7 ms·
Resist "AI"
- voidUpdate 21d agoI've never understood the water argument... yes, it takes a lot of water in the initial setup to fill the water cooling loops, but isn't not constantly burning water, right? it gets cooled off again and goes around the loop
- alcomatt 21d agoIn some cases it does. Most of the DCs use open evaporators still. Keeps the costs down.
- mapontosevenths 20d agoYes. The part I don't get is why do we care about that? Earth is two thirds water, and it rains. The water I drank this morning is million of years old. It will be around for millions more. So, they pump some water out of the earth and it evaporates... It will come back down, and we aren't running out anytime soon. Why do we care? Are they building these things in deserts? If so that's the problem. They should use closed loops if they want to build in the desert.
- joenada 20d agoThis is satirical, right? They use fresh water, which is a tiny, tiny % of all water on earth.
- voidUpdate 20d ago2.5 to 3% according to google... Small but not tiny tiny
- joenada 20d agoThat's fresh water in general. Most of it is frozen. The amount you can actually use is a sliver.
- mapontosevenths 20d agoThree percent of two thirds of the entire planet is enormous. We aren't running out, and never will. Some people just live in places that aren't suitable for human life and survive only through technology. Those places need to have different laws about water. For example, I shouldn't be forced to use a low flow showerhead when I'm 100 miles from 1.3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water. If you aren't next door to lake Michigan then maybe you should be.
- joenada 20d agoBecause you're the only person on earth who matters, clearly. Also, it's not 3% of 2/3. It's more like ~1% of 3% of 2/3. Most of the fresh water on earth is locked up in glaciers or trapped deep underground. You can absolutely lose surface water, too - when pipes leak, for instance. And that happens all the time because a lot of the water infrastructure is ancient. Where I live, there are still thousands of miles of Victorian-era pipes. These crack all the time. You don't just get that water back straight away when it next rains.
- mapontosevenths 20d ago> You can absolutely lose surface water, Where the heck does it go? Space? You're talking about the entire planet here. There's nowhere for it to be lost to, unless you're cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen or something. > Because you're the only person on earth who matters, clearly. As I said elsewhere in this third 2/3rds of humans live near large bodies of water.
- joenada 20d agoYour question is already answered in the comment you're replying to.
- mindwok 20d agoWhy does this matter? It remains fresh when its evaporated until it falls into the ocean, and then gets evaporated from there back into fresh.
- joenada 20d agoIt matters because there's almost none as it is, and you don't collect 100% of the water you use just because it rains. Water gets polluted, trapped underground, locked up in glaciers.
- mapontosevenths 20d ago> It matters because there's almost none as it is That's ridiculous and untrue.
- joenada 20d agoStatistically speaking, compared to non-fresh water and compared to how much we actually use as a species, there is very, very little fresh water available to us.
- mapontosevenths 20d agoI do need an entire ocean of water to live a normal lifestyle. Only some amount far less than the many, many, many quadrillions of gallons of freshwater we have. If you live in the desert, stop doing that... or get them to laws for your specific place in the world. Where I live we have something close to an infinite supply of fresh water.
- joenada 20d agoThis attitude is why the world is fucked.
- alcomatt 20d agoBecause it rarely goes back to the place it has been taken from.
- toasty228 20d agoAh ok, then drought aren't a problem I guess? Guess what happens when you pump ground water faster than rain water replenishes it? Guess what climate change is disturbing? This your your typical HN take, aka "I thought about a random problem I barely understand for 12 seconds and I think I figured it out better than domain experts"
- mapontosevenths 20d agoFully two thirds of earths inhabitants live near large bodies of water. It's not a problem for most of us. The 1/3rd that choose to live in arid places where droughts are a concern should probably just pass laws that require closed loop cooling.
- toasty228 20d agoThere are plenty of places built around water for obvious reason which are now experiencing droughts at an increased rate... It's not a problem for most of us yes, but it's a problem for more and more people. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/16/climate/lake-powell-reservoir-record-low-colorado-river https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/16/climate/lake-powell-reser... https://www.dw.com/en/romania-shuts-nuclear-plant-hungary-dams-dry-danube-river/a-78359581 https://www.dw.com/en/romania-shuts-nuclear-plant-hungary-da... https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/06/17/colorado-river-desalination-agreement/ https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/06/17/colorado-river-desa... > Fully two thirds of earths inhabitants live near large bodies of water. Most of these large bodies of water are salty, it's expensive as shit to desalinate it completely infeasible to pump it in land for agriculture and people
- mapontosevenths 20d agoIt doesn't need to be desalinated for evaporative cooling, does it? Maybe they use fresh water because we allow it and it's cheaper. They should outlaw that where it makes sense.
