to panic, but you need a plan for what happens if / when salaries tank dramatically. I hate to be "that guy" but in life I've found expecting the worst, isn't always a bad thing. Keep your mood up, prepare for the worst possible outcome, and be pleasantly surprised if that's not what happens.
JPKab 8mo ago
"I'm not going to use this technology that obviously enhances my productivity because <insert emotional subjective reasoning that no customer would ever care about here>." I think a lot of people have forgotten why we actually get paid to write code. The person who wants an automated billing system doesn't care if you hand-typed it or not, or if the CSS that would have taken 2 hours to write took 8 seconds via an AI plus 60 seconds of you tweaking a border you didn't like. They just want their billing system. And if you are the person that takes 20x longer to build it, you're going to quickly get outcompeted. Sorry.
- hilliardfarmer 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - slater 8mo ago
    wtf?
- tines 8mo ago
  Give me Understanding or give me death.
- deadbabe 8mo ago
  Customer doesn’t give a fuck how long a billing system took to make, they only care that it works correctly. A billing system only truly gets built once, then possibly maintained in perpetuity. This makes the advantage of building it 20x times faster pointless. AI builds it in a day, will it matter 5 years from now if that billing system was instead built by hand in 20 days a long time ago? No. The speed advantage of AI only comes into play when you have a lot of code to crank out continuously. Do you have a need to constantly build bespoke billing systems at a rate of 1 per day? Probably not. So who cares. Take your little AI grift charging $1000/month somewhere else. It’s not needed.
  - bluGill 8mo ago
    Every billing system in use is constantly maintained with new features, bug fixes ane the like. The system of 20 years ago would apply the wrong tax laws today. the people asking for the new feature today care about how easy those are to add
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
rspoerri 8mo ago
Human thinks eating food from fire is bad because it looks charred and you might burn your fingers doing so. /s I remember the time when people insisted that they would never use a mobile phone. I remember the time when people didnt understand my presentation about the magical "internet" (8th grade school in 94).
ognav 8mo ago
[flagged]
yomismoaqui 8mo ago
I would pay money to read rants on a forum like Hackernews but in 190X when cars started sharing the roads with horse carriages. I bet it would look something like the posts we are seeing today with developers and agentic AI.
- sunir 8mo ago
  It’s called a library. It’s free. Plus you get to say microfiche which is fun. :)
- autoexec 8mo ago
  I'd bet that a lot of those posters would have accurately predicted and called out many of the very real harms that cars have caused our society and shown that many many mistakes we've made could have been avoided.
- hilliardfarmer 8mo ago
  You don't have to go back that far! Even now just listen to how they talk about cryptocurrency. Most people on this website hate anything they don't understand.
andai 8mo ago
Reposting a comment (and one of the replies) since it's relevant: --- It occurred to me on my walk today that a program is not the only output of programming. The other, arguably far more important output, is the programmer. The mental model that you, the programmer, build by writing the program. And -- here's the million dollar question -- can we get away with removing our hands from the equation? You may know that knowledge lives deeper than "thought-level" -- much of it lives in muscle memory. You can't glance at a paragraph of a textbook, say "yeah that makes sense" and expect to do well on the exam. You need to be able to produce it. (Many of you will remember the experience of having forgotten a phone number, i.e. not being able to speak or write it, but finding that you are able to punch it into the dialpad, because the muscle memory was still there!) The recent trend is to increase the output called programs, but decrease the output called programmers. That doesn't exactly bode well. See also: Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko --- Munksgaard 1 day ago: Peter Naur had that realization back in 1985: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
- andai 8mo ago
  Update: I fleshed this out into an article: The Deliverable is You! Programming as Theory Building https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/the-deliverable-is-you-programming https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/the-deliverable-is-you-pr... The open question is to what degree the actual typing is necessary. I see it as proof that the mental model is sound. The thinking produces the mental model, the mental model produces the program. In the absence of that final step, what validates the model? (Complaints from users and colleagues? ;) Another great thread to pull on: the overlap between "moving up levels of abstraction", i.e. AI assisted programming merely continues and accelerates a trend that has been there for the entire history of programming.
- anon-3988 8mo ago
  I haven't thought about it this way but I have been feeling that something is off. I think you got it right. There is a HUGE difference between "I understand the concept" and "I can write down the concept on paper". Everyone fools themselves into thinking that they understand but the illusion immediately falls apart when they try to write it down. The problem with LLM is that it is actually able to produce something that "works". But more often that not, what it produces is usually beyond what the author actually understand. Arguably, one could ask "Why does it matter?" If there are enough tests and monitoring to capture the behavior of the program, who cares how it is implemented? To me this is extremely disappointing. I have always wanted to write software that lasts for a century but if software becomes a commodity, I see software quality mattering less and less. If something is broken, just ask the LLM to patch it. Unlike a human, there is no limit to this. The LLM will happily fix that 50 years old Fortran code that no one understand. There is a lot less pressure to rethink at the fundamental principles.
TaupeRanger 8mo ago
> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” Getting a feeling of "wanting to keep going" with something does not automatically make it an "addiction". > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. A tale as old as time, and a valid feeling, though not particularly helpful to dwell on since the technology will never go away and never get worse than it is right now. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. Your brain will think about other important things and you don't need to become "lazy" just because a machine is doing something that used to require more effort on your part. > I enjoy technical discussions with (human) co-workers. So what? You can still have those discussion. > I enjoy reading blog posts and tutorials and learning from other developers. So what? You can still read those blogs, but the subjects might shift away from coding minutiae to other topics. > I want to learn and grow and become better at what I am doing by trial and error and mistakes I make all by myself. Going forward, that trial and error process will start to happen more at the product/project level rather than the source code level. > I don’t want to be part of a trend/hype destroying our planet even faster than we already do without it. It isn't. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
- matheusmoreira 8mo ago
