5 ms·

After AI takes everything

102 points by speckx 5mo ago

Mistletoe 5mo ago
> Every machine is waiting for the next machine. I like that. We are all machines.
- grantpitt 5mo ago
  You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.
deleted 5mo ago
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pydry 5mo ago
I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential crisis is at its core, acknowledgement of of a skill issue.
- citrin_ru 5mo ago
  Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.
  - drudolph914 5mo ago
    Yeah, I keep coming back to a point that the way people talk about AI is still entirely disconnected from what it can actually do. I think of the bell curve meme a lot when I see people talking about AI. the people most bullish to perpetuate that it's going to take over are people that have vested interested, or people that are fall on the bottom half of the bell curve. I mean ... come on, by design an AI is literally a statistical averaging of all the data it's seen. AI is extremely average at nearly everything it does. If you find yourself using AI and it's doing something amazing, that speaks more to your knowledge/ability about a subject more than it speaks about AIs ability I mean, I guess if all you do is work on implementing CRUD endpoints ... sure I guess you're cooked. but we had tech to automate this already, this isn't anything new. But oh man, if you're doing real engineering, the tools are barely usable. I hate when people don't give examples, so I am going to throw one here. just the other day, I asked the newest and most expensive claude model to write an LRU and to have a running tally of the capacity of bytes in the cache as the threshold to evict something from the cache. It wrongly implemented the threshold checks and just tracked how many elements were in the cache. this might sound small, but scale that mistake up to a real production system. this is literally unusable. and the expectation to sit there, have it generate 1000s of lines of code for you, and then spot check that small but huge error is not worth it. you have to move so slow to spot check everything - to the point that it's literally faster to type it. This is a model that costs $100s to run per hour and is advertised as "PHD level intelligence" making High school AP computer science to freshman computer science errors - like come on. If you're reading this, are an expert in your field, and are actually worried about your job - you got be able to have some mental fortitude and not fall for this ...
    - hurtigioll 5mo ago
      after the implementation was done, have you asked the model again, in a fresh context window, to review the code against the specification?
      - drudolph914 5mo ago
        so much to unpack here and almost poetic that you say this first is that the model will write out that it “thought” and “double checked” it’s output Second, this was in a fresh context window of the latest model (that isn’t fable b/c we can’t use for reasons beyond this thread), and it was on it’s second highest thinking mode. I shouldn’t have to double check something that it claimed to have burned more tokens on to double check Outside of it costing me more money to fix what it claims to do, the main point of this article is that models are implementing things nearly end to end, and if we scale it up, it will only continue to do that. I Intentionally chose the example of something that is < 70 lines to implement in TS (btw, the language with the second most amount of data available to scrape and train on) I would assume a machine that can almost implement things end to end should be able to implement something of 70 lines of code and has been documented for nearly 50 years. My point is that time and time again on the most trivial examples, under the best of conditions, and with unlimited amounts of money, they can’t do what it claims Outside of that, this follow up comment(s) that say, “oh you need to ask it to check its own work and be so involved in the process of it writing the code that you need to spot check it” goes against everything the article states The best analogy I have for this is New speak in 1984, it’s just vibes dictating vibes and trying to make people claim that the vibes are right. and if you try to validate the vibes, your vibes are just wrong because you don’t get the vibes. The claims that it made have no data backing it. And if there is data, it’s cherry picked. Please use your brain and stop outsourcing your ability to think to a machine that is incorrectly thinking on your behalf Edit: Typos
        hurtigioll 5mo ago
        I guess the code you write always works correctly whem you submit the PR, and code reviews don't find real problems in it. it makes sense then to have the exact same bar when using LLMs
  - sandoze 5mo ago
    Where you see quality crisis I see job security! Honest question, when it comes to enshittification of software quality.. have you ever had to use a Meta framework? How many times have they rewritten their mobile apps to use some architect's bespoke code pipe dream? The quality crisis has always been here, now there's just more of it.
- graypegg 5mo ago
  I’ve tried to explain this to folks as “having taste”, but I’m always worried it comes off as subjective and snobby. It might be a fair assessment honestly, it’s hard for me to describe so I wouldn’t hold anyone to it as a standard. Give me an honest vibe check on that. Theres a lot of codebases out there that are at odds with my own opinions about syntax/structure/purpose, but there’s evidence of “taste” that I absolutely respect. I can look at a couple modules, and have a good idea what the other modules are going to be like, because the mental model of the author is clear from the code itself. Even teams with multiple authors with taste average out to one taste-profile and in a similar way, I’ve seen LLM output shaped by someone with taste and had the same feeling: “yeah I see the direction you’re going in”. Someone without taste using an LLM writes slop. I can’t tell what you’re doing. Any question about what you’re doing results in “sorry that was Claude”. Entirely pointless that you’re even involved. It’s a property of the author IMO. They were kind of owed an existential crisis as cruel as that is to say.
  - SoftTalker 5mo ago
    Was recognized long before AI came on the scene. The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. Steve Jobs
    - graypegg 5mo ago
      HAH! Ok fair, maybe parts of that quote are rattling around somewhere in my mind.
  - dijksterhuis 5mo ago
    giving a shit == having taste. giving a shit != perfect. i recently had a PR which had a comment explaining a change of an import: "// Changed imports to add Foo as it's needed for updated bar()". apparently the person behind "it" has been a developer for 10 years. couldn't be bothered to remove completely useless "how" comments from a 25 line change (without all the useless comments). also, i posted on another AI slop thread about taste: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515463
- rybosworld 5mo ago
  I think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough". One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one). With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore. Said another way: AI generated code doesn't chase perfection. It just chases good enough.
  - pydry 5mo ago
    So you have high slop tolerance. This is fine, it just means that there's very little point if you're an IC.
    - rybosworld 5mo ago
      Everyone processes the transition to the post-AI development world differently and on their own timeline. You just seem to be a late bloomer.
  - edukite 5mo ago
    But it's not good enough. We can see this all over industry where even M$ is producing software so bad even calculator is electron app. Slow, poor quality and for any engineer below acceptable
    - pixl97 5mo ago
      Producing things that aren't good enough has never stopped companies from becoming multibillion dollar entities. I've been waiting for 40 years for good software to take over the market... and I'm still waiting.
      - edukite 5mo ago
        I don't know any company with below good enough soft which became multibillion-dollar entity. Contrary M$ has started to have issues after recent "improvements"
- hacker_homie 5mo ago
  It was never about the code, all that really matters is does it work. In that light I’m not happy about it, but the code always was just a means to an end.
- variadix 5mo ago
  People have built entire careers shipping garbage, now they can ship 10x more garbage and to them that’s progress.
- marcosdumay 5mo ago
  > I give it 9-12 months That's a wildly optimistic take. Most of them will never realize it by themselves, and will put the blame of people reacting badly to their work on the people complaining, not themselves.
no_multitudes 5mo ago
Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.
- pocksuppet 5mo ago
  My boss pays me for the lines of code, right?
- jolt42 5mo ago
  "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal
  - grey-area 5mo ago
    Unfortunately with word generators this has become - I would have written a letter, but I couldn’t be bothered.
  - r1zzzzA 5mo ago
    third time i see this cliche quote in two days
    - recursive 5mo ago