- toasty228 19d ago
- samvher 20d agoYes and many forms of electricity generation evaporate water as well
- N_Lens 21d agoIt’s not a good argument in my opinion, just something that’s spread because it’s easy to latch onto. The actual numbers on water usage aren’t a big deal. That’s not to say that AI is all fine and dandy, I genuinely think frontier AI companies have deranged leadership.
- scotty79 20d agoIt's about evaporative cooling. Read about how cooling towers work in nuclear and coal plants. The principle is the same for the data centers, but it the wasteheat to get rid of comes from computation. They obviously shouldn't be doing it like that, but since clean water is cheap and business in absence of reason optimizes for lowest costs that's exactly what they did.
- alansaber 20d agoI think it's just the most evocative of the plethora of environmental arguments
- serbuvlad 21d agoI'm not saying this situation is different from all of the other technological paradigm shifts in history. But what concerns me is that authors of articles such as this feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments in history.
- alcomatt 21d agoI think it is very much different. Previous revolutions allowed us to fall back from manual labour to more mental driven work. Now even this is not going to be an option. Soon we're going to be reduced to be useful for spare parts only.
- serbuvlad 20d agoThis is only the case for the Industrial Revolution. There have been many other thinking technologies and they ALL have been attacked in exactly the same way. * Socrates attacked the invention of writing, arguing it would make people intellectually lazy. * Abbot Johannes Trithemius argues in "In Praise of Scribes" in the 15th century that the Gutenberg machine would make people intellectually lazy. * Lots of people in the 1960s attacked punch card computers, and automation in general (!), on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy. * Nicholas Carr attacks Google in a famous article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy. And so on and so on and so on. "That which has been is what will be, And there is nothing new under the sun." It is because of this history that any argument such as the author makes, arguing that AI would make people intellectually lazy, must start already from the lamentation of the downfall of human intelligence from the days of Socrates, or must explain why this is different. It is obviously not different. There are three mental skills being offloaded onto AI: 1. Domain-specific skills 2. General intelligence (g) 3. Recall Of these three, the danger with 1 is offloading them too early, before the AI is "good enough" to be better than human experts. This is a genuine concern and we should do things carefully. However, if the AI is good enough, there is no danger here. Recall is the mental skill that all of these innovations have "hurt", but it can simply be trained explicitly and synthetically. We will certainly have to structure our societies more and more in the future to synthetically exercising recall (like we're now synthetically exercising our muscles), but if we do this, offloading recall at work is not a big issue. As for general intelligence, this is the most harmless to offload, because, as far as I know from the literature, it cannot really be trained, and it does not really degrade either.
- capestart 21d ago[dead]
- draw_down 21d ago[dead]
- glimshe 21d agoEmotional rejection of AI will lead to the same outcome as emotional rejection of cars, the printing press and computers. Additionally, when it comes to the software field, it will be a sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--bH6O2_Vvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--bH6O2_Vvk
- lirolero 20d ago> it will be sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool i'm ok with that
- ftomassetti 20d agoIt must be nice have no economic needs and have no dependents
- lirolero 20d agoIt is
- kg 20d agoPlenty of people live successfully without a car in 2026.
- glimshe 20d agoIn this context, a "car" is a vehicle with some sort of engine, as opposed to a horse, mule, carriage or other animal-powered vehicle. Those who rejected cars when they came out would also happily reject buses, cabs and even trains.
- alansaber 20d agoA more up-to-date analogy would probably be the people who refuse to fly in commercial aviation.
- 20d ago
- vertnerd 21d ago"After trying Kagi/Duck Duck Go, I have gone back to Google for search and I freely grant that I find the “AI Overview” to be useful." I feel compelled to point out that Kagi does offer AI-backed answers if you want it to. Just pose your query with a question mark to trigger the AI response in addition to the usual search results. It is not ever the default or only answer, and I pray Kagi keeps it that way! I use the AI option more often than I thought I would, usually for things that I don't consider controversial or complicated.