  > So what? You can still have those discussion. Doubt. When the money dries up, there won't be many people who will care enough to learn and discuss computer science or whatever else. The AI already knows all of it and people will absolutely be satisfied by that.
allenrb 8mo ago
For what it’s worth (ie, absolutely nothing), I agree with her 100%. I didn’t get into this field in order to prompt an AI to take care of the details. I got into it because I love the details. I’m a strong performer on a good team at a company many people would want to work at… and I know the clock is ticking. Sooner or later, I will be too slow. I’m not going to claim that this is the wrong way to go. It’s obviously the future, and the future doesn’t care what allenrb does or does not want. I’m somewhat hopeful that power and cooling requirements will come down by multiple factors of 10x over time, reducing the environmental damage. The fact is, I love what I’ve been able to do “the old way” and just don’t feel the urge to move on. So it goes.
- ryandvm 8mo ago
  48 years old and I am 100% feeling this. Yes, I am much more productive having Claude Code bang out boilerplate back-end code, but honestly I always kind of enjoyed doing it. Now I'm just a micro-manager for an AI. And honestly, how long will that last? Given that LLMs came out of nowhere to radically redefine my role from software engineer to prompt writer in just a couple years, I have every reason to believe that they're coming for my role as prompt engineer next. (As my CEO surely hopes.) I'm just glad the timing of the great AI replacement began right when I was nearing burnout anyway.
- dd8601fn 8mo ago
  Someone the other day was talking about there being two kinds of builders. One likes the details of doing, where the other likes the things they produce. The idea was that one likes AI and the other naturally hates it. I thought about that for a bit and decided that, like most things, if you’re any good at something the “hard way” you probably have some of both. Or at least I’m sure it’s true for me. I LOVE that I can produce the things I want to create without spending months crafting lines of text. The “I know how to architect this, I know what a decent data model looks like, I have a good idea of where someone is likely to introduce security or scaling problems. I can pilot this plane and produce something GOOD.” But, I really also HATE looking at the final product and forever measuring, in my head, how much of it is even mine. Which parts I haven’t thoroughly reviewed, or would have spent a week learning and didn’t, or maybe wouldn’t have accomplished correctly at all? Am I a fraud, now? I wasn’t before… It’s a really painful trade for me.
par 8mo ago
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C Clarke
api 8mo ago
I'm a little tired of the environmental argument against AI. It feels contrived, like people are fishing for a "problemism" to use to oppose it to avoid harder discussions. Let's compare AI to one typical 20 mile round trip commute. I asked Gemini and Claude and compared to see if the results looked good, but feel free to check. One ~20 mile round trip commute: about 5700 Wh in an EV, about 27000 Wh in a gas car (due to thermal efficiency). Comparing to the EV that's about 1,400 ChatGPT queries, 2,800 AI code completions, and 380 AI image generations. Ordering lunch on Doordash uses the same power as days and days worth of very heavy AI usage, and that's if the dasher is driving a very efficient car. If they're driving an inefficient gas car it's like weeks of heavy AI usage. Ultimately what matters is where we get our power. If we are getting it from CO2 emitting sources, what we do with it after that is not relevant. Make AI memes? Order burritos? Boil spaghetti? Who cares. The solution is to replace CO2 emitting sources with cleaner sources. I also think people are avoiding the big fat elephant: wealth inequality. The whole problem with AI that bothers people is loss of jobs and possible wage suppression. The problem isn't AI, it's inequality and the fact that our system is basically regressive at this point with wealth being actively transferred upward. But that's a hard complicated discussion and involves confronting powerful forces. It's easier to make stuff up about AI being some uniquely bad energy or water waste when it's not. This is really what "problemism" is all about: using a contrived or exaggerated or mis-attributed problem to avoid a hard or complicated conversation.
- rustystump 8mo ago
  I think it was a carry over from crypto days. Crypto terrible for energy etc etc. AI is also compute heavy so same deal. Regardless of real world use environment arguments are hard to sell because everything in modern life is terrible across the board. I am pretty sure that the beef industry is far worse than data centers. Dont get me started on plastics. Stronger arguments can be made “against” ai then energy use.
  - api 8mo ago
    Everything in modern life is terrible compared to how it could be. There is quite a lot of room for improvement. But compared to living in extreme poverty in parts of the developing world today or the life of a peasant in the Middle Ages? It’s much better for the vast majority of people. It would have to get a lot worse to be as bad as subsistence farming or filthy slum life. I think the most frustrating thing though is that many of our problems are self inflicted. The subsistence farmer and the slum dweller are victims of circumstance or societal forces far outside their control.
slumpt_ 8mo ago
to be clear, the work you’re doing is only relevant to the extent it produces product nobody cares if you use your brain or not. they do care if you’re efficiently delivering reliable product
- tines 8mo ago
  I care if I'm using my brain or not. I don't care that nobody else cares.
firmretention 8mo ago
I've found two personal use cases for LLM generated code: (1) I have an idea for some app, but either I feel it won't be useful enough/save me enough time to justify developing it, or I simply don't feel the problem is interesting enough to be motivated by it. In that case, a vibe coded tool is perfect. It generally does one simple thing, and I don't care about long term maintenance, because it just needs to keep doing that thing. (2) Adding a feature to an open source project. Again, it's a case of "I want this feature, but am not willing to spend the time needed to implement it." Even a relatively simple open source project can take a day or two just to get a basic understanding of the code and where I need to make the changes. Now I can often just get a functioning vibe-coded implementation within a few hours. (2) leaves me with some unsettling feelings about how this will affect the future of open source software. Some of the features I've implemented this way may very well be useful to other users, but I can't in good conscience just dump a vibe coded pull request on a project and except them to do the work of vetting it. But if I didn't have the energy to implement the change myself, I'm definitely not going to bother doing the work of going through all the LLM generated code, cleaning it up to the standards of the project, etc. Whereas before I didn't have a choice, and the idea of getting the change ready for a PR was much less daunting since I understood the problem space and solution well. So at least for myself, I can see a future where many of the apps I use are bespoke forks of popular applications. Extrapolate that to many, many people and an interesting landscape emerges.
rickdeaconx 8mo ago
The idea of getting information from other engineers relies on the idea that the other engineers aren't already complacent with AI.
aeternum 8mo ago
A lot of this is just wrong. AI can now see the output. It's interesting that highly flawed opinion pieces like this are so popular.
TheGRS 8mo ago