      And yet people(?) keep publishing stuff that's too long.
    - FergusArgyll 5mo ago
      The quoting will continue until writing improves
    - AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
      The thing is that writing - especially writing well - is fairly hard, and does take time and mental effort. So lazy authors (or wannabe authors) take the shortcut. But the fact remains that most of us do not want to read AI-generated slop, and human-written slop is not much better. So there is a point to the quote, no matter how many times you've read it. But there is a countering point as well: If you don't have time, don't write. Don't use that as an excuse to get lazy and shove slop at us.
deleted 5mo ago
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functionmouse 5mo ago
> My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest. lol Two More Weeks(TM)
- GolfPopper 5mo ago
  I've noticed that "18 months" is a very popular prediction target, across a wide variety of prognosticators. Close enough to seem urgent, and if what they predict comes to pass anytime in the next few years, they can claim "See, I was right, just a little off on the timing because <excuse>". If it doesn't happen, most everyone will have forgotten their prediction. And in the unlikely event they get called out, they have over a year of random events to find a plausible fall guy for their failure.
- stemlord 5mo ago
  That really pissed me off. Why do people continute to pretend they can predict the future
  - recursive 5mo ago
    It's a valuable skill.
  - bregma 5mo ago
    Get used to it: I think we're going to be pretending to predict the future for many years to come.
    - paulhebert 5mo ago
      I think we’ll stop predicting the future soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest.
      - functionmouse 5mo ago
        i think ur rite
    - 5mo ago
biotechbio 5mo ago
This post is a little long winded. At times I agreed, and others I felt the author was doing a little too much hand-wringing on what-is-mine vs. what-is-the-AI's. The opportunity is and always has been the possibility of accelerating work. Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation. We value these things because they have become correlated with quality. We now have the opportunity to decouple these things; maybe something that took no effort will be just as good as a painstaking human labor. The risk is if this doesn't come true. If we let our skills degrade and get ahead of our skis, embracing "slop" that superficially appears to "work", we will eventually pay the price. Financially and culturally, it seems like we are already all-in on the bet that it will work. I hope it does, I just want to solve the problems I am working on.
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  > Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation. That's where I'm at too. Saves you weeks of effort to boot.
  - visarga 5mo ago
    But once you put something out, an app, repo, content, music or photo - it can be easily cloned with AI, changed to be different just enough to avoid accusations and customized as needed. The price of replication is dropping fast, and that means any perceived arbitration point will be competed away. I predict AI will be immensely valuable like Linux, but "nobody" (excluding shovel makers, for a while) will get rich off AI, because whatever it can clone is not a moat anymore.
    - giancarlostoro 5mo ago
      Current AI still needs people who know and understand the tech and code, they made Mythos sound like it would be the model to do away with that, but I got no inclination that it was. I tire of the hype just for something that Opus can do if it works a little longer.
visarga 5mo ago
I have my own take on what is ours and can never be taken away by AI. When a task is initiated, it starts from a need, from a specific context. To work it out the AI needs to continuously interact with the context, and get feedback from it. At the end gains, losses, risks and costs sink back in the context. The context is you, the person who prompts, your team or company. It is indexical and relational. It is maximally distributed. It cannot be hoarded. You can't eat so that I feel satiated. AI is called to do the work, but it can't handle 3 things - start, middle and end of a task.
- swader999 5mo ago
  I agree with all that but the problem is what others will pay for. There might be niche artisans that survive but most of it might go the way of wallmart.
  - visarga 5mo ago
    Yes, AI gives me superpowers but my competitors get it too. True, we are in a race to re-differentiate now. Companies too, imitation of anything we put out is approaching a very low cost.
- silksowed 5mo ago
  Well said. Deciding what to build is derived by experience in the context of your problem space, and that is human centric. Makes me encouraged that as AI tooling increases in adoption, more people will build things to solve their problems. Instead of large corporations hoarding talent and then building things for people, I could see more small business success where they sit closer to the very things that need solving.
paul7986 5mo ago
Overall, AI is irrelevant without us and it needs to pay us to keep it relevant (all the content we create naturally everyday) I think! It can not continue to be a bloodsucker!
agentultra 5mo ago
Again, they didn’t smash the machines because they hated the technology or wanted everyone to be making lace by hand. They were arguing for basic human rights in the workplace. Things like child labour were still super common and were among the practices the Luddites wanted to abolish. Along with the workhouses they wanted to replace with protection for workers (they didn’t have the word for it but they wanted a social security system). They smashed the machines for leverage. There was little labour law at the time. Most of it was written by the capital holders with the help of the constabulary. Things like showing up to work on time or no pay, etc. Violence, controlled violence, was the tool they used to try and get the capital holders to the table and negotiate. It failed, as we know, and it was a bloody failure. People were executed and jailed. The movement became a pejorative for someone who is backwards and against technology and progress.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  I think the vibe is generally same with AI too. If people believe AI will genuinely be used for good (like many in China seem to think, I get the feeling) then the public at large seems fine with industry focusing on it. But when people have the feeling or even expectation that it'll be used for things like increasing the wealth/wage/inequality gap, control of the masses, automated widespread surveillance and more, you get the violent attacks on data centers and such. Maybe if these people who are basically wealthier than some countries would share their loot or just care a tiny bit about 99% of the rest of the world, people would feel differently about things. Use AI and your data centers to figure out how to quench, feed and power the entire world, and probably a bunch of people who hate AI would even get onboard.
  - CuriouslyC 5mo ago
    People in China think AI will be used for good because China has a track record of protecting workers from the fallout of automation (see courts ruling people can't be wholesale replaced with AI), and they view the ridiculous surveillance less negatively because the party delivers low crime and rapidly improving economic circumstances.
ks2048 5mo ago
paraphrase> what's left for us? ... taste. If human "taste" changes our cursor for no reason, maybe we should just go with the AI's "taste"? Sorry for the snark - nothing wrong with the essay - I just prefer a plain, unobtrusive style.
kmoser 5mo ago
> Go where it’s new. Build things no one has built yet — things that other people’s workflows can come to depend on. One important rule here: don’t build what can be obtained by burning tokens. Any engineering product that someone has already built and that you can simply have AI clone — one more review bot, one more workflow tool — is not worth your energy, because its acquisition cost has already approached zero. What’s worth building is paradigm-level work: things that, once they exist, change how other people work. But once you build something new, that people depend on, they will shortly want to move away from that dependency, lest you raise prices or disappear. Even paradigm-level work ends up as tools that can be replicated by other humans, at the cost of a few tokens. That's a difficult dragon to catch and ride successfully. I think the author had it right when they talked about going deeper into the stack, where we are still loath to deploy AI. The only way to stay ahead of the beast is to do things the beast can't do reliably.
r1zzzzA 5mo ago
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r1zzzzA 5mo ago
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munchler 5mo ago
> Once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us? This is a good question, but is perhaps too abstract to address well. I think a better question for right now is: Once AI generates all the wealth it can generate, who benefits from that wealth? If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting. If the answer is some number of AI agents, but no humans at all, that is probably also a dystopia worth resisting. I think the only good outcome is one in which humanity benefits on the whole. If that means that we have to become a post-capitalist society in order to share in the wealth, so be it.
