The whole "it's turned political so it's bad" brush off that this article anchors itself on is crazy. I understand many Americans can't understand what it's like to be under threat, but I'm not pumping money into massive organizations that pay federal American taxes. And seriously, f*ck you for insinuating I should.
AI Tribalism
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: AI Tribalism
#32What 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…
Your work will eventually be driven by the same economics as the industry as a whole, project estimates 12 months from now will be done based on how long it takes a dev with full LLM backing, not your current speed. Then you need to be prepared to work at that speed.
Re: AI Tribalism
#33What 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…
You don’t have to, of course, but you probably will if you want to be competitive in a professional capacity in the future.
Not doing so seems a bit like a farmer ploughing fields and harvesting crops by hand while seeking to remain competitive with modern machinery, surely?
Re: AI Tribalism
#34What 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…
You don’t have to! Enjoy it! Just don’t bank on getting paid for it indefinitely. That’s the aspect of it that’s causing so much consternation.
Re: AI Tribalism
#35> “What about security?” [..] “What about performance?” [..] “What about accessibility?”
TBH i'm fine with AI but my main concern isn't any of these issues (even if they suck now -though supposedly Claude Code doesn't- they can get better in the future).
My main concern, by far, is control and availability. I do not mind using some AI, but i do mind using AI that runs on someone else's computer and isn't under my control - and i can, or have a chance at, understanding/tweaking/fixing (so all my AI use is done via inference engines that are written in C++ that i compiled myself and are running on my PC).
Of course the same logic applies to anything where that makes sense (i.e. all my software runs locally, the only things i use online/cloud versions for are things which are inherently about networking - e.g. chat, forums, etc, but even then i use -say- a desktop-based email client instead of webmail).
Re: AI Tribalism
#36This is kind of where I'm at. I don't think everything is for certain though. I think it's 50/50 on whether Anthropic/whoever figures out how to turn them into more than a boilerplate generator. The imprecision of LLMs is real, and a serious problem. And I think a lot of the engineering improvements (little s-curve gains or whatever) have caused more and more of these. Every step or improvement has some randomness/lo…
> I do think there's a bit of an experience divide here, where people more experienced have been down the path of a codebase degrading until it's just too much to salvage – so I think that's part of why you see so much pushback.
When I look back over my career to date there are so many examples of nightmare degraded codebases that I would love to have hit with a bunch of coding agents.
I remember the pain of upgrading a poorly-tested codebase from Python 2 to Python 3 - months of work that only happened because one brave engineer pulled a skunkworks project on it.
One of my favorite things about working with coding agents is that my tolerance for poorly tested, badly structured code has gone way down. I used to have to take on technical debt because I couldn't schedule the time to pay it down. Now I can use agents to eliminate that almost as soon as I spot it.
Re: AI Tribalism
#37What 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…
It almost reeks of insecurity from the Agent Evangelists and I wonder if all the "fear" and "uncertainty" they talk about is just projecting.
That's probably true on some level for some evangelists, but it's probably just as true that some people who are a bit scared of AI read every positive post about it as some sort of propaganda trying to change their mind.
Sometimes it's fine to just let people talk about things they like. You don't know what camp someone is in so it's good to read their post as charitably as possible.
Re: AI Tribalism
#38> I can already hear the cries of protest from other engineers who (like me) are clutching onto their hard-won knowledge. You mean the knowledge that Claude has stolen from all of us and regurgitated into your projects without any copyright attributions? > But I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand That feeling is mutual.
We did the same as devopers before Claude. We would copy paste from stack overflow. Now this process is heavily automated.
...from answers that were publicly shared without license. It's not the same thing, even though every LOVES to make this argument.
Also: Over the past 20 years, I could count the number of times on one hand that I was been able to get away with out-right copy/paste from SO.
Re: AI Tribalism
#39> 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?
$1000 a month to make someone whose being $10,000 a month even 1.5x more productive is well worth the price.
Re: AI Tribalism
#40What 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…
> Why do I _have_ to give it a go?
Because your boss is going to want you capable of using these things effectively even as shortly as 1-2 years from now? If not them, then their boss.