I know I read several posts like these every day, but I've been thinking more and more that I should stick to the chat window and having AI guide me instead of doing the work for me. Great tool for showing me what to do when I don't know and offering me guidance, and rubber ducking of course, but I definitely lose the context and understanding when I just let it rip and write everything for me.
- hirvi74 8mo ago
  > I've been thinking more and more that I should stick to the chat window and having AI guide me instead of doing the work for me. That's how I have been using AI for years. I feel like my productivity has skyrocketed over the past year or two, and all my code is still written by hand. It's like having StackOverflow on demand. I also never really have to worry about tokens or usage limits. I don't think I have ever hit the limit on the $20 Claude plan, and I use Claude every day.
itomato 8mo ago
What did you first order at the bar? Did it burn? Did you become a teetotaler? Latecomers lack the hundreds of iterations and the experience that comes with it. The senses haven't been trained. There's a business here. Not one I want to be in, or one without major ethical drag, but a viable one. Fend off extinction, get fit.
- babagan0ush 8mo ago
  [dead]
Nevermark 8mo ago
Some of us have been waiting our whole lives for a comprehensive DWIM command. > DWIM is an embodiment of the idea that the user is interacting with an agent who attempts to interpret the user's request from contextual information. Since we want the user to feel that he is conversing with the system, he should not be stopped and forced to correct himself or give additional information in situations where the correction or information is obvious. [0] — Teitelman and his Xerox PARC colleague Larry Masinter, Xerox PARC, in 1981 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM
- saltcured 8mo ago
  IMO, many such people, unfortunately, are prone to forget to state the addendum NWIS to express their true hope: Do What I Mean, Not What I Said. And this is kind of terrifying to me, in the context of an LLM that is working completely based on What You Said and any ability to Do What You Mean has to come from murky associations in the training data. It is more than kind of terrifying when this is then extended to scenarios requiring novel analysis and problem solving, rather than just performing a repetitive, idiomatic task for the N+1th time.
tjchear 8mo ago
Here’s my experience: just yesterday I had to tackle this task that’d have required a backend engineer and a frontend engineer several days, so I tasked several Claude code agents to work on them autonomously. With the time freed up, I didn’t just twiddle my thumbs. I used it to read up on this topic that was making the rounds yesterday and gained a better understanding of it - something hard to do when you juggle both a job and raising a family. I could then reinvest the time I used to learn something by using them in some other projects. Just my two cents. No matter whether you use AI or not, I’m sure you’ll gain something.
machinecontrol 8mo ago
How is there such a wide gap between developers? Either running ten agents pushing thousands of LOC a day or afraid to paste a code snippet from ChatGPT.
lowlander 8mo ago
Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." Doctor: "Then don't do that!" I'm finding that how you choose to use it makes all the difference in whether it's useful or not. I understand the reticence to jump on the hype train and it's taken some reps to find the parts of building with AI that I don't like and how to navigate it and keep it from making choices I wouldn't make or are low quality. > asking for a recommended tech stack this is up to you. you can just tell it what tech stack to use. better yet, bootstrap the project yourself and give it to AI as the starting point. nobody is saying AI has to make these choices for you and you're not allowed anymore. > I wasn’t happy with some of them because of my own experiences in the past... Even when deciding against something for a reason, Claude Code tried to push me back on the suggested track. this kind of sounds like many human teammates at work... you don't always like their suggestions or they aren't convinced by your arguments? the difference being with AI you can just tell it what to do, no persuasion required. nothing about AI prevents you from thinking about design choices, architecture, data modeling, or even the minutiae if you want to. the only thing telling AI to do those things for you is you!
PeterStuer 8mo ago
I am the opposite. I do not understand how people do not get at least 5x more productive with GenAI. Maybe it is because I do not do much front-end design. Maybe it is because I'm a bit more diligent than your average "viber", or maybe because for me it is easier to spot a suboptimal solution, or challange with edge cases from experience etc. But these people turning their backs, not in principle, because that I fully understand, but because of underperformance? Maybe their expectations are way out there? Maybe (most likely) it is the application domain? Maybe plainly a skill issue? But seeing how GenAI is plowing through through fields, I would not turn my back on it even if it wasn't there (yet) in my domain.
politelemon 8mo ago
> When you know CSS well (and I would consider myself as someone who does), you quickly find weird and broken things in the generated code. You have encountered https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect
thepra 8mo ago
That's true for new projects, I've found that as a bootstrap mechanism it is not ideal, takes away your hard earned preferences/know-how abs leaves you barely engaged on the technical path. On the other side I already have quite big codebases, some legacy and inherited, there exist vast amount of context to work on and figure out stuff/fixes/bugs/improvements and Claude Code excels 95% of the time in figuring the existing flows and functionality, if a vague or precise issue is known that's facing some files elaborations or user work flows it can do a good job in pointing out what are, with a high chance, the issues.
heathrow83829 8mo ago
You are lucky that you have the luxury of being able to work at a normal pace and not be pressured to go "even faster". My boss, is constantly saying "go faster, go faster". AI, is unfortunately the only way to keep up if you want to keep your job, this day and age.
jeremie_strand 8mo ago
[flagged]
ikidd 8mo ago
Good lord, don't hire a plumber to fix the pipes, you'd better do it yourself then. Maybe you like plumbing; then plumb. But most people will just pay for the person that does a good enough job that they can take a shower in the morning. Personally I think I do a better job so I do it myself, but my wife sure as hell wouldn't, and shouldn't. The sheer selective blindness is mind boggling. I get so sick of seeing this virtue signalling.
- sph 8mo ago
  > don't hire a plumber to fix the pipes, you'd better do it yourself then This but unironically. I'm self-taught; what I've seen from people with normal education is a complete inability if not fear of learning any skill on their own after they get their degree. Delegating is great, but learning something for yourself is better, and much easier than many seem to believe.
tim-tday 8mo ago
Best argument I’ve seen
piloto_ciego 8mo ago
There are always a lot of people afraid of change. People in my rough age bracket have lived in a time where change usually sucked for us, so we tend to look at this latest change and think, "oh my god, not again." It's fear of being worthless in a society where previously being "smart" (because they could write code) made them special. The truth is and it's a bummer, but none of us are special anymore. That's OK, get over it and go build cool things! Life is short.
jeremie_strand 8mo ago
[dead]
66yatman 7mo ago
Goodluck you didn’t take enough sip, you aren’t afraid of all Dario has said