- meander_water 21d agoI see a lot of people throw their hands up in the air and say "I have no control over this, might as well go all in on AI". But we as individual consumers have more power than we think. We don't need to use these AI features and products. We've survived perfectly fine without AI. Made plenty of scientific discoveries and lead enriched lives without it. The biggest "fuck you" to the pricks who pushed this on us would be if we collectively went "meh".
- _davide_ 20d agoI understand the appeal of saying fuck you to billionaires and pathological liars CEOs and the annoying usages of AI, but i don't understand the wider "fuck you AI". AI are here, is it going to demolish and (maybe) reconstruct the world as we know it, trying to avoid it it's just silly. There is no sane world where we can "stop AI", even if every single researcher were to do vanish tomorrow and the hardware and schematics magically gone, it would still only be a stopgap. So...What are you trying to achieve?
- meander_water 20d agoA humanist revolution. Sure we can't stop the technology, but we _can_ stop the importance and money heaped into it.
- ChickeNES 20d agoBeing against technology is anti-human
- card_zero 20d agoThis is being against interest in a specific technology. For example I could say "I think yo-yos are stupid". But the yo-yo is here to stay! The world must adapt to the yo-yo or be left behind, because we all think that yo-yos are very important and we use them constantly to do everything instead of using our hands! Or we could not be interested in that, because it's stupid.
- unified101 21d agoThe important question is: Will my work competitor also resist AI? We have no way to organize this, and hence, as they say, "resistance is futile".
- lnkl 20d agoThe point is, you will be better than your competitor if you resist it.
- Foobar8568 20d agoHow so?
- discreteevent 20d agoBecause you will have an understanding of the complete system. Your domain and the code. This means that you can be more creative with it and also get yourself out of a mess if it occurs (which it will). From what I have seen AI doesn't understand the code. But even if you argue that it does understand the code it definitely doesn't understand the domain because it's only input channel is a stream of text and you didn't even type in a "full" text representation of the domain. So you remain the only thing that can understand the whole system. If your competitor has no one (or no team) who can put together a full understanding of the system then you will have an advantage.
- dist-epoch 20d agoYou will have a good understanding of a system which is 20 times smaller in size/features. For a todo app that is fine. But for most projects your competitor will leave you in the dust with the speed at which they add features. Same story, 25 years ago: > But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too. https://paulgraham.com/avg.html https://paulgraham.com/avg.html
- borzi 20d agoWhy? AI is enriching my life and letting me focus on solving hard problems. I don't believe in the sentience crap and am just using it at face value for what it is, a useful productivity tool. Every software developer's main purpose is to automate and reduce the amount of boring manual labour required. By this logic, should people in the past have "resisted the software development department"?
- alansaber 20d agoPragmatist meets moralist
- czpl 20d agoWhy are we glossing over the fact that it's all trained on stolen code, stolen art, stolen books? It's unethical to use it, it's unethical to take money for it. It should be either free or killed. I really don't understand why we just collectively accepted that.
- sdcfgy 20d agoNot all of us did.
- mapontosevenths 20d agoI gloss over it because it's an argument that makes no sense to me. Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists. Ai is progress. Further, the works it creates are fully transformative. It isn't just spitting out Harry Potter verbatim, it's making new things from it. To me, this argument is like staying that if you read Winnie The Pooh as a child then Milne owns your artistic output for life, because one of your many influences might have been his work. It just seems obvious at face value.
- pydry 20d ago>Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists. Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences? Whatever it started out as (and I have my doubts it was ever a tool to help artists), it's now primarily a tool corporations use to milk creativity for profit and squash it where it might interfere with that profit.
- mapontosevenths 20d ago> Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences? No, but that needs new laws. Not an abuse of the old ones justified under the thinnest of pretenses. I don't think that folks stop to consider what bending copyright law into these weird shapes to meet their ends will do to other aspects of copyright. For example, sampling in music. How is that different from AI generated music? If anything AI uses LESS of any individual song. You can't just say "no derivative works." That would fully halt progress on many fronts.
- DannyBee 20d agoI guess i'll give a super-unpopular take. Listening to developers complain about AI doing things to their life and the world at large when they have spent the past 30 years automating just about everyone else they could out of a job (Since this has been one of the primary uses of software) is ... something else. It sounds like a a a mix of hubris, arrogance, cognitive dissonance, ignorance, etc. Only when it started to affect their world did any developers start to care, and even then nobody seems to ever stop and say "hey what were we doing the past 30 years, maybe we should think about this", it's instead "hey look at what these other people are doing with AI, someone should think about this". It feels like, to paraphrase a movie quote - "Nobody gets to destroy jobs and the the world but us"
- draw_down 20d ago[dead]
- joenada 20d agoThe difference is that automated tasks are (or should be) deterministic and reproducible, and taking up time devs could be using to do their actual job (writing code, solving technical problems, etc).
