We mourn our craft

Sure, if you have the money, get a carpenter to build your kitchen from solid oak. Most people buy MDF, or even worse, chipboard. IKEA, etc. In fact, not too long ago, I had a carpenter install prefabricated cabinets in a new utility room. The cabinets were pre-assembled, and he installed them on the wall in the right order and did the detailed fittings. He didn’t do a great job, and I could have done better, albeit much slower. I use handsaws simply because I’m afraid of circular saws, but I digress.

A lot of us here are like carpenters before IKEA and prefabricated cabinets, and we are just now facing a new reality. We scream “it is not the same”. It indeed isn’t for us. But the consumers will get better value for money. Not quality, necessarily, but better value.

How about us? We will eventually be kitchen designers (aka engineers, architects), or kitchen installers (aka programmers). And yes, compared to the golden years, those jobs will suck.

But someone, somewhere, will be making bespoke, luxury furniture that only a few can afford. Or maybe we will keep doing it anyway because our daily jobs suck, until we decide to stop. And that is when the craft will die.

The world will just become less technical, as is the case with other industrial goods. Who here even knows how a combustion engine works? Who knows how fabric is made, or even how a sawing machine works? We are very much like the mechanics of yesteryear before cars became iPads on wheels.

As much as we hate it, we need to accept that coding has peaked. Juniors will be replaced by AI, experts will retire. Innovation will be replaced by processes. And we must accept our place in history.

  > it's still just six months away

I think it is one thing for the average person to buy into the promises but I've yet to understand why that happens here. Or why that happens within our community of programmers. It is one thing for non-experts to fall for obtuse speculative claims, but it is another for experts. I'm excited for autonomous vehicles, but in 2016 is was laughable to think they're around the corner and only 10 years later does such a feat seem to start looking like it's actually a few years away.

Why do we only evaluate people/claims on their hits and not their misses? It just encourages people to say anything and everything, because eventually one will be right. It's 6 months away because eventually it will actually be 6 months away. But is it 6 months away because it is actually 6 months away or because we want it to be? I thought the vibe coder's motto is "I just care that it works." Honestly, I think that's the problem. Everyone care's about if it works or not and that's the primary concern of all sides of the conversation here. So is it 6 months away because it is 6 months away or is it 6 months away because you've convinced yourself it is 6 months away. You got good reasons for believing that, you got the evidence, but evidence for a claim is meaningless without comparing to evidence that counters the claim.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

When I write a program, I understand the architecture of the computer, I understand the assembly, I understand the compiler, and I understand the code. There are things that I don't understand, and as I push to understand them, I am rewarded by being able to do more things. In other words, Understanding is both beautiful and incentivized.

When making something with an LLM, I am disincentivized from actually understanding what is going on, because understanding is very slow, and the whole point of using AI is speed. The only time when I need to really understand something is when something goes wrong, and as the tool improves, this need will shrink. In the normal and intended usage, I only need to express a desire to achieve a result. Now, I can push against the incentives of the system. But for one, most people will not do that at all; and for two, the tools we use inevitably shape us. I don't like the shape into which these tools are forming me - the shape of an incurious, dull, impotent person who can only ask for someone else to make something happen for me. Remember, The Medium Is The Message, and the Medium here is, Ask, and ye shall receive.

The fact that AI use leads to a reduction in Understanding is not only obvious, but also studies have shown the same. People who can't see this are refusing to acknowledge the obvious, in my opinion. They wouldn't disagree that having someone else do your homework for you would mean that you didn't learn anything. But somehow when an LLM tool enters the picture, it's different. They're a manager now instead of a lowly worker. The problem with this thinking is that, in your example, moving from say Assembly to C automates tedium to allow us to reason on a higher level. But LLMs are automating reasoning itself. There is no higher level to move to. The reasoning you do now while using AI is merely a temporary deficiency in the tool. It's not likely that you or I are the .01% of people who can create something truly novel that is not already sufficiently compressed into the model. So enjoy that bit of reasoning while you can, o thou Man of the Gaps.

They say that writing is God's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is. AI tools discourage one from writing. They encourage us to prompt, read, and critique. But this does not result in the same Understanding as writing does. And so our thinking will be, become, and remain vapid, sloppy, inarticulate, invalid, impotent. Welcome to the future.

Now the determinism is gone and computers are gaining the worst qualities of people.

My only sanctuary in life is slipping away from me. And I have to hear people tell me I'm wrong who aren't even sympathetic to how this affects me.