121 points by speckx 8mo ago

[flagged]

Pretty insubstantial high level tour of broad AI pushback. Goes from "It was just not 'elegant.'" [sic] to "I don't want to give up my brain" [sic].

hilliardfarmer 8mo ago
Exactly, the article is silly, the perspective, idiotic. She says it's, "addictive" like driving a car is addictive compared to walking???

haolez 8mo ago

I don't have a stake on AI, but more and more I see the following patterns: - people that give in to AI do so because the technical merits suddenly became too big to ignore (even for seasoned developers that were previously against it) - people who avoid AI center their arguments on principles and personal discomfort Just from that, you can kind of see where this is going.

rustystump 8mo ago
Most arguments against it are built on some moral principle and not on objective reality of usefulness. Crypto used to be the thing to hate but that made sense as the objective usefulness of crypto was meek. AI models were always crazy useful but prohibitively expensive. Youd need an entire team to build your models. Now you dont.
tines 8mo ago
Yeah, things get more and more terrible over time. Your point?

mstank 8mo ago

While I applaud her and wish her well — writing like this reminds me of a couple of things. First my aging father insisting on navigating using his unfortunately fading memory instead of Google maps. Some people just won’t pick up technology out of habit or spite, even if it hinders them. Second, a quote I read here that I’ll paraphrase “you can be the best marathon runner in the world and still lose a race to a guy on a bike.” Know the race you’re racing. It often changes. I think it’s valid and commendable to keep the old ways alive, but also potentially dangerous to not realize they’re old ways.

wcarss 8mo ago
I don't think this diminishes your point, but, for a thing like memory, your father may be maintaining it by insisting on relying on it. It may diminish regardless, but its diminishment may slow down. At work, we are in a certain kind of race. In life, we are in a certain other kind. To paraphrase a recent Brandon Sanderson talk about creativity in an era where AI can outpace and possibly soon, out-quality a professional, "The work you do on _you_ can be _the art_."
- igor47 8mo ago
  Strongly agree! As someone who has been caring for a parent with dementia, it's definitely a use or lose it kind of situation. See also the studies on long term cognitive health in London cab drivers https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-research-taxi-drivers-hippocampus-dementia-link/ https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-resea...
tines 8mo ago
[dead]
drfloyd51 8mo ago
I had a significant other 20 years ago that would not use a GPS. This resulted in constant fights whenever she travelled. If she got off her route, I got a phone call. I lacked the skills to divine her exact location and what direction she needs to go based on vague descriptions of being on “some highway” for “some amount of time” and she is near mile marker “I don’t know.” After hanging up on me she would eventually stop somewhere or ask someone or figure something out or maybe never come home. Then one day, She was on the way to an OB appointment she almost plowed into a car in front of her while she was looking at her Mapquest pages. Risking our unborn child. Even after pointing out the danger she claimed the guy in front… He did no such thing, I saw everything from my position in the parking lot. I bought a GPS unit “for me” and put it into my car. I just used it. If we travelled in my car she still insisted on her printed maps. I ignored them. (This was very intense.) Then one day we took her car for a trip and I brought my GPS. And “forgot it” in her car. I claimed I would remove it “later”. About two weeks later she gave me the look and said not to laugh. Dead serious. She then said “the GPS is ok “ and can stay in her car. Hallelujah! The life expectancy of my wife and child just went up exponentially. This day, I have no idea what her hangup was. The best I could come up with was she was bad with directions. Was probably taught how to read a map. And her father probably instilled her sense of pride for the ability to read a map. And choosing to use a GPS was retroactively wasting her time learning how to use maps. And devaluing a skill she worked hard to learn. I don’t care. I just wanted my family to live.

legitster 8mo ago

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave? Do you buy food from a grocery store? Do you own power tools? The entire point of civilization and society is that we are all "addicted" to technology and progress. But the invention of the plow did not, in fact, make us lazier or stop using our brain. We just moved on to the next problems. Maybe the Amish are have it right and we should just be happy with a certain level of technology. But none of us have "lost" the ability to go backwards if we really wanted. You can finally ask a computer to think and solve problems, and it will! People act like this is a brave new world, but this is literally what computers were supposed to be doing for us 50 years ago! If somebody finally came out with a fusion reactor tomorrow I would half expect people to suddenly come out and say "Oh, I don't think I can support this. What about the soul of solar panels? I think cheap electricity is going to make things too easy."

tines 8mo ago
The problem is that you're likening fundamentally unlike things. AI isn't like a microwave or an automatic car or a power tool. It does not augment you. As I said elsewhere: AI is not a bicycle for the mind, it's an easy chair. You will lose more than you ever gain.
- sunir 8mo ago
  Dubious. Ai psychosis is the opposite. It’s about being empowered to explore ideas much further but with a maladaptive tool designed to be an appeaser by reinforcement learning.
- TechSquidTV 8mo ago
  Im hearing a lot of opinion, but nothing convincing.
  - 8mo ago

cowlby 8mo ago

Who else struggles with both sides of this? My engineer side values curiosity, brain power, and artistanship. My capitalist side says it's always the product not the process. My formula is something like this: product = money, process = happiness, money != happiness, no money = unhappiness. I think the optimal solution is min/maxing this thing. Find the AI process that minimizes unhappiness, and maximizes money.