- fpauser 20d agoGood argument. In the end we are all ignorant opportunists.
- alansaber 20d agoAnd how could we not be? The world is unfathomably big and complex, and each of us wants their own narrative (well that, and to economically support loved ones, etc...)
- keiferski 20d agoYup. If current-gen AIs were capable of writing articles, but not code, then devs wouldn't care at all. None of these articles would exist, and some new variation of "learn to code" would be the snarky reply to nay-sayers. In fact, we already pretty much have proof of this: devs didn't care when software destroyed the journalism industry twenty years ago. Turns out that people ultimately only care when their only jobs are on the line.
- cautiouscat 20d agoI admittedly flip-flop on this quite a bit. I use LLMs in my work and for a bunch of pet projects I don’t really care much about. For the pet projects, it’s not really a big deal. I’m the only user, and I as the user don’t care how it works under the hood. Work is a different story. I have never felt more disconnected from my work than in the last 6-8 months. It takes a huge mental toll to read into our code and figure stuff out, almost like I just got hired and I’m working on new code for the first time. I’m asked to read “specs” written by LLMs that are unintelligible and I find my brain disconnecting immediately. Tickets, also written by LLMs pose the same problem. I’m asking teammates questions because I want their answer and I’m told to just ask Claude. None of this feels good, it may be where the industry is heading but as a professional it feels wrong.
- orphea 20d agoWhat I hate the most is people vomiting AI slop communicating with others. I have teammates who decided that an agent producing a wall of text summarizing changes in a pull request instead of a simple "LGTM" is a good idea. I have teammates who talk using AI almost exclusively (you can see a small tag "Sent using Claude" or "Sent using Cursor" under their messages)
- bayindirh 20d ago> I have teammates who talk using Claude almost exclusively. If somebody told that humans are a form of creature which can forego their most important and powerful capabilities just for convenience, I'd call the person saying that batshit insane, but here we are... I have no more words for this.
- kg 20d agoPosing a well considered, concise and precise question only to get a wall of Claudeisms in response from a colleague is always demoralizing. Then you have to play the guessing game of 'is this detail in the response true, or did Claude make it up for them?'
- rDr4g0n 20d agoa teammate who exclusively writes slop PRs and copy/paste LLM responses to slack has demonstrated they can be replaced by an LLM integration to slack and github. also, take some fucking pride in your work.
- ftomassetti 20d agoI see good ethical reasons to be against AI, but I see no reasons why “resisting” would lead to anything but irrelevance. So I think this is terrible advice
- vouwfietsman 20d agoBad blog. > I do not come to you with clean hands. > I am not here to dictate morality These two things contradict eachother. > My primary focus here will be software development > Environmental Harm > Stanley Tucci These three things also contradict eachother. > If we lived in a post-scarcity Maybe this is your real problem, and you're just confusing cause and effect. > We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die Hyperbole. > Look up the “Eliza effect”. Even the weakest conceivable program like this was seductive. These new ones are masters of seduction. Sounds like software development alright. This person has a familiar name, I'm sure he is amazing at something. This blog is not the peak of his work. EDIT: > I quote “AI” to emphasize that these things are not intelligent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- bayindirh 20d agoI don't think the take is bad, and what he says is right. Maybe we shall look at the substance rather than the artistic properties of their words? I was recently discussing with someone who wanted to put all datacenters into AI datacenter basket, and inadvertently labeled all consolidated computing bad. That person, claiming otherwise was not knowing what they were talking about, But while having nuances, AI datacenters and heavy AI usage is harmful to the world we live in, as a whole. We should come into terms with this and go from there.
- vouwfietsman 20d agoNo, what he says is not right. Parts of it are, but broadly (as I pointed out) he conflates a lot of things together that have no business being in the same sentence. 1. Reducing/replacing/automating highly complex work is fundamentally a good thing, it might be the case that society is not ready for the consequences of it, those are two separate things. Concluding that millions of people will die, is simply hyperbole. 2. Saying that AI is not intelligent is at best a non-sequitur but more likely intended misrepresentation and goalpost moving 3. The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI. This says nothing about AI in the general sense, only how we produce it today. This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off if cars were never invented? None of this is about the 'artistic properties of their words', it is precisely about the core content being objectionable.
