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AI Tribalism

nolanlawson.com

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Re: AI Tribalism

#11

Post by sph »

> I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it.

Imagine if we had to suffer these posts, day in and day out, when React or Kubernetes or any other piece of technology got released. This kind of proselyting that is the very reason there is tribalism with AI.

I don't want to use it, just like I don't want to use many technologies that got released, while I have adopted others. Can we please move on, or do we have to suffer this kind of moaning until everybody has converted to the new religion?

Never in my 20 years in this career have I seen such maniacal obsession as it has been over the past few years, the never-ending hype that have transformed this forum into a place I do not recognise, into a career I don't recognise, where people you used to respect [1] have gone into a psychosis and dream of ferrets, and if you dare being skeptical about any of it, you are bombarded with "I used to dislike AI, now I have seen the light and if you haven't I'm sorry for you. Please reconsider." stories like this one.

Jesus, live and let live. Stop trying to make AI a religion. It's posts like this one that create the sort of tribalism they rail against, into a battle between the "enlightened few" versus the silly Luddites.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46744397

Re: AI Tribalism

#13

Post by ls612 »

I saw a similar inflection point to this guy personally, in 2024 the models weren’t good enough for me to use them for coding much, but around the time of o1/o3/Gemini 2.5 was when things changed and I haven’t looked back since.

Re: AI Tribalism

#14

Post by XenophileJKO »

Sharlin wrote: post #9

> I’m mostly […] doing routine tasks that it’s slow at, like refactoring or renaming. So… humans are now doing the stuff that computers are supposed to do and be good at?

No I think he means using a refactor tool in the IDE. Though really all we need to do is expose an API for the agent, which we should do.

Re: AI Tribalism

#15

Post by ls612 »

alansaber wrote: post #10
AstroBen wrote: post #8

> The models don’t have to get better, the costs don’t have to come down (heck, they could even double and it’d still be worth it) What worries me about this is that it might end up putting up a barrier for those that can't afford it. What do things look like if models cost $1000 or more a month and genuinely provide 3x productivity improvements?

They want you to have to pay for an advantage. If a single AI provider gets enough advantage, they'll be able to charge whatever they want.

Given that models seem to be converging to similar capabilities and that there are plenty of open weights models out there market competition should drive prices towards the marginal cost of inference.

Re: AI Tribalism

#16

Post by Sharlin »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #14
Sharlin wrote: post #9

> I’m mostly […] doing routine tasks that it’s slow at, like refactoring or renaming. So… humans are now doing the stuff that computers are supposed to do and be good at?

No I think he means using a refactor tool in the IDE. Though really all we need to do is expose an API for the agent, which we should do.

Yeah. Lots of talk about agents and whatever, but then you lack minimal integration with the most basic of tools?

Re: AI Tribalism

#17

Post by mromnia »

justkys wrote: post #3

I agree with the thrust of this but: > The models don’t have to get better, the costs don’t have to come down (heck, they could even double and it’d still be worth it), and we don’t need another breakthrough. The costs should come down. I don’t know what costs this post refers to, but the cost of using Claude is almost definitely hiding the actual cost. That said, I’m still hoping we ensure our public models out ther…

Considering what's happening with PC component prices, it's likely we won't have anything to run those public models on anyway. Everything might become permanently cloud-only at some point.

Re: AI Tribalism

#18

Post by skybrian »

AstroBen wrote: post #8

> The models don’t have to get better, the costs don’t have to come down (heck, they could even double and it’d still be worth it) What worries me about this is that it might end up putting up a barrier for those that can't afford it. What do things look like if models cost $1000 or more a month and genuinely provide 3x productivity improvements?

If they're paying you, they can afford it. Also, even if running large teams of coding agents becomes practical, you don't necessarily need more than one or two to learn.

Re: AI Tribalism

#19

Post by WA »

sph wrote: post #11

> I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Imagine if we had to suffer these posts, day in and day out, when React or Kubernetes or any other piece of technology got released. This kind of proselyting th…

The author of that post Nolan is a pretty interesting guy and deep in the web tech stack. He’s really one of the last people I’d call "tribal", especially since you mention React. This guy hand-writes his web components and files bug reports to browsers and writes his own memory leak detection lib and so on.

If such a guy is slowly dipping his toes into AI and comes to the conclusion he just posted, you should take a step back and consider your position.

Re: AI Tribalism

#20

Post by lins1909 »

What if I just enjoy how I work at the moment and don't really care about this stuff? Why do I _have_ to give it a go? Why don't LLM evangelists accept this as an option?

Choosing not to use AI agents is maybe the only tool position I feel I've had to defend or justify in over a decade of doing this, and it's so bizarre to me. It almost reeks of insecurity from the Agent Evangelists and I wonder if all the "fear" and "uncertainty" they talk about is just projecting.

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