- willchis 5mo ago
  > If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting. Have you looked around at the current state of wealth inequality?! The internet (without AI) already did that.
- Windchaser 5mo ago
  There was a really neat article here a while back comparing AI to previous tech/industry revolutions. The article compared market conditions to argue that the current revolution is similar to the shipping container revolution of the '60s-'80s -- with a lot of market interest and no real moat or market leader, high competition drove prices down, kept margins low, and most of the benefits went to the consumer. This seems like the best case scenario here. AI ends up expensive to train but cheap to copy and run, so we end up with lots of competitors or even just running it in-house. It's cheap to use, so there'll be lots of businesses trying similar AI-driven ideas and pushing prices of their products down for the consumer.
bananamogul 5mo ago
These types of posts are tediously regular. Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” in 2024 [1]. Fraudster Matt Schumer’s “Something Big is Happening” in February [2]. Next viral doom post in September-ish? [1] https://situational-awareness.ai/ https://situational-awareness.ai/ [2] https://lowendbox.com/blog/ai-fraudster-matt-shumer-wrote-something-big-is-happening-and-he-should-be-ashamed/ https://lowendbox.com/blog/ai-fraudster-matt-shumer-wrote-so...
paulorlando 5mo ago
I really liked this quote: “If in the future we write less code and only review, these abilities are hard to train — what do we do?” That's a different question than the included Luddite example, which I take as "what do we do to prevent change?". Related, I've been maintaining a list of anti-tech Luddite movements here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRWXNXRq4ZOAAwDgQ08CIN3pec/edit?gid=749408265#gid=749408265 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...
- Windchaser 5mo ago
  I think the better Luddite position is "what can we do to protect humans?" Which can be channeled into making the change healthy. I heard a statistic that the average QOL and life expectancy didn't increase for most of the Industrial Revolution, once you account for the increase in pollution and disease (disease partly coming from greater urbanization). Yes, our lives are much richer now than they would've been 200 years ago, but it was pretty rough there for a while. I'd like to think we can do better this time. Though, realistically, I'm not sure. Gilded Age 2.0, coming up
themafia 5mo ago
> My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest. Which is based on what? > AI can process the entire world It can process what is in it's training set. Which is a monumental gap to step over. Failing to understand this leads to all kinds of silly predictions and mindless prognostication. I'd like to see an AI article based on data and not paragraphs of internal monologue spewed out onto the internet.
romaniv 5mo ago
This "how to adapt" prop-slop is getting tiresome. So much of it is obviously intended to project and demoralize rather than provoke thought or give legitimate advice. The trick of this kind of writing is to skip arguing that something rather questionable will happen and go straight to giving advice about how everyone should adapt to the new, totally inevitable reality. This isn't even a particularly sophisticated method of manipulation.
rayiner 5mo ago
AI can’t take away babies, picnics with your spouse, or dipping your toes into the ocean. If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway.
- yacin 5mo ago
  how will you afford that baby, or picnic, or trip to the ocean?
  - rayiner 5mo ago
    Easily. People in my dad’s village in Bangladesh have those things.
    - hollerith 5mo ago
      OK, but by hypothesis the AIs are in control. Now suppose they want to switch to a more efficient kind of data center that would corrode quickly in the presence of oxygen, so they remove all the oxygen from the atmosphere. Or they disassemble the rocky planets to make a Dyson sphere.
    - HDBaseT 5mo ago
      They also don't have clean drinking water or food that wasn't prepared on the ground. They don't have modern medicines or 'modern' entertainment like cinemas. It is not comparable.
- willchis 5mo ago
  But what about putting food on the table for your babies and spouse?
- lelanthran 5mo ago
  > If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway. If that were true, you would have done it (given up working) by now. You haven't, hence it's not true.
torginus 5mo ago
Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes - in fact I'd be very happy if AI could just fix software - basically heaps upon heaps of software is just built wrong fundamentally (operating systems, just to give one huge example), and AI productivity could give us a chance to try again and build things the right way.
- bayarearefugee 5mo ago
  > Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes We're all really excited to do those mostly minimum wage jobs. Especially given how much competition there will be for them when the currently non-minimum-wage jobs disappear.
  - torginus 5mo ago
    Why would those jobs be minimum wage? Skilled trades often pay as well or better than most desk jobs - which might be a downgrade for a lot of folks here, but the maximalist AI disruption premise is still far from an apocalyptic scenario
    - apatry 5mo ago
      [dead]
    - bayarearefugee 5mo ago
      Not all of them are minimum wage now, but even for the ones that currently aren't how do you think their wages will be impacted by the sea of currently-white-color workers retraining into their markets to escape the white-collar employment apocalypse? Even the "AI proof" jobs are going to get hit hard in multiple directions -- first, there will be more supply of the labor they perform as people scramble to transition to "safe jobs", second there will be less demand for their services because the people undergoing the transition aren't going to have disposable income to spend on the services they provide. If the permanent underclass thing comes true, none of us who don't already own lots of assets are escaping it.
_pdp_ 5mo ago
I am absolutely convinced that in just a few years 90% of what we know as the Internet will be AI and possibly there will be an entire new class of economy that is based around these agents. I can see glimpses of that today but we are a bit too early. And with that almost all of the software will be written by AI for AI but humans will be in control - I hope :)
kazinator 5mo ago
> Every new model release brings another paradigm shift It does not; the increments are almost imperceptible now and locked to the same paradigm, whose peak has already gone by.
Fraterkes 5mo ago
I, everyone here, has read all these discussions a thousand times now. I've tried to have a more nuanced view, I understand the excitement and I think there can be real value in automation being accessible to everyone. What matters to me is, I like programming and making things, and I'm okay at it. I can learn to enjoy, and get good at, other work (I hope). Close a fairly brief chapter of my life where I felt some certainty about what I wanted to do for the coming decades. But it's maddening to not have any idea if I will need to. Here's my point: it may not be bad to live in a future world were ai and llm's are very prevelant, ordinary technology. But I think living in the now, while that world is (slowly) being born, can get to be pretty bad.
brap 5mo ago
>So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach. Yeah for sure and that’s great and all but I think what they were really asking is how they’ll feed their kids
- brap 5mo ago
  OP after completing this essay https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/240/075/90f.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/240/075/90f...
keybored 5mo ago