- cfiggers 20d agoI'm sympathetic to the author's core position. I think LLMs as they're currently deployed are doing net societal harm so far. For example, for every React app whistled up in five hours, there's a high schooler or college student out there sleepwalking through their foundational courses and being set up to catastrophically fail upon trying to enter the job market. But I think it's important for the quality of public discourse that we forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position (whether I personally agree with that position or not). A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position. So with that preamble, some constructive criticism (very well-intentioned): > I am not exaggerating: We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die. On this one you are, in fact, exaggerating (certainly with "millions," likely with "thousands" as well). The overwhelming majority of people who lose their job for whatever reason (and there are many reasons, not just this one issue) fall back on a support network of their family and friends while they "get back on their feet" by pivoting to another job or form of employment (sometimes branching into entrepreneurship, for example). The alternative to employment at whatever FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company someone was laid off from is not "death." It is typically "some, sometimes quite significant, discomfort." Granted "AI Layoffs" are starting to ripple out beyond FAANG, but the story is similar in other industries. If "layoffs kill people" is the moral hill we choose to plant our flag on, then mustn't we also campaign with equal vociferousness against all the other causes of layoffs in general? Since to do otherwise is to sit by while those laid off allegedly die in droves of thousands or perhaps millions? It also occurs to me that this framing ("AI causes layoffs") also gives incompetent and unaccountable executives a pass by pinning the actual harm done by irresponsible layoffs (which to be clear, is not none!) on "the AI" rather than on the leaders who are in the positions to actually decide what happens in their organizations. I think the argument is much stronger if we talk about the aggregate cost to humanity being paid in terms of displacement, life disruption, and curtailed opportunity (especially for juniors). We should not make the "toxic escalationism" move of equivocating things we don't like with negligent homicide, even if it makes for a punchy one-liner.
- vouwfietsman 20d ago> For example, for every React app whistled up in five hours, there's a high schooler or college student out there sleepwalking through their foundational courses and being set up to catastrophically fail upon trying to enter the job market. Oh man how did we ever survive calculators.
- llm_nerd 20d agoI'm not sure how valuable this advice is. From what I can see, Jeffries hasn't been involved in actual software development for decades (he is ~87 and has a lot of great accomplishments under his belt, but in the year 2026, 0% of his income relies upon him generating solutions for paying clients in a competitive space, and probably hasn't for a long, long time). For some reason HN readers love this sort of content, largely by periphery players who mostly think it gives them an angle for clicks. And, I mean, as someone who uses lots of AI to delight clients and stay competitive, you be you. It leaves more for me.
- ChickeNES 20d ago> From what I can see, Jeffries hasn't been involved in actual software development for decades (he is ~87 and has a lot of great accomplishments under his belt, but in the year 2026, 0% of his income relies upon him generating solutions for paying clients in a competitive space, and probably hasn't for a long, long time). I had to google him to even figure out why he's relevant (his About Me on the linked site is literally "I’m Ron Jeffries, the same old one. This is my new site. It’s where all my new articles will go" very helpful smh.) Xtreme Programming? When was that last relevant, 20 years ago?
- rDr4g0n 20d agowe can all debate the finer points but in any case "resist" is exactly the right message. AI companies are racing to build empires on products built on the whole of human writing, charging rent to access it, then leveraging their scale to improve the model. the big data era was a gold rush for greed. the AI era is has upgraded to a warp engine for greed. the harms and manipulation of social media took ages to enter the social discourse, and are just now turning into legal action. AIs warp-engine speed guarantees greed will fuel warp-engine scale harm before society catches up, and before America's greedy ass politicians are cornered into trying to do something. resist fucking greed. if you gotta use LLMs, at least don't pay an AI company.