deleted 8mo ago
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thewoodsman 8mo ago
I definitely struggle with both sides, or maybe multiple sides. On the one hand most of my daily output at my job is coming from AI these days. On the other hand I find the explosion of AI-generated "writing" (and other forms of art) to be aesthetically abhorrent. And I've just recently started a ... weird sort of metaphysics / spirituality / but also AI related writing project, so the difference between creation with and without AI is in really sharp focus for me right now. I wrote an article about this, but honestly I don't think I really captured the totality of my feelings. I really haven't decided where I land. I'm definitely using the tools for economic purposes, and I even have some "pure-fun" side project stuff where I'm getting value from it. Here's the article if that sounds interesting, would love to discuss the whole topic with anyone who's finding themselves of two (or more) minds on these sorts of issues: https://hermeticwoodsman.substack.com/p/why-i-let-ai-write-my-code-but-not https://hermeticwoodsman.substack.com/p/why-i-let-ai-write-m...
prewett 8mo ago
> My capitalist side says it's always the product not the process. Your capitalist side needs to read some Deming. "Your system is perfectly tuned to produce the results that you are getting." Obviously, then, if you want better results, you need to improve your system. Also "the product" is ambiguous. Is it the overall product, like how the product sits in the market, how the user interacts with it to achieve their goals, the manufacturability of the product, etc.? That is Steve Jobs sort of focus on the product, and it is really more of a system (how does the product relate to its user, environment, etc). However, AI doesn't produce that product, nor does any individual engineer. If "the product" means "the result of a task", you don't want to optimize that. That's how you get Microsoft and enterprise products. Nothing works well together, and using it is like cutting a steak with a spoon, but it has a truckload of features.

trinsic2 8mo ago

Yeah I think this article put a finger on what I was feeling after using Claude Code for the first time to convert an PDF to an Markdown document[0]. I think I will update my article on these thoughts. Thanks for touching on something I had been feeling. It also feel like I was cheating. I also used CC to update the version of my SSG and that was good because I did not want to spend my time dealing with that. But there are certain projects that I can see myself not feeling good about if I used the tool to help me with. [0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-my-first-llm-experiment/ https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-my-fir...

basket_horse 8mo ago

Why can’t people just acknowledge AI is good at some things and bad at others. Why does every post say AI is either groundbreaking or terrible. Get a grip people. It’s a tool.

api 8mo ago
Nuanced opinions don't get clicks and don't fit in tweets. Algorithms hate context. We've created a communications system bottlenecked by virality and short form text and video in which all nuance and context is stripped from everything. This, far far more than anything AI is doing, is what's making us dumber.
- rustystump 8mo ago
  Thank you. I always thought the “we are getting dumber” was happening way before AI. There is now like 3-4 social media giants where anything viral is reposted across them all so it is really like one global “feed” of information.
  - api 8mo ago
    Addictive social media has done infinitely more to zombify and destroy the attention spans of people than AI. AI is more of a double edged sword I think. Depends a lot on how people use it. I think it's actually more likely to have positive effects on cognition than social media and especially scrollers like TikTok. Don't get me started on gambling.
DerArzt 8mo ago
People can do that, but they can't always get that point across to the decision makers at work (after enough smoke, they seem to enjoy the warm breeze between their butt cheeks).

jr3592 8mo ago

I love posts like this. AI is easily the most disruptive thing to hit our industry in over a decade and it feels like one of those "this changes everything" moments. Reading how it's impacting others is cathartic and helps shape my own understanding. Here are some thoughts I have from reading this article: > The AI can’t “see” the output, so some responsive refinements were just not correct. Within one CSS rule block there were redundant declarations. This 1,000%. Vibe coding has its issue and for me personally, frontend polish, responsiveness, and overall quality is the #1 most glaring of them that simply re-prompting often can't solve. Even with the ability to screen shot your UI that hasn't solved things like glitchy animations. If you want to do anything even remotely above a junior level like scroll animations, page transitions, etc. good luck. AI will certainly try to do it for you, but inevitably it will not work perfectly and you will need to manually refine or even re-write code. When the code base isn't yours, that makes these re-writes a lot less fun. > The guilty conscience at the same time, like I was cheating. I realized that when I move on like this, my project will never truly feel like my own. I've wrestled with this over the last year, and still do to some extent. I'm trying to shift my perspective and envision myself as a brand new developer maybe 16 or 17 years of age. Would I think this isn't my work? I doubt it. I'd probably just (correctly) assume that this is the state of the art, this is how you do it. Unfortunately this doesn't fix a bigger problem... I just don't enjoy vibe coding as a craft. There's something special about sitting down in the morning with your coffee and taking on a difficult programming problem. You start writing some code, the solutions start to formalize in your mind, there's a strong back-and-forth effect where as you code, the concepts crystalize further... small wins fuel a wonderful dopamine hit experience... intellisense completions, compilation completions, page refreshes, etc. are now all replaced with dull moments often waiting for the agent to return its response, which you now read. > I’m curious (and a little bit scared) to see where we will go from here. I hope that in the end I can be part of a community that values craftsmanship, individuality and honest, high-quality work. I really hope so too... But speaking honestly, I think this ship is sailing away quite quickly. Time is money, and it always has been this way. Very few organizations can afford the luxury of time when building, designing, etc. I see no chance for this genie to go back in the bottle, and I believe it has (and will continue) to fundamentally change the nature of our work. Over time as these models improve, there's a chance it could dramatically reduce the overall need for developers... It will start with low level teams as we're seeing already, but could expand. I have been saying this to everyone -- what's your exit strategy? I'm not saying you need to panic, but you need a plan for what happens if / when salaries tank dramatically. I hate to be "that guy" but in life I've found expecting the worst, isn't always a bad thing. Keep your mood up, prepare for the worst possible outcome, and be pleasantly surprised if that's not what happens.

