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My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

matthewrocklin.com

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Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#101

Post by aspenmartin »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #100
aspenmartin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a coding agent or LLM is a different technology than a compiler and that the delta in industry standard workflow looks different isn’t quite my point though: things change. Norms change. That’s the real crux of my argument. > But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against…

> Norms change. That’s the real crux of my argument. Novelty isn't necessarily better as a replacement of what exists. Example: blockchain as fancy database, NFTs, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, etc.

No it’s certainly not, and if you do want to lump coding agents into blockchain and NFTs that’s of course your choice but those things did not spur trillions of dollars of infra buildout and reshape entire geopolitical landscapes and have billions of active users. If you want to say: coding agents are not truly a net positive right now, that’s I think a perfectly reasonable opinion to hold (though I disagree personally). If you want to say coding agents are about as vapid as NFTs that to me is a bit less defensible

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#102

Post by jaredcwhite »

I'm so completely over these types of articles. Just as the AI techbros want to convince people that "the genie is out of the bottle" and that these services & practices are inevitable, it is also the case the the cohort of people who explicitly eschew using genAI is significant and growing. Nobody is being convinced reading this…like "wow, I vowed never to use genAI as a software developer, and then suddenly I read this article and now I've seen the light!"

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#103

Post by jaredcwhite »

pixl97 wrote: post #77
NoraCodes wrote: post #23

I don't care that AI development is more fun for the author. I wouldn't care if all the evidence pointed toward AI development being easier, faster, and less perilous. The externalities, at present, are unacceptable. We are restructuring our society in a way that makes individuals even less free and a few large companies even more powerful and wealthy, just to save time writing code, and I don't understand why people…

>hat makes individuals even less free and a few large companies even more powerful and wealthy You're what, 250 years behind at this point? Since the dawn of the industrial revolution there is a general trend that fewer can make more with less. And really even bigger than AI were fast fuel based transportation and then global networks. Long before we started worrying about genAI, businesses have been consolidating do…

Saying "well the world sucks so what's new" isn't a perspective a lot of folks are going to resonate with. Just because we can recognize troubling patterns from the past in the present doesn't mean we just volunteer to lie down and take a boot to the neck. Positive change is always possible. Always.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#104

Post by dang »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

Fun is a feeling, so one can't really have an argument that something is fun or not - that would be a category error no?

You've got a good analogy there though, because many great and/or famous painters have used teams of apprentices to produce the work that bears their (the famous artist's) name.

I'm reminded also of chefs and sous-chefs, and of Harlan Mill's famous "chief surgeon plus assistants" model of software development (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_programmer_team). The difference in our present moment, of course, is that the "assistants" are mechanical ones.

(as for how fun this is or isn't - personally I can't tell yet. I don't enjoy the writing part as much - I'd rather write code than write prompts - but then also, I don't enjoy writing grunt code / boilerplate etc., and there's less of that now, - and I don't enjoy having to learn tedious details of some tech I'm not actually interested in in order to get an auxiliary feature that I want, and there's orders of magnitude less of that now, - and then there are the projects and programs that simply would never exist at all if not for this new mechanical help in the earliest stages, and that's fun - it's a lot of variables to add up and it's all in flux. Like the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell! - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/04/02/early-tell/)

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#105

Post by dionian »

thewebguyd wrote: post #96
CharlesW wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. Some people find software architecture and systems thinking more fun than coding. Some people find conducting more fun than playing an instrument. It's not too mysterious.

I am one of those, but that's why I went into the ops side of things and not dev, although the two sides have been merging for a while now and even though I deal with infrastructure, I do so by writing code. I don't mind ops code though. I dislike building software as in products, or user-facing apps but I don't mind glue code and scripting/automation. Don't ask me to do leetcode though, I'll fail and hate the experi…

i like delivering value, AI lets me do that better on low risk projects very fast

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#106

Post by dang »

falloutx wrote: post #69
llmslave2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news: the evidence points to it being slower than non-ai workflows. So we're destroying our economy, society, and planet to make worse software, more slowly! :)

we are also making all software much worse at the same time. I dont think every app needs AI but apparently they do. Notion used to be a Zen writing app back in the day, canva used to an app where you can do simple graphics without a complicated tools panel.

I think Pete's article last year made a good case for regarding this as the "horseless carriage" stage, i.e. growing pains around how to use a new technology effectively.

AI Horseless Carriages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43773813 - April 2025 (478 comments)

Or maybe it's analogous to the skeuomorphic phase of desktop software. Clumsy application of previous paradigm to new one; new wine in old bottles; etc.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#107

Post by dang »

llmslave2 wrote: post #74
falloutx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we are also making all software much worse at the same time. I dont think every app needs AI but apparently they do. Notion used to be a Zen writing app back in the day, canva used to an app where you can do simple graphics without a complicated tools panel.

[flagged]

> Disgusting work

Please don't do this here. Thoughtful criticism is fine on this site but snark and name-calling are not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: on closer look, you've been breaking the HN guidelines so badly and so consistently that I've banned the account. Single-purpose accounts aren't allowed here in any case.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#108

Post by raincole »

Verdex wrote: post #99
BeetleB wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We, as SW engineers, have been doing that to many industries for the last 40+ years. It's silly and selfish to draw the line now that we're in the crosshairs.

I've spent my 20 year career working largely in medical software. The only jobs I've been replacing are pancreas that stop functioning correctly. Maybe don't speak for all of us.

Computers themselves replaced computers (yeah, a job title). Your medical software certainly automatizes someone else's job, otherwise no one will pay you to write them. You just don't care about them.

Or you do, but you believe it's worth it because your software helped more patients, or improved the overall efficiency and therefore created more demand and jobs - a belief many pro-AI people hold as well.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#109

Post by diamond559 »

quotemstr wrote: post #4
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

> not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning. What if I have a block of marble and a vision for the statue struggling from inside it and I use an industrial CNC lathe to do my marble carving for me. Have I sculpted something? Am I an artist? What if I'm an architect? Brunelleschi didn't personally lay all the bricks for his famous dome in Flore…

Did the CNC lathe decide where to make the cuts based on patterns from real artists it was trained on to regurgitate a bland copy of real artists work?

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#110

Post by vercaemert »

dang wrote: post #104
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

Fun is a feeling, so one can't really have an argument that something is fun or not - that would be a category error no? You've got a good analogy there though, because many great and/or famous painters have used teams of apprentices to produce the work that bears their (the famous artist's) name. I'm reminded also of chefs and sous-chefs, and of Harlan Mill's famous "chief surgeon plus assistants" model of software…

yeah, well said

i like what software can do, i don't like writing it

i can try to give the benefit of the doubt to people saying they don't see improvements (and assume there's just a communication breakdown)

i've personally built three poc tools that proved my ideas didn't work and then tossed the poc tools. ive had those ideas since i knew how to program, i just didn't have the time and energy to see them through.

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