> Over the past month I’ve received three letters in a row from strangers — all software engineers I’ve never met. One was a frontend developer in infrastructure, another did data ops, the third was somewhere in between. The three letters look different, but they ask the same question. Moments where I wonder why this is an apparent people sent me thoughts opinion column while at the same time not caring. > These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us? As we will see later, the answers are just hustlerism. But that’s very immediate and practical. So why this existential pose? Because the societal questions have very immediate questions and answers as well if you don’t actively try to obfuscate with philosophical nonsense. - Who benefits? - Who will be left standing? And the answers to those aren’t the machines, unless you’re some ideological cretin who believes in AI takeover while at the same time is working on building AI. They are also people. And if your doomer narrative has labor of all sort vanishing, and it’s just a matter of time, interspersed with model gooning—who are the h-u-m-a-ns left? Why hustler on the individual level, philosopher on the societal level? > Later, some of them went out at night and smashed the machines. History calls them the Luddites. People usually treat them as fools who hated technology, but that’s a misreading— No, it’s an intentional reading. But we’re too busy obfuscating to face obvious facts. > So the real question is not “do you know how to use AI.” People who know how to use it today do hold an advantage over those who don’t, but the half-life of that advantage is maybe a year or two — and at the top of the field, possibly only one or two months. The pressure from each new model generation is mounting; the window for exploration and adaptation gets shorter every time. Every new model release brings another paradigm shift, and the workflow you painstakingly built, the prompting tricks you collected, the engineering scaffolding you accumulated — any of it can become a Spinning Jenny overnight So what does this afford you in terms of amazing insight? > My only method for dealing with this is what I call end-state thinking: don’t spend yourself on intermediate-state problems. Think and act with the endpoint as the premise. Platitude nonsense. Don’t look at the trees. Look at the whole forest. > The threat to the job, the cultivation of the ability, the survival of subjecthood — all of these anxieties collapse, when gathered, into the same thing: we are afraid of losing our sense of value. Afraid that one day we will wake up and find we are no longer useful to this world. Being laid off is just the outer shell of that fear. The core is older: a person’s deepest fear has never been having no job. It is the suspicion that one is no longer worthy. On the one hand, they say that you will be out of a job in two years time. Forever. On the other hand, we’re fed this touchy-feely nonsense about going to work. Weird, I thought we were going to be punched in the balls with real materialistic dread, some real labor disciplining that keeps us desperate and fearful, not getting mind-lobbied over how ow-owwy our feelings will be when we are no longer fit to have our labor commodity exploited by billionaires or perhaps trillionaires (who are worthy because they have assets). > So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach. The destruction of your income is actually withering away at your materialistic fetters that keeps you from spiritual self-realization. > In that old essay I gave that center a definition How many links of this author are we supposed to have referenced now? I’m imagining a web of nonsense, but I can’t attest to that. In fact I didn’t read most of this piece. > This year, friends who know me well call me radical: I hand designs to AI, code to AI, review drafts to AI; next I’m preparing to hand over testing too. Today, the radical is the one who radically builds on non-deterministic foundations. > The real purpose of being radical is one thing only: before the macro trend arrives, keep finding new ground to stand on. All the time AI saves you must flow into growth and exploration — not into more requirements. This is a discipline I set for myself, and a sentence I repeat in every reply: if the dividends of efficiency get eaten entirely by workload, then this revolution is meaningless to the individual. The real purpose of being a radical is being a bloodless grinder. Yeah that’s about as much as I expected from someone writing about how a force might wipe out their income. From a software engineering perspective. > To close, I want to return to those Luddites who smashed machines in the night. Now let’s return to the Luddites and pretend that they were the only ones who rebelled against industrial society and that they only failed. Some real 12-hour days in the factory grindset. > Back to the question in the first letter: Could not meander more. Or, did you perhaps forget to refer to another essay here? > But the answer to that question doesn’t depend on AI. It depends on where you are standing when that day comes: at the end of the assembly line, stamping approval on the machine’s output with an ever-lower bar, waiting for even the stamping to be optimized away? Or further upstream — where the questions are picked, where the standards are set, where the logic is guarded, where the world is built. The old school answer was to organize with others. But that was just when most people could get a job, or had to anyway. When labor itself is about to be wiped out? Double down on being a bloodless hustler. > The wind rises in the reeds. The great trend is never some monolith descending from the sky — it is composed of the choices of countless individuals in this very moment. to refuse to lower your standard for the sake of speed, to invest the saved hours into an exploration no one has done before — these tiny decisions are themselves the trend. Yeah, what do I do when I am the author and think that the inevitability of tech is going to eat my livelihood? What rousing speech to manifest? > The decision you make today to push the logical chain through on paper before opening the chat window, Beyond embarrassing. Pick a lane. You can’t scaremonger about AI Inevitability and have a rousing speech about the tiny decisions of Opening the Chat Window.
dmje 5mo ago
Well I thought this was terrific even if it’s apparently getting panned by HN
pilgrim0 5mo ago
What I find curious is that a machine replacing manual work is a new device in the environment, but LLMs are not new a device, they’re a feature on the device, the device still is the computer, and the operator is the same. There’s another conflicting angle, which is that LLMs derive from sampled human work and is paid for by wealth generated by human work, so if you discard human work there’s no wealth to maintain the LLMs nor data to feed it. And I don’t really see how can LLMs produce their own wealth nor how it could succeed producing their own samples. Humans and LLMs are natural complements of each other. I cannot rationally see how this development could lead to a complete breakdown of labor economics without the complete breakdown of the technology itself. Furthermore, human cognition, language, culture, philosophy, science, etc evolve at enormous momentum, with basically zero friction, while training of LLMs is insanely costly and slow. Even if it could self improve, it would still be way slower and increasingly costly (dataset only grows). So advancing this technology without restrictions is the recipe for its own demise, for many possible reasons: no one to pay for it, no material to train it, no supply to scale it, etc. That is, its own potential is tightly tied to the potential to starve itself. So the sustainable thing to do is to find a balance. (This is just to talk about general dynamics, not considering particular social, cultural and environmental effects at each point in the evolution curve)
nullbyte 5mo ago
Great article
HardCodedBias 5mo ago
The author was so close. "This gives us the first corollary of end-state thinking — cold but honest: every step that sits between intent and implementation will, by default, disappear." This is likely correct. But the author withdraws into thousands of words afterwards about the importance of gatekeeping using their current skills. I think that is wrong. YMMV.
arty_throwaway 5mo ago
First thing is that "intent", according to this author, is single-author and monolithic. I'm not sure that's the way it works with any modern codebase of any size. I suppose they were perhaps just thinking about sitting down at a prompt and having a go, but I suspect it's a fiction because what is an LLM if not encoded intent of millions of us, itself running on a codebase of hundreds of authors, itself running on an OS of thousands of authors, etc. The main move here is hand execution to the machine and keep "choosing what to intend" for the human. Isn't choosing what to intend just...intent? And forming intent is what programmers always do/did. That sounds less like a new refuge, and more like a relabelled part of the job. More importantly, "intent is implementation" needs intent to be two different things at once. For the slogan to work, the intent at handoff has to be complete enough to determine the system on its own. But Section 4's own recipe is not that. It's hand off a rough idea and let the AI "expand and refine" it. Complete enough to ship, or rough enough to need the machine to finish it? "Intent" can't be both. There's no finished intent at the handoff for the slogan to be true of. Same problem with the verification argument. Section 1 says nobody needs to read the assembly (personally, I like reading assembly, but I digress). Then Section 2 says the one thing that can't be sped up is verification. The author says it's an economic reality, I would argue it's structural. Verification is expensive because there's no general procedure to confirm an implementation does what you intended! Halting problem, natch. Saying you verified the result doesn't work because that's specific: this time in that environment. Verification keeps dragging back to the code. You can't claim that code loses meaning AND claim that verification is the surviving human job, because verification is the place that code meaning won't go away. Anyway, there are frameworks that can describe how intent relates to computational process. This blog post isn't one of them.