JPKab 8mo ago

"I'm not going to use this technology that obviously enhances my productivity because <insert emotional subjective reasoning that no customer would ever care about here>." I think a lot of people have forgotten why we actually get paid to write code. The person who wants an automated billing system doesn't care if you hand-typed it or not, or if the CSS that would have taken 2 hours to write took 8 seconds via an AI plus 60 seconds of you tweaking a border you didn't like. They just want their billing system. And if you are the person that takes 20x longer to build it, you're going to quickly get outcompeted. Sorry.

hilliardfarmer 8mo ago
[flagged]
- slater 8mo ago
  wtf?
tines 8mo ago
Give me Understanding or give me death.
deadbabe 8mo ago
Customer doesn’t give a fuck how long a billing system took to make, they only care that it works correctly. A billing system only truly gets built once, then possibly maintained in perpetuity. This makes the advantage of building it 20x times faster pointless. AI builds it in a day, will it matter 5 years from now if that billing system was instead built by hand in 20 days a long time ago? No. The speed advantage of AI only comes into play when you have a lot of code to crank out continuously. Do you have a need to constantly build bespoke billing systems at a rate of 1 per day? Probably not. So who cares. Take your little AI grift charging $1000/month somewhere else. It’s not needed.
- bluGill 8mo ago
  Every billing system in use is constantly maintained with new features, bug fixes ane the like. The system of 20 years ago would apply the wrong tax laws today. the people asking for the new feature today care about how easy those are to add

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

rspoerri 8mo ago

Human thinks eating food from fire is bad because it looks charred and you might burn your fingers doing so. /s I remember the time when people insisted that they would never use a mobile phone. I remember the time when people didnt understand my presentation about the magical "internet" (8th grade school in 94).

ognav 8mo ago

[flagged]

yomismoaqui 8mo ago

I would pay money to read rants on a forum like Hackernews but in 190X when cars started sharing the roads with horse carriages. I bet it would look something like the posts we are seeing today with developers and agentic AI.

sunir 8mo ago
It’s called a library. It’s free. Plus you get to say microfiche which is fun. :)
autoexec 8mo ago
I'd bet that a lot of those posters would have accurately predicted and called out many of the very real harms that cars have caused our society and shown that many many mistakes we've made could have been avoided.
hilliardfarmer 8mo ago
You don't have to go back that far! Even now just listen to how they talk about cryptocurrency. Most people on this website hate anything they don't understand.

andai 8mo ago

Reposting a comment (and one of the replies) since it's relevant: --- It occurred to me on my walk today that a program is not the only output of programming. The other, arguably far more important output, is the programmer. The mental model that you, the programmer, build by writing the program. And -- here's the million dollar question -- can we get away with removing our hands from the equation? You may know that knowledge lives deeper than "thought-level" -- much of it lives in muscle memory. You can't glance at a paragraph of a textbook, say "yeah that makes sense" and expect to do well on the exam. You need to be able to produce it. (Many of you will remember the experience of having forgotten a phone number, i.e. not being able to speak or write it, but finding that you are able to punch it into the dialpad, because the muscle memory was still there!) The recent trend is to increase the output called programs, but decrease the output called programmers. That doesn't exactly bode well. See also: Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko --- Munksgaard 1 day ago: Peter Naur had that realization back in 1985: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

andai 8mo ago
Update: I fleshed this out into an article: The Deliverable is You! Programming as Theory Building https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/the-deliverable-is-you-programming https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/the-deliverable-is-you-pr... The open question is to what degree the actual typing is necessary. I see it as proof that the mental model is sound. The thinking produces the mental model, the mental model produces the program. In the absence of that final step, what validates the model? (Complaints from users and colleagues? ;) Another great thread to pull on: the overlap between "moving up levels of abstraction", i.e. AI assisted programming merely continues and accelerates a trend that has been there for the entire history of programming.
anon-3988 8mo ago
I haven't thought about it this way but I have been feeling that something is off. I think you got it right. There is a HUGE difference between "I understand the concept" and "I can write down the concept on paper". Everyone fools themselves into thinking that they understand but the illusion immediately falls apart when they try to write it down. The problem with LLM is that it is actually able to produce something that "works". But more often that not, what it produces is usually beyond what the author actually understand. Arguably, one could ask "Why does it matter?" If there are enough tests and monitoring to capture the behavior of the program, who cares how it is implemented? To me this is extremely disappointing. I have always wanted to write software that lasts for a century but if software becomes a commodity, I see software quality mattering less and less. If something is broken, just ask the LLM to patch it. Unlike a human, there is no limit to this. The LLM will happily fix that 50 years old Fortran code that no one understand. There is a lot less pressure to rethink at the fundamental principles.

TaupeRanger 8mo ago

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” Getting a feeling of "wanting to keep going" with something does not automatically make it an "addiction". > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. A tale as old as time, and a valid feeling, though not particularly helpful to dwell on since the technology will never go away and never get worse than it is right now. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. Your brain will think about other important things and you don't need to become "lazy" just because a machine is doing something that used to require more effort on your part. > I enjoy technical discussions with (human) co-workers. So what? You can still have those discussion. > I enjoy reading blog posts and tutorials and learning from other developers. So what? You can still read those blogs, but the subjects might shift away from coding minutiae to other topics. > I want to learn and grow and become better at what I am doing by trial and error and mistakes I make all by myself. Going forward, that trial and error process will start to happen more at the product/project level rather than the source code level. > I don’t want to be part of a trend/hype destroying our planet even faster than we already do without it. It isn't. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

matheusmoreira 8mo ago
> So what? You can still have those discussion. Doubt. When the money dries up, there won't be many people who will care enough to learn and discuss computer science or whatever else. The AI already knows all of it and people will absolutely be satisfied by that.

allenrb 8mo ago

For what it’s worth (ie, absolutely nothing), I agree with her 100%. I didn’t get into this field in order to prompt an AI to take care of the details. I got into it because I love the details. I’m a strong performer on a good team at a company many people would want to work at… and I know the clock is ticking. Sooner or later, I will be too slow. I’m not going to claim that this is the wrong way to go. It’s obviously the future, and the future doesn’t care what allenrb does or does not want. I’m somewhat hopeful that power and cooling requirements will come down by multiple factors of 10x over time, reducing the environmental damage. The fact is, I love what I’ve been able to do “the old way” and just don’t feel the urge to move on. So it goes.

