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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

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Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#261

Post by robot-wrangler »

simonw wrote: post #256
robot-wrangler wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ? Instead of asking "where are the AI-generated projects" we could ask about the easier problem of "where are the AI-generated ports". Why is it still hard to take an existing fully concrete specification, and an existing test suite, and dump out a working feature-complete port of huge, old, and popular projects? Lots of stuff like this wi…

> Why is it still hard to take an existing fully concrete specification, and an existing test suite, and dump out a working feature-complete port of huge, old, and popular projects? Lots of stuff like this will even be in the training We have a smaller version of that ability already: - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/ See also https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/01/08/a-software-library-with-... I n…

So extrapolating from here and assuming applications are as easy as libraries, operating systems are as easy as applications.. at this rate with a few people in a weekend you can convert anything to anything else, and the differences between different programming languages are very nearly effectively erased. Nice!

And yet it doesn't feel true yet, otherwise we'd see it. Why do you think that is?

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#262

Post by esperent »

falloutx wrote: post #216
esperent wrote: post #42

> But I'm worried for the folks that will get fired. It is not clear what the dynamic at play will be: will companies try to have more people, and to build more? This is the crux. AI suddenly became good and society hasn't caught on yet. Programmers are a bit ahead of the curve here, being closer to