- ChickeNES 20d agoGreed is good. You're on a website run by a VC firm lmao
- api 20d agoI criticize stuff like this a lot. I criticize the doomer “bomb data centers” rationalist cult even more. At the same time, maybe I shouldn’t, and I sometimes find all the AI skeptic and even doomer discourse heartening. We really messed up with the Internet. I’m an Xennial and I had a minor role in it but I was there and it feels like the Internet was “our project.” I was literally born with the PC, discovered BBSes as a tween and the pre web Internet as a teen. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the net is bad. I think it’s more positive than not (still). But my god the addiction and disinformation and brain rot and propaganda and child predators and you get the idea. The addiction is the big one, the root of all evil. “Maximizing engagement” is destroying civilization. But I digress. Back in the 90s, nobody talked about this. Well not nobody but maybe this one person pissing into the hurricane. Discourse on the net and computing in general was 99.99% breathlessly positive bordering on delusional utopian. We didn’t see it coming. Nobody was talking about how this could go off the rails and do horrible things. Well almost nobody. I guess dystopian cyberpunk nailed some of it but it was too much in the realm of fiction. It wasn’t part of the real world discourse which was all Mondo 2000 and early Wired and open source movement and PC industry optimism. So ironically all the anti AI discourse makes me cautiously more optimistic about AI. We are talking about the risks, the downsides, the ways it could go majorly bad. Maybe we will notice if it does and correct. If we’d done that with the net, noticed that maybe addictionmaxxing apps and sites was going to work “too well” or that flattening the discourse to 140 characters would harm the collective mind, things might be a little better today. Even if we go in with one eye a little open and correct a little bit, that could make a big difference. Could have with the net too.
- keiferski 20d agoI can buy the idea that AIs are making people a lot lazier intellectually, on average. But I do think that for the atypical user that is "information-hungry," AIs are a massive productivity booster. I've probably asked ChatGPT 1,000 questions over the last 2 years that I otherwise would have needed to spend 15+ minutes researching. Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up. The danger is just when you start using AI but otherwise continue doing exactly what you were doing before.
- lukan 20d ago"The danger is just when you start using AI but otherwise continue doing exactly what you were doing before." You mean letting AI write the code, but still trying to write the same code by hand? Joke aside, this is still what I am struggling with. I don't really code anymore - not worth it, when I want something done, but I miss it.
- keiferski 20d agoI'm not a programmer so I can't really relate directly, I was replying more to the idea of using AI as an information-gathering tool. I guess the analogy could be: with AI you should be doing more complex and more (quantity) programming than you did before. But don't quote me.
- lukan 20d ago" the idea of using AI as an information-gathering tool." Programming is mostly exactly that. You gather want information you need to get the job done. What are the names of the API you call, what are good patterns for this kind of situation etc. But your point still stands as in use of AI can make those skills detoriate. And regarding to coding, that you don't know anymore what is in your codebase, how it actually works. Can happen fast if you let AI run in auto mode.
- Planktonne 20d ago> I do think that for the atypical user that is "information-hungry," > Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up. You're putting yourself in the group of people who are 'information-hungry', but your own evidence suggests that's not the case.
- wartywhoa23 20d agoCount me in. I rejected my promotion (losing 2x gain in salary) from sysadmin to developer at my work exactly because of AI that ate it alive during the last year. Our devs have been outright complaining about getting dumb, losing touch with the codebase and getting lost in weekly switching between models/agents that have been gushing as if from a firehose, but the management (read investors) knows better and there's a culture of self-censoring the opposition to AI among employees.
- renegat0x0 20d agoThere are various approaches toward AI. Some are radical. I often found extremism to be wrong in most cases. I have a suspicion that people who reject AI related stuff is just scared under the hood. They fight against AI because of the fear against loosing job, money, or control. There were many manual jobs. Lets say carpenters. They had manually created things, often pieces of art. Now many things are soulless, created by factory output, and by robots. It is true that we lost some artistry. It is true that every line of code will not be a work of art. There is no going back though. Adapt.
- wartywhoa23 20d ago> ... people who reject AI related stuff is just scared under the hood. They fight against AI because of the fear ... Oh yes, buddy, those stupid people should better act out of love, not fear, right? > There is no going back though. Adapt. “He who would live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has no right to exist.” - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925.
- adamtaylor_13 20d agoDude said "Adapt" and you really pulled out Hitler. Oi. Discussion on this site gets more difficult each day. Instead of pointing out where you disagreed you just pulled out the most egregious appeal to authority and said, "oH yEaH?"
- wartywhoa23 20d agoPointing it out for you: the inescapable "X is here, adapt" is absolutely fascist in its nature. It's as if all man-made change was placed in the same ballpark as tectonic movements and extinction events - as a blind force of nature. Humans are given intelligence not only to construct things, but also not to construct things that better be not, FFS.