ryandvm 8mo ago
48 years old and I am 100% feeling this. Yes, I am much more productive having Claude Code bang out boilerplate back-end code, but honestly I always kind of enjoyed doing it. Now I'm just a micro-manager for an AI. And honestly, how long will that last? Given that LLMs came out of nowhere to radically redefine my role from software engineer to prompt writer in just a couple years, I have every reason to believe that they're coming for my role as prompt engineer next. (As my CEO surely hopes.) I'm just glad the timing of the great AI replacement began right when I was nearing burnout anyway.
dd8601fn 8mo ago
Someone the other day was talking about there being two kinds of builders. One likes the details of doing, where the other likes the things they produce. The idea was that one likes AI and the other naturally hates it. I thought about that for a bit and decided that, like most things, if you’re any good at something the “hard way” you probably have some of both. Or at least I’m sure it’s true for me. I LOVE that I can produce the things I want to create without spending months crafting lines of text. The “I know how to architect this, I know what a decent data model looks like, I have a good idea of where someone is likely to introduce security or scaling problems. I can pilot this plane and produce something GOOD.” But, I really also HATE looking at the final product and forever measuring, in my head, how much of it is even mine. Which parts I haven’t thoroughly reviewed, or would have spent a week learning and didn’t, or maybe wouldn’t have accomplished correctly at all? Am I a fraud, now? I wasn’t before… It’s a really painful trade for me.

par 8mo ago

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C Clarke

api 8mo ago

I'm a little tired of the environmental argument against AI. It feels contrived, like people are fishing for a "problemism" to use to oppose it to avoid harder discussions. Let's compare AI to one typical 20 mile round trip commute. I asked Gemini and Claude and compared to see if the results looked good, but feel free to check. One ~20 mile round trip commute: about 5700 Wh in an EV, about 27000 Wh in a gas car (due to thermal efficiency). Comparing to the EV that's about 1,400 ChatGPT queries, 2,800 AI code completions, and 380 AI image generations. Ordering lunch on Doordash uses the same power as days and days worth of very heavy AI usage, and that's if the dasher is driving a very efficient car. If they're driving an inefficient gas car it's like weeks of heavy AI usage. Ultimately what matters is where we get our power. If we are getting it from CO2 emitting sources, what we do with it after that is not relevant. Make AI memes? Order burritos? Boil spaghetti? Who cares. The solution is to replace CO2 emitting sources with cleaner sources. I also think people are avoiding the big fat elephant: wealth inequality. The whole problem with AI that bothers people is loss of jobs and possible wage suppression. The problem isn't AI, it's inequality and the fact that our system is basically regressive at this point with wealth being actively transferred upward. But that's a hard complicated discussion and involves confronting powerful forces. It's easier to make stuff up about AI being some uniquely bad energy or water waste when it's not. This is really what "problemism" is all about: using a contrived or exaggerated or mis-attributed problem to avoid a hard or complicated conversation.

rustystump 8mo ago
I think it was a carry over from crypto days. Crypto terrible for energy etc etc. AI is also compute heavy so same deal. Regardless of real world use environment arguments are hard to sell because everything in modern life is terrible across the board. I am pretty sure that the beef industry is far worse than data centers. Dont get me started on plastics. Stronger arguments can be made “against” ai then energy use.
- api 8mo ago
  Everything in modern life is terrible compared to how it could be. There is quite a lot of room for improvement. But compared to living in extreme poverty in parts of the developing world today or the life of a peasant in the Middle Ages? It’s much better for the vast majority of people. It would have to get a lot worse to be as bad as subsistence farming or filthy slum life. I think the most frustrating thing though is that many of our problems are self inflicted. The subsistence farmer and the slum dweller are victims of circumstance or societal forces far outside their control.

slumpt_ 8mo ago

to be clear, the work you’re doing is only relevant to the extent it produces product nobody cares if you use your brain or not. they do care if you’re efficiently delivering reliable product

tines 8mo ago
I care if I'm using my brain or not. I don't care that nobody else cares.

firmretention 8mo ago

I've found two personal use cases for LLM generated code: (1) I have an idea for some app, but either I feel it won't be useful enough/save me enough time to justify developing it, or I simply don't feel the problem is interesting enough to be motivated by it. In that case, a vibe coded tool is perfect. It generally does one simple thing, and I don't care about long term maintenance, because it just needs to keep doing that thing. (2) Adding a feature to an open source project. Again, it's a case of "I want this feature, but am not willing to spend the time needed to implement it." Even a relatively simple open source project can take a day or two just to get a basic understanding of the code and where I need to make the changes. Now I can often just get a functioning vibe-coded implementation within a few hours. (2) leaves me with some unsettling feelings about how this will affect the future of open source software. Some of the features I've implemented this way may very well be useful to other users, but I can't in good conscience just dump a vibe coded pull request on a project and except them to do the work of vetting it. But if I didn't have the energy to implement the change myself, I'm definitely not going to bother doing the work of going through all the LLM generated code, cleaning it up to the standards of the project, etc. Whereas before I didn't have a choice, and the idea of getting the change ready for a PR was much less daunting since I understood the problem space and solution well. So at least for myself, I can see a future where many of the apps I use are bespoke forks of popular applications. Extrapolate that to many, many people and an interesting landscape emerges.

rickdeaconx 8mo ago

The idea of getting information from other engineers relies on the idea that the other engineers aren't already complacent with AI.

aeternum 8mo ago

A lot of this is just wrong. AI can now see the output. It's interesting that highly flawed opinion pieces like this are so popular.