102 points by speckx 5mo ago

Mistletoe 5mo ago

> Every machine is waiting for the next machine. I like that. We are all machines.

grantpitt 5mo ago
You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

pydry 5mo ago

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential crisis is at its core, acknowledgement of of a skill issue.

citrin_ru 5mo ago
Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.
- drudolph914 5mo ago
  Yeah, I keep coming back to a point that the way people talk about AI is still entirely disconnected from what it can actually do. I think of the bell curve meme a lot when I see people talking about AI. the people most bullish to perpetuate that it's going to take over are people that have vested interested, or people that are fall on the bottom half of the bell curve. I mean ... come on, by design an AI is literally a statistical averaging of all the data it's seen. AI is extremely average at nearly everything it does. If you find yourself using AI and it's doing something amazing, that speaks more to your knowledge/ability about a subject more than it speaks about AIs ability I mean, I guess if all you do is work on implementing CRUD endpoints ... sure I guess you're cooked. but we had tech to automate this already, this isn't anything new. But oh man, if you're doing real engineering, the tools are barely usable. I hate when people don't give examples, so I am going to throw one here. just the other day, I asked the newest and most expensive claude model to write an LRU and to have a running tally of the capacity of bytes in the cache as the threshold to evict something from the cache. It wrongly implemented the threshold checks and just tracked how many elements were in the cache. this might sound small, but scale that mistake up to a real production system. this is literally unusable. and the expectation to sit there, have it generate 1000s of lines of code for you, and then spot check that small but huge error is not worth it. you have to move so slow to spot check everything - to the point that it's literally faster to type it. This is a model that costs $100s to run per hour and is advertised as "PHD level intelligence" making High school AP computer science to freshman computer science errors - like come on. If you're reading this, are an expert in your field, and are actually worried about your job - you got be able to have some mental fortitude and not fall for this ...
  - hurtigioll 5mo ago
    after the implementation was done, have you asked the model again, in a fresh context window, to review the code against the specification?
    - drudolph914 5mo ago
      so much to unpack here and almost poetic that you say this first is that the model will write out that it “thought” and “double checked” it’s output Second, this was in a fresh context window of the latest model (that isn’t fable b/c we can’t use for reasons beyond this thread), and it was on it’s second highest thinking mode. I shouldn’t have to double check something that it claimed to have burned more tokens on to double check Outside of it costing me more money to fix what it claims to do, the main point of this article is that models are implementing things nearly end to end, and if we scale it up, it will only continue to do that. I Intentionally chose the example of something that is < 70 lines to implement in TS (btw, the language with the second most amount of data available to scrape and train on) I would assume a machine that can almost implement things end to end should be able to implement something of 70 lines of code and has been documented for nearly 50 years. My point is that time and time again on the most trivial examples, under the best of conditions, and with unlimited amounts of money, they can’t do what it claims Outside of that, this follow up comment(s) that say, “oh you need to ask it to check its own work and be so involved in the process of it writing the code that you need to spot check it” goes against everything the article states The best analogy I have for this is New speak in 1984, it’s just vibes dictating vibes and trying to make people claim that the vibes are right. and if you try to validate the vibes, your vibes are just wrong because you don’t get the vibes. The claims that it made have no data backing it. And if there is data, it’s cherry picked. Please use your brain and stop outsourcing your ability to think to a machine that is incorrectly thinking on your behalf Edit: Typos
      - hurtigioll 5mo ago
        I guess the code you write always works correctly whem you submit the PR, and code reviews don't find real problems in it. it makes sense then to have the exact same bar when using LLMs
- sandoze 5mo ago
  Where you see quality crisis I see job security! Honest question, when it comes to enshittification of software quality.. have you ever had to use a Meta framework? How many times have they rewritten their mobile apps to use some architect's bespoke code pipe dream? The quality crisis has always been here, now there's just more of it.
graypegg 5mo ago
I’ve tried to explain this to folks as “having taste”, but I’m always worried it comes off as subjective and snobby. It might be a fair assessment honestly, it’s hard for me to describe so I wouldn’t hold anyone to it as a standard. Give me an honest vibe check on that. Theres a lot of codebases out there that are at odds with my own opinions about syntax/structure/purpose, but there’s evidence of “taste” that I absolutely respect. I can look at a couple modules, and have a good idea what the other modules are going to be like, because the mental model of the author is clear from the code itself. Even teams with multiple authors with taste average out to one taste-profile and in a similar way, I’ve seen LLM output shaped by someone with taste and had the same feeling: “yeah I see the direction you’re going in”. Someone without taste using an LLM writes slop. I can’t tell what you’re doing. Any question about what you’re doing results in “sorry that was Claude”. Entirely pointless that you’re even involved. It’s a property of the author IMO. They were kind of owed an existential crisis as cruel as that is to say.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago
  Was recognized long before AI came on the scene. The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. Steve Jobs
  - graypegg 5mo ago
    HAH! Ok fair, maybe parts of that quote are rattling around somewhere in my mind.
- dijksterhuis 5mo ago
  giving a shit == having taste. giving a shit != perfect. i recently had a PR which had a comment explaining a change of an import: "// Changed imports to add Foo as it's needed for updated bar()". apparently the person behind "it" has been a developer for 10 years. couldn't be bothered to remove completely useless "how" comments from a 25 line change (without all the useless comments). also, i posted on another AI slop thread about taste: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515463
rybosworld 5mo ago
I think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough". One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one). With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore. Said another way: AI generated code doesn't chase perfection. It just chases good enough.
- pydry 5mo ago
  So you have high slop tolerance. This is fine, it just means that there's very little point if you're an IC.
  - rybosworld 5mo ago
    Everyone processes the transition to the post-AI development world differently and on their own timeline. You just seem to be a late bloomer.
- edukite 5mo ago
  But it's not good enough. We can see this all over industry where even M$ is producing software so bad even calculator is electron app. Slow, poor quality and for any engineer below acceptable
  - pixl97 5mo ago
    Producing things that aren't good enough has never stopped companies from becoming multibillion dollar entities. I've been waiting for 40 years for good software to take over the market... and I'm still waiting.
    - edukite 5mo ago
      I don't know any company with below good enough soft which became multibillion-dollar entity. Contrary M$ has started to have issues after recent "improvements"
hacker_homie 5mo ago
It was never about the code, all that really matters is does it work. In that light I’m not happy about it, but the code always was just a means to an end.
variadix 5mo ago
People have built entire careers shipping garbage, now they can ship 10x more garbage and to them that’s progress.
marcosdumay 5mo ago
> I give it 9-12 months That's a wildly optimistic take. Most of them will never realize it by themselves, and will put the blame of people reacting badly to their work on the people complaining, not themselves.

no_multitudes 5mo ago

Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.

