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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#241

Post by eqvinox »

> but the plagiarism […] Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

Speeding is quite common too, yet if you get caught — especially overdoing it — you'll have a problem.

Also, in this case, presumably everything produced with AI is fair game too? The argument being made here isn't even "it's not plagiarism", rather "it's plagiarism but I don't care" — why would anyone else respect such an author's copyrights?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#242

Post by NotAnOtter »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

The author's central argument seems to be that the current state of LLM development is such that 1 Senior + LLM === 1 Senior + 4 juniors

With that as a metric, 1 Senior + 4 juniors cannot build the company with the scope you are describing.

A 50-eng company might have 1 CTO, 5 staff, 15 Seniors, and 29 juniors. So the proposition is you could cut the company in ~half but would still require the most-expensive aspects of running a company.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#243

Post by jjcm »

The most important thing in this article in my mind is in the level setting section - if you are basing your perspective on the state of AI from when you tested it 6mo+ ago, your perspective is likely not based on the current reality.

This is kind of a first though for any kind of technology. The speed of development and change here is unreal. Never before has a couple months of not being on top of things led to you being considered "out of date" on a tool. The problem is that this kind of speed requires not just context, but a cultural shift on the speed of updating that context. Humanity just isn't equipped to handle this rate of change.

Historically in tech, we'd often scoff at the lifecycle of other industries - Airlines haven't changed their software in 20 years?? Preposterous! For the vast majority of us though, we're the other industry now.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#244

Post by munificent »

"Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged."

I would jump off a bridge before I accepted that as my full-time job.

I've been programming for 20+ years and I've never wanted to move into management. I got into programming because I like programming, not because I like asking others to write code on my behalf and review what they come up with. I've been in a lead role, and I certainly do lots of code review and enjoy helping teammates grow. But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else.

I like writing code. Yes, sometimes writing code is tedious, or frustrating. Sometimes it's yak-shaving. Sometimes it's Googling. Very often, it's debugging. I'm happy to have AI help me with some of that drudgery, but if I ever get to the point that I feel like I spend my entire day in virtual meetings with AI agents, then I'm changing careers.

I get up in the morning to make things, not to watch others make things.

Maybe the kind of software engineering role I love is going to disappear, like stevedores and lamplighters. I will miss it dearly, but at least I guess I got a couple of good decades out of it. If this is what the job turns into, I'll have to find something else to do with my remaining years.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#245

Post by mrbungie »

You know what's nuts? How so many articles about supporting LLMs and against skeptics are so full of fallacies and logical inconsistencies like strawmans, false dichotomies, appeals to emotion and to authority when they have supposedly almost AGI machines to assist them in their writing. They could at least do a "please take a look at my article and see if I'm commiting any logical fallacies" prompt iteration session if they trust these tools so much.

These kinds of articles that heavily support LLM usage in programming seem to FOMO you or at least suggest that "you are using it wrong" in a weak way just to invalidate contrary or conservative opinions out of the discussion. These are pure rhetorics with such an empty discourse.

I use these tools everyday and every hour in strange loops (between at least Cursor, ChatGPT and now Gemini) because I do see some value in them, even if only to simulate a peer or rubber duck to discuss ideas with. They are extremely useful to me due to my ADHD and because they actually support me through my executive disfunction and analysis paralysis even if they produce shitty code.

Yet I'm still an AI skeptic because I've seen enough failure modes in my daily usage. I do not know how to feel when faced with these ideas because I feel out of the false dichotomy (pay for them, use them every day, but won't think them as valuable as the average AI bro). What's funny is that I'm yet to see an article that actually shows LLMs strengths and weaknesses in a serious manner and with actual examples. If you are going to defend a position, do it seriously ffs.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#246

Post by creativenolo »

If you’re leaning out, spend two weeks leaning in.

I did, and learned a ton, and likely not going back to how I was before, or how I used it a week ago.

The comments in the article about not reading the agent is good but it’s more than that…

Vibe coding is for non-coders. Yet, you get a feel for the vibe of the AI. With windsurf, you have two or three files open, and working in one. It starts smashing out the multi, interspersed, line edits and you know with a flutter of your eyes, it’s got your vibe and correctly predicted your next ten lines. And for a moment you forgive it for leading you astray when you read what it said.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#247

Post by protocolture »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

>I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this

He spent a large tranche of the article specifically hanging a lantern on how mediocre the output is.

>by creating an AI only company

He specifically says that you need to review the code over and over and over.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#248

Post by manmal »

mjburgess wrote: post #77

Can we get a video of a workday conducted by these people? Unless there's a significant sense of what people are working on, and how LLMs are helping -- there's no point engaging -- there's no detail here. Sure, if your job is to turn out tweaks to a wordpress theme, presumably that's now 10x faster. If its to work on a new in-house electric motor in C for some machine, presumably that's almost entirely unaffected. N…

Here's a 3+h video of the PSPDFKit (Nutrient) founder vibe-coding a Mac app. Can be watched at 2x: https://steipete.me/posts/2025/the-future-of-vibe-coding?utm...

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#249

Post by ghostly_s »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

Did you even glance at the link? The author is advocating for a human-supervised LLM agent workflow.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#250

Post by kevinsync »

Not to derail, but NFT mania (part of the opening salvo in the article) was the giant shitshow that it was -not- because the concept of unique digital bits in the possession of a single owner was a bad idea (or, the concept of unique verification of membership in a club was a bad idea) -- it was a diarrhea-slicked nightmare because it was implemented via blockchains and their related tokens, which inherently peg fluctuating fiat value to the underlying mechanisms of assigning and verifying said ownership or membership, and encourages a reseller's market .. not to mention the perverse, built-in economic incentives required to get nodes to participate in that network to make the whole thing go.

Had NFTs simply been deployed as some kind of protocol that could be leveraged for utility rather than speculation, I think the story would be a complete 180. No clue personally how to achieve that, but it feels like it could be done.. except that, too, would have been completely perverted and abused by centralized behemoths, leading to a different but terrible outcome. Can you imagine if all data became non-fungible? Convince all the big identity vendors (Google, Apple, etc) to issue key pairs to users that then get used by media companies to deliver audio and video keyed only to you that's embedded with maybe some kind of temporal steganographic signature that's hard to strip and can be traced back to your key? It's not just cracking AACS once and copying the bytes. It becomes this giant mess of you literally can't access anything without going through centralized authorities anymore. Then build more anti-patterns on top of that lol. Prolly better that it was mostly just monkey JPEGs and rug pulls.

Anyways, I'm so far off topic from what's actually being discussed -- just couldn't help myself from veering into left field.

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