- adamtaylor_13 20d ago
- adamtaylor_13 20d agoI must again point out that we're not even certain yet that we're "losing" any programming capability, and we're not certain the tradeoff isn't worth it. All of these arguments presuppose we're losing something that's not worth losing. I want someone to start one square earlier and argue to me why that matters. I've read enough of these "your skills are atrophying!" arguments; I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did through a business that delights my clients. Why should I care about my "skills" if I'm still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life? I just don't think it's that serious.
- mirror_neuron 20d agoI think there's a key difference of perspective hidden in your response. You're a business owner; you sell outcomes to your customers. Even if we suppose that skill atrophy is real, it's easy to see how that tradeoff would be worth it to you, and not to someone who is an individual contributor in a corporate environment. For an IC in a corporate environment, the accumulation of portable skills is an important part of what makes the job worthwhile. For what it's worth: I went freelance right around the time that agents were starting to become extremely capable, and I've never enjoyed my work more. I'd believe the claim that my hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree, but I'm also developing other skills that have much higher leverage in my new setting.
- glimshe 20d ago> "hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree" It really depends on how you define "coding", right? Throughout my career coding meant many different things. In the beginning, coding was really Assembly. Then it became C. Then C++/OOP. Then Java/C# and managed memory languages. Then Python etc. These languages aren't the same thing with different syntax. The details that matter in the act of "coding" changed dramatically. It really went from "bit thinking" in the assembly era to stitching open source libraries in the Python era. Many would excel in one paradigm but not the other. Coding with AI requires a different set of skills. I see the proper command of AIs through prompts and human-made specs as hand coding as much as building line-by-line micro algorithms in Assembly. I think the noise in this discussion comes from putting vibe coding and AI-assisted coding in the same bucket. I'd argue that pure vibe coding is perhaps the one thing that doesn't resemble traditional coding as much. But the AI coding approach where people gradually build applications through the accumulation of components and layers built with heavy AI assistance is hand coding. I can see that relying on AI assistance for too long could atrophy the skill of manual line-by-line mental model transcription, but I never really cared too much for this skill. Once I have the right data structures and algorithms in my head, actually entering the if, else, class, struct, for, etc statements are a giant annoyance.
- Vaslo 20d agoAll I’m seeing is mediocre or inexperienced coders executing at a similar level to traditional coders, with traditional coders not liking it. Im guessing this is similar to any situation where new tech replacing old tech, and old tech potentially empire building to protect themselves with articles like “resist the helpful new technology!”
- etrautmann 20d ago"A real experiment: “Devise an honest AI experiment in your department, measuring real costs and real benefits. Try, honestly, to find all the flaws with this AI stuff.” This does not seem like a honest framing of an experiment... Wouldn't that be to create a true trial to assess strengths and weaknesses, or to figure out in what ways AI is effective for your team as a tool?
- williebeek 20d ago"I do not use any of the programming “AIs”" There is your problem. You're making a case against technology that you don't understand. You haven't fixed esoteric bugs using AI or created whole new applications with AI. You haven't seen AI building new functionality in minutes instead of days of manual labor, at even better code quality. Replace the word "AI" with Television/radio/internet/railways and you see how ridiculous this blog is.
- bitbasher 20d agoI don't think it's so crazy to resist television, radio or the internet. Our literacy rates would likely be a lot higher!
- mancerayder 20d agoReposting something I wrote on the topic of AI reducing not increasing domain knowledge in companies: I'm seeing it at small scale around me. I view it as a Dunning Kruger enablement - AI gives confident answers and long-winded explanations on domains distinct from the person asking, making it hard to verify. The user of AI now feel they have replaced someone's advice. I see it in Technology at work (particularly in architecture) but also in non work things like plumbing, law, medicine. We're all doctors and physical therapists now, for example. Also we don't need psychologists, either. Everyone is obsolete. Just upload the MRI report to Claude and let it tell you what you should do. When people talked about AI being a catastrophe to befall us, I thought people were picturing killer robots. What's happening instead is something else - the enablement of stupidity.
- rsynnott 20d ago> I do not use any of the programming “AIs”, not even whatever is built into JetBrains IDEs The JetBrains one is particularly bad, in that it seems very clearly worse than their (excellent, arguably best-in-class) deterministic autocomplete.