pocksuppet 5mo ago
My boss pays me for the lines of code, right?
jolt42 5mo ago
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal
- grey-area 5mo ago
  Unfortunately with word generators this has become - I would have written a letter, but I couldn’t be bothered.
- r1zzzzA 5mo ago
  third time i see this cliche quote in two days
  - recursive 5mo ago
    And yet people(?) keep publishing stuff that's too long.
  - FergusArgyll 5mo ago
    The quoting will continue until writing improves
  - AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
    The thing is that writing - especially writing well - is fairly hard, and does take time and mental effort. So lazy authors (or wannabe authors) take the shortcut. But the fact remains that most of us do not want to read AI-generated slop, and human-written slop is not much better. So there is a point to the quote, no matter how many times you've read it. But there is a countering point as well: If you don't have time, don't write. Don't use that as an excuse to get lazy and shove slop at us.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

functionmouse 5mo ago

> My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest. lol Two More Weeks(TM)

GolfPopper 5mo ago
I've noticed that "18 months" is a very popular prediction target, across a wide variety of prognosticators. Close enough to seem urgent, and if what they predict comes to pass anytime in the next few years, they can claim "See, I was right, just a little off on the timing because <excuse>". If it doesn't happen, most everyone will have forgotten their prediction. And in the unlikely event they get called out, they have over a year of random events to find a plausible fall guy for their failure.
stemlord 5mo ago
That really pissed me off. Why do people continute to pretend they can predict the future
- recursive 5mo ago
  It's a valuable skill.
- bregma 5mo ago
  Get used to it: I think we're going to be pretending to predict the future for many years to come.
  - paulhebert 5mo ago
    I think we’ll stop predicting the future soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest.
    - functionmouse 5mo ago
      i think ur rite
  - 5mo ago

biotechbio 5mo ago

This post is a little long winded. At times I agreed, and others I felt the author was doing a little too much hand-wringing on what-is-mine vs. what-is-the-AI's. The opportunity is and always has been the possibility of accelerating work. Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation. We value these things because they have become correlated with quality. We now have the opportunity to decouple these things; maybe something that took no effort will be just as good as a painstaking human labor. The risk is if this doesn't come true. If we let our skills degrade and get ahead of our skis, embracing "slop" that superficially appears to "work", we will eventually pay the price. Financially and culturally, it seems like we are already all-in on the bet that it will work. I hope it does, I just want to solve the problems I am working on.

giancarlostoro 5mo ago
> Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation. That's where I'm at too. Saves you weeks of effort to boot.
- visarga 5mo ago
  But once you put something out, an app, repo, content, music or photo - it can be easily cloned with AI, changed to be different just enough to avoid accusations and customized as needed. The price of replication is dropping fast, and that means any perceived arbitration point will be competed away. I predict AI will be immensely valuable like Linux, but "nobody" (excluding shovel makers, for a while) will get rich off AI, because whatever it can clone is not a moat anymore.
  - giancarlostoro 5mo ago
    Current AI still needs people who know and understand the tech and code, they made Mythos sound like it would be the model to do away with that, but I got no inclination that it was. I tire of the hype just for something that Opus can do if it works a little longer.

visarga 5mo ago

I have my own take on what is ours and can never be taken away by AI. When a task is initiated, it starts from a need, from a specific context. To work it out the AI needs to continuously interact with the context, and get feedback from it. At the end gains, losses, risks and costs sink back in the context. The context is you, the person who prompts, your team or company. It is indexical and relational. It is maximally distributed. It cannot be hoarded. You can't eat so that I feel satiated. AI is called to do the work, but it can't handle 3 things - start, middle and end of a task.

swader999 5mo ago
I agree with all that but the problem is what others will pay for. There might be niche artisans that survive but most of it might go the way of wallmart.
- visarga 5mo ago
  Yes, AI gives me superpowers but my competitors get it too. True, we are in a race to re-differentiate now. Companies too, imitation of anything we put out is approaching a very low cost.
silksowed 5mo ago
Well said. Deciding what to build is derived by experience in the context of your problem space, and that is human centric. Makes me encouraged that as AI tooling increases in adoption, more people will build things to solve their problems. Instead of large corporations hoarding talent and then building things for people, I could see more small business success where they sit closer to the very things that need solving.

paul7986 5mo ago

Overall, AI is irrelevant without us and it needs to pay us to keep it relevant (all the content we create naturally everyday) I think! It can not continue to be a bloodsucker!

agentultra 5mo ago

Again, they didn’t smash the machines because they hated the technology or wanted everyone to be making lace by hand. They were arguing for basic human rights in the workplace. Things like child labour were still super common and were among the practices the Luddites wanted to abolish. Along with the workhouses they wanted to replace with protection for workers (they didn’t have the word for it but they wanted a social security system). They smashed the machines for leverage. There was little labour law at the time. Most of it was written by the capital holders with the help of the constabulary. Things like showing up to work on time or no pay, etc. Violence, controlled violence, was the tool they used to try and get the capital holders to the table and negotiate. It failed, as we know, and it was a bloody failure. People were executed and jailed. The movement became a pejorative for someone who is backwards and against technology and progress.

embedding-shape 5mo ago
I think the vibe is generally same with AI too. If people believe AI will genuinely be used for good (like many in China seem to think, I get the feeling) then the public at large seems fine with industry focusing on it. But when people have the feeling or even expectation that it'll be used for things like increasing the wealth/wage/inequality gap, control of the masses, automated widespread surveillance and more, you get the violent attacks on data centers and such. Maybe if these people who are basically wealthier than some countries would share their loot or just care a tiny bit about 99% of the rest of the world, people would feel differently about things. Use AI and your data centers to figure out how to quench, feed and power the entire world, and probably a bunch of people who hate AI would even get onboard.
- CuriouslyC 5mo ago
  People in China think AI will be used for good because China has a track record of protecting workers from the fallout of automation (see courts ruling people can't be wholesale replaced with AI), and they view the ridiculous surveillance less negatively because the party delivers low crime and rapidly improving economic circumstances.

ks2048 5mo ago

paraphrase> what's left for us? ... taste. If human "taste" changes our cursor for no reason, maybe we should just go with the AI's "taste"? Sorry for the snark - nothing wrong with the essay - I just prefer a plain, unobtrusive style.

kmoser 5mo ago

> Go where it’s new. Build things no one has built yet — things that other people’s workflows can come to depend on. One important rule here: don’t build what can be obtained by burning tokens. Any engineering product that someone has already built and that you can simply have AI clone — one more review bot, one more workflow tool — is not worth your energy, because its acquisition cost has already approached zero. What’s worth building is paradigm-level work: things that, once they exist, change how other people work. But once you build something new, that people depend on, they will shortly want to move away from that dependency, lest you raise prices or disappear. Even paradigm-level work ends up as tools that can be replicated by other humans, at the cost of a few tokens. That's a difficult dragon to catch and ride successfully. I think the author had it right when they talked about going deeper into the stack, where we are still loath to deploy AI. The only way to stay ahead of the beast is to do things the beast can't do reliably.

r1zzzzA 5mo ago

[flagged]

r1zzzzA 5mo ago

[flagged]

munchler 5mo ago

> Once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us? This is a good question, but is perhaps too abstract to address well. I think a better question for right now is: Once AI generates all the wealth it can generate, who benefits from that wealth? If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting. If the answer is some number of AI agents, but no humans at all, that is probably also a dystopia worth resisting. I think the only good outcome is one in which humanity benefits on the whole. If that means that we have to become a post-capitalist society in order to share in the wealth, so be it.