TheGRS 8mo ago

I know I read several posts like these every day, but I've been thinking more and more that I should stick to the chat window and having AI guide me instead of doing the work for me. Great tool for showing me what to do when I don't know and offering me guidance, and rubber ducking of course, but I definitely lose the context and understanding when I just let it rip and write everything for me.

hirvi74 8mo ago
> I've been thinking more and more that I should stick to the chat window and having AI guide me instead of doing the work for me. That's how I have been using AI for years. I feel like my productivity has skyrocketed over the past year or two, and all my code is still written by hand. It's like having StackOverflow on demand. I also never really have to worry about tokens or usage limits. I don't think I have ever hit the limit on the $20 Claude plan, and I use Claude every day.

itomato 8mo ago

What did you first order at the bar? Did it burn? Did you become a teetotaler? Latecomers lack the hundreds of iterations and the experience that comes with it. The senses haven't been trained. There's a business here. Not one I want to be in, or one without major ethical drag, but a viable one. Fend off extinction, get fit.

babagan0ush 8mo ago
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Nevermark 8mo ago

Some of us have been waiting our whole lives for a comprehensive DWIM command. > DWIM is an embodiment of the idea that the user is interacting with an agent who attempts to interpret the user's request from contextual information. Since we want the user to feel that he is conversing with the system, he should not be stopped and forced to correct himself or give additional information in situations where the correction or information is obvious. [0] — Teitelman and his Xerox PARC colleague Larry Masinter, Xerox PARC, in 1981 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM

saltcured 8mo ago
IMO, many such people, unfortunately, are prone to forget to state the addendum NWIS to express their true hope: Do What I Mean, Not What I Said. And this is kind of terrifying to me, in the context of an LLM that is working completely based on What You Said and any ability to Do What You Mean has to come from murky associations in the training data. It is more than kind of terrifying when this is then extended to scenarios requiring novel analysis and problem solving, rather than just performing a repetitive, idiomatic task for the N+1th time.

tjchear 8mo ago

Here’s my experience: just yesterday I had to tackle this task that’d have required a backend engineer and a frontend engineer several days, so I tasked several Claude code agents to work on them autonomously. With the time freed up, I didn’t just twiddle my thumbs. I used it to read up on this topic that was making the rounds yesterday and gained a better understanding of it - something hard to do when you juggle both a job and raising a family. I could then reinvest the time I used to learn something by using them in some other projects. Just my two cents. No matter whether you use AI or not, I’m sure you’ll gain something.

machinecontrol 8mo ago

How is there such a wide gap between developers? Either running ten agents pushing thousands of LOC a day or afraid to paste a code snippet from ChatGPT.

lowlander 8mo ago

Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." Doctor: "Then don't do that!" I'm finding that how you choose to use it makes all the difference in whether it's useful or not. I understand the reticence to jump on the hype train and it's taken some reps to find the parts of building with AI that I don't like and how to navigate it and keep it from making choices I wouldn't make or are low quality. > asking for a recommended tech stack this is up to you. you can just tell it what tech stack to use. better yet, bootstrap the project yourself and give it to AI as the starting point. nobody is saying AI has to make these choices for you and you're not allowed anymore. > I wasn’t happy with some of them because of my own experiences in the past... Even when deciding against something for a reason, Claude Code tried to push me back on the suggested track. this kind of sounds like many human teammates at work... you don't always like their suggestions or they aren't convinced by your arguments? the difference being with AI you can just tell it what to do, no persuasion required. nothing about AI prevents you from thinking about design choices, architecture, data modeling, or even the minutiae if you want to. the only thing telling AI to do those things for you is you!

PeterStuer 8mo ago

I am the opposite. I do not understand how people do not get at least 5x more productive with GenAI. Maybe it is because I do not do much front-end design. Maybe it is because I'm a bit more diligent than your average "viber", or maybe because for me it is easier to spot a suboptimal solution, or challange with edge cases from experience etc. But these people turning their backs, not in principle, because that I fully understand, but because of underperformance? Maybe their expectations are way out there? Maybe (most likely) it is the application domain? Maybe plainly a skill issue? But seeing how GenAI is plowing through through fields, I would not turn my back on it even if it wasn't there (yet) in my domain.

politelemon 8mo ago

> When you know CSS well (and I would consider myself as someone who does), you quickly find weird and broken things in the generated code. You have encountered https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

thepra 8mo ago

That's true for new projects, I've found that as a bootstrap mechanism it is not ideal, takes away your hard earned preferences/know-how abs leaves you barely engaged on the technical path. On the other side I already have quite big codebases, some legacy and inherited, there exist vast amount of context to work on and figure out stuff/fixes/bugs/improvements and Claude Code excels 95% of the time in figuring the existing flows and functionality, if a vague or precise issue is known that's facing some files elaborations or user work flows it can do a good job in pointing out what are, with a high chance, the issues.

heathrow83829 8mo ago

You are lucky that you have the luxury of being able to work at a normal pace and not be pressured to go "even faster". My boss, is constantly saying "go faster, go faster". AI, is unfortunately the only way to keep up if you want to keep your job, this day and age.

jeremie_strand 8mo ago

[flagged]

ikidd 8mo ago

Good lord, don't hire a plumber to fix the pipes, you'd better do it yourself then. Maybe you like plumbing; then plumb. But most people will just pay for the person that does a good enough job that they can take a shower in the morning. Personally I think I do a better job so I do it myself, but my wife sure as hell wouldn't, and shouldn't. The sheer selective blindness is mind boggling. I get so sick of seeing this virtue signalling.

sph 8mo ago
> don't hire a plumber to fix the pipes, you'd better do it yourself then This but unironically. I'm self-taught; what I've seen from people with normal education is a complete inability if not fear of learning any skill on their own after they get their degree. Delegating is great, but learning something for yourself is better, and much easier than many seem to believe.

tim-tday 8mo ago

Best argument I’ve seen

piloto_ciego 8mo ago

There are always a lot of people afraid of change. People in my rough age bracket have lived in a time where change usually sucked for us, so we tend to look at this latest change and think, "oh my god, not again." It's fear of being worthless in a society where previously being "smart" (because they could write code) made them special. The truth is and it's a bummer, but none of us are special anymore. That's OK, get over it and go build cool things! Life is short.

jeremie_strand 8mo ago

[dead]

66yatman 7mo ago

Goodluck you didn’t take enough sip, you aren’t afraid of all Dario has said