willchis 5mo ago
> If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting. Have you looked around at the current state of wealth inequality?! The internet (without AI) already did that.
Windchaser 5mo ago
There was a really neat article here a while back comparing AI to previous tech/industry revolutions. The article compared market conditions to argue that the current revolution is similar to the shipping container revolution of the '60s-'80s -- with a lot of market interest and no real moat or market leader, high competition drove prices down, kept margins low, and most of the benefits went to the consumer. This seems like the best case scenario here. AI ends up expensive to train but cheap to copy and run, so we end up with lots of competitors or even just running it in-house. It's cheap to use, so there'll be lots of businesses trying similar AI-driven ideas and pushing prices of their products down for the consumer.

bananamogul 5mo ago

These types of posts are tediously regular. Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” in 2024 [1]. Fraudster Matt Schumer’s “Something Big is Happening” in February [2]. Next viral doom post in September-ish? [1] https://situational-awareness.ai/ https://situational-awareness.ai/ [2] https://lowendbox.com/blog/ai-fraudster-matt-shumer-wrote-something-big-is-happening-and-he-should-be-ashamed/ https://lowendbox.com/blog/ai-fraudster-matt-shumer-wrote-so...

paulorlando 5mo ago

I really liked this quote: “If in the future we write less code and only review, these abilities are hard to train — what do we do?” That's a different question than the included Luddite example, which I take as "what do we do to prevent change?". Related, I've been maintaining a list of anti-tech Luddite movements here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRWXNXRq4ZOAAwDgQ08CIN3pec/edit?gid=749408265#gid=749408265 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...

Windchaser 5mo ago
I think the better Luddite position is "what can we do to protect humans?" Which can be channeled into making the change healthy. I heard a statistic that the average QOL and life expectancy didn't increase for most of the Industrial Revolution, once you account for the increase in pollution and disease (disease partly coming from greater urbanization). Yes, our lives are much richer now than they would've been 200 years ago, but it was pretty rough there for a while. I'd like to think we can do better this time. Though, realistically, I'm not sure. Gilded Age 2.0, coming up

themafia 5mo ago

> My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest. Which is based on what? > AI can process the entire world It can process what is in it's training set. Which is a monumental gap to step over. Failing to understand this leads to all kinds of silly predictions and mindless prognostication. I'd like to see an AI article based on data and not paragraphs of internal monologue spewed out onto the internet.

romaniv 5mo ago

This "how to adapt" prop-slop is getting tiresome. So much of it is obviously intended to project and demoralize rather than provoke thought or give legitimate advice. The trick of this kind of writing is to skip arguing that something rather questionable will happen and go straight to giving advice about how everyone should adapt to the new, totally inevitable reality. This isn't even a particularly sophisticated method of manipulation.

rayiner 5mo ago

AI can’t take away babies, picnics with your spouse, or dipping your toes into the ocean. If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway.

yacin 5mo ago
how will you afford that baby, or picnic, or trip to the ocean?
- rayiner 5mo ago
  Easily. People in my dad’s village in Bangladesh have those things.
  - hollerith 5mo ago
    OK, but by hypothesis the AIs are in control. Now suppose they want to switch to a more efficient kind of data center that would corrode quickly in the presence of oxygen, so they remove all the oxygen from the atmosphere. Or they disassemble the rocky planets to make a Dyson sphere.
  - HDBaseT 5mo ago
    They also don't have clean drinking water or food that wasn't prepared on the ground. They don't have modern medicines or 'modern' entertainment like cinemas. It is not comparable.
willchis 5mo ago
But what about putting food on the table for your babies and spouse?
lelanthran 5mo ago
> If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway. If that were true, you would have done it (given up working) by now. You haven't, hence it's not true.

torginus 5mo ago

Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes - in fact I'd be very happy if AI could just fix software - basically heaps upon heaps of software is just built wrong fundamentally (operating systems, just to give one huge example), and AI productivity could give us a chance to try again and build things the right way.

bayarearefugee 5mo ago
> Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes We're all really excited to do those mostly minimum wage jobs. Especially given how much competition there will be for them when the currently non-minimum-wage jobs disappear.
- torginus 5mo ago
  Why would those jobs be minimum wage? Skilled trades often pay as well or better than most desk jobs - which might be a downgrade for a lot of folks here, but the maximalist AI disruption premise is still far from an apocalyptic scenario
  - apatry 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - bayarearefugee 5mo ago
    Not all of them are minimum wage now, but even for the ones that currently aren't how do you think their wages will be impacted by the sea of currently-white-color workers retraining into their markets to escape the white-collar employment apocalypse? Even the "AI proof" jobs are going to get hit hard in multiple directions -- first, there will be more supply of the labor they perform as people scramble to transition to "safe jobs", second there will be less demand for their services because the people undergoing the transition aren't going to have disposable income to spend on the services they provide. If the permanent underclass thing comes true, none of us who don't already own lots of assets are escaping it.

_pdp_ 5mo ago

I am absolutely convinced that in just a few years 90% of what we know as the Internet will be AI and possibly there will be an entire new class of economy that is based around these agents. I can see glimpses of that today but we are a bit too early. And with that almost all of the software will be written by AI for AI but humans will be in control - I hope :)

kazinator 5mo ago

> Every new model release brings another paradigm shift It does not; the increments are almost imperceptible now and locked to the same paradigm, whose peak has already gone by.

Fraterkes 5mo ago

I, everyone here, has read all these discussions a thousand times now. I've tried to have a more nuanced view, I understand the excitement and I think there can be real value in automation being accessible to everyone. What matters to me is, I like programming and making things, and I'm okay at it. I can learn to enjoy, and get good at, other work (I hope). Close a fairly brief chapter of my life where I felt some certainty about what I wanted to do for the coming decades. But it's maddening to not have any idea if I will need to. Here's my point: it may not be bad to live in a future world were ai and llm's are very prevelant, ordinary technology. But I think living in the now, while that world is (slowly) being born, can get to be pretty bad.

brap 5mo ago

>So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach. Yeah for sure and that’s great and all but I think what they were really asking is how they’ll feed their kids

brap 5mo ago
OP after completing this essay https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/240/075/90f.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/240/075/90f...

keybored 5mo ago

> Over the past month I’ve received three letters in a row from strangers — all software engineers I’ve never met. One was a frontend developer in infrastructure, another did data ops, the third was somewhere in between. The three letters look different, but they ask the same question. Moments where I wonder why this is an apparent people sent me thoughts opinion column while at the same time not caring. > These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us? As we will see later, the answers are just hustlerism. But that’s very immediate and practical. So why this existential pose? Because the societal questions have very immediate questions and answers as well if you don’t actively try to obfuscate with philosophical nonsense. - Who benefits? - Who will be left standing? And the answers to those aren’t the machines, unless you’re some ideological cretin who believes in AI takeover while at the same time is working on building AI. They are also people. And if your doomer narrative has labor of all sort vanishing, and it’s just a matter of time, interspersed with model gooning—who are the h-u-m-a-ns left? Why hustler on the individual level, philosopher on the societal level? > Later, some of them went out at night and smashed the machines. History calls them the Luddites. People usually treat them as fools who hated technology, but that’s a misreading— No, it’s an intentional reading. But we’re too busy obfuscating to face obvious facts. > So the real question is not “do you know how to use AI.” People who know how to use it today do hold an advantage over those who don’t, but the half-life of that advantage is maybe a year or two — and at the top of the field, possibly only one or two months. The pressure from each new model generation is mounting; the window for exploration and adaptation gets shorter every time. Every new model release brings another paradigm shift, and the workflow you painstakingly built, the prompting tricks you collected, the engineering scaffolding you accumulated — any of it can become a Spinning Jenny overnight So what does this afford you in terms of amazing insight? > My only method for dealing with this is what I call end-state thinking: don’t spend yourself on intermediate-state problems. Think and act with the endpoint as the premise. Platitude nonsense. Don’t look at the trees. Look at the whole forest. > The threat to the job, the cultivation of the ability, the survival of subjecthood — all of these anxieties collapse, when gathered, into the same thing: we are afraid of losing our sense of value. Afraid that one day we will wake up and find we are no longer useful to this world. Being laid off is just the outer shell of that fear. The core is older: a person’s deepest fear has never been having no job. It is the suspicion that one is no longer worthy. On the one hand, they say that you will be out of a job in two years time. Forever. On the other hand, we’re fed this touchy-feely nonsense about going to work. Weird, I thought we were going to be punched in the balls with real materialistic dread, some real labor disciplining that keeps us desperate and fearful, not getting mind-lobbied over how ow-owwy our feelings will be when we are no longer fit to have our labor commodity exploited by billionaires or perhaps trillionaires (who are worthy because they have assets). > So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach. The destruction of your income is actually withering away at your materialistic fetters that keeps you from spiritual self-realization. > In that old essay I gave that center a definition How many links of this author are we supposed to have referenced now? I’m imagining a web of nonsense, but I can’t attest to that. In fact I didn’t read most of this piece. > This year, friends who know me well call me radical: I hand designs to AI, code to AI, review drafts to AI; next I’m preparing to hand over testing too. Today, the radical is the one who radically builds on non-deterministic foundations. > The real purpose of being radical is one thing only: before the macro trend arrives, keep finding new ground to stand on. All the time AI saves you must flow into growth and exploration — not into more requirements. This is a discipline I set for myself, and a sentence I repeat in every reply: if the dividends of efficiency get eaten entirely by workload, then this revolution is meaningless to the individual. The real purpose of being a radical is being a bloodless grinder. Yeah that’s about as much as I expected from someone writing about how a force might wipe out their income. From a software engineering perspective. > To close, I want to return to those Luddites who smashed machines in the night. Now let’s return to the Luddites and pretend that they were the only ones who rebelled against industrial society and that they only failed. Some real 12-hour days in the factory grindset. > Back to the question in the first letter: Could not meander more. Or, did you perhaps forget to refer to another essay here? > But the answer to that question doesn’t depend on AI. It depends on where you are standing when that day comes: at the end of the assembly line, stamping approval on the machine’s output with an ever-lower bar, waiting for even the stamping to be optimized away? Or further upstream — where the questions are picked, where the standards are set, where the logic is guarded, where the world is built. The old school answer was to organize with others. But that was just when most people could get a job, or had to anyway. When labor itself is about to be wiped out? Double down on being a bloodless hustler. > The wind rises in the reeds. The great trend is never some monolith descending from the sky — it is composed of the choices of countless individuals in this very moment. to refuse to lower your standard for the sake of speed, to invest the saved hours into an exploration no one has done before — these tiny decisions are themselves the trend. Yeah, what do I do when I am the author and think that the inevitability of tech is going to eat my livelihood? What rousing speech to manifest? > The decision you make today to push the logical chain through on paper before opening the chat window, Beyond embarrassing. Pick a lane. You can’t scaremonger about AI Inevitability and have a rousing speech about the tiny decisions of Opening the Chat Window.

dmje 5mo ago

Well I thought this was terrific even if it’s apparently getting panned by HN

pilgrim0 5mo ago

What I find curious is that a machine replacing manual work is a new device in the environment, but LLMs are not new a device, they’re a feature on the device, the device still is the computer, and the operator is the same. There’s another conflicting angle, which is that LLMs derive from sampled human work and is paid for by wealth generated by human work, so if you discard human work there’s no wealth to maintain the LLMs nor data to feed it. And I don’t really see how can LLMs produce their own wealth nor how it could succeed producing their own samples. Humans and LLMs are natural complements of each other. I cannot rationally see how this development could lead to a complete breakdown of labor economics without the complete breakdown of the technology itself. Furthermore, human cognition, language, culture, philosophy, science, etc evolve at enormous momentum, with basically zero friction, while training of LLMs is insanely costly and slow. Even if it could self improve, it would still be way slower and increasingly costly (dataset only grows). So advancing this technology without restrictions is the recipe for its own demise, for many possible reasons: no one to pay for it, no material to train it, no supply to scale it, etc. That is, its own potential is tightly tied to the potential to starve itself. So the sustainable thing to do is to find a balance. (This is just to talk about general dynamics, not considering particular social, cultural and environmental effects at each point in the evolution curve)

nullbyte 5mo ago

Great article

HardCodedBias 5mo ago

The author was so close. "This gives us the first corollary of end-state thinking — cold but honest: every step that sits between intent and implementation will, by default, disappear." This is likely correct. But the author withdraws into thousands of words afterwards about the importance of gatekeeping using their current skills. I think that is wrong. YMMV.

arty_throwaway 5mo ago

First thing is that "intent", according to this author, is single-author and monolithic. I'm not sure that's the way it works with any modern codebase of any size. I suppose they were perhaps just thinking about sitting down at a prompt and having a go, but I suspect it's a fiction because what is an LLM if not encoded intent of millions of us, itself running on a codebase of hundreds of authors, itself running on an OS of thousands of authors, etc. The main move here is hand execution to the machine and keep "choosing what to intend" for the human. Isn't choosing what to intend just...intent? And forming intent is what programmers always do/did. That sounds less like a new refuge, and more like a relabelled part of the job. More importantly, "intent is implementation" needs intent to be two different things at once. For the slogan to work, the intent at handoff has to be complete enough to determine the system on its own. But Section 4's own recipe is not that. It's hand off a rough idea and let the AI "expand and refine" it. Complete enough to ship, or rough enough to need the machine to finish it? "Intent" can't be both. There's no finished intent at the handoff for the slogan to be true of. Same problem with the verification argument. Section 1 says nobody needs to read the assembly (personally, I like reading assembly, but I digress). Then Section 2 says the one thing that can't be sped up is verification. The author says it's an economic reality, I would argue it's structural. Verification is expensive because there's no general procedure to confirm an implementation does what you intended! Halting problem, natch. Saying you verified the result doesn't work because that's specific: this time in that environment. Verification keeps dragging back to the code. You can't claim that code loses meaning AND claim that verification is the surviving human job, because verification is the place that code meaning won't go away. Anyway, there are frameworks that can describe how intent relates to computational process. This blog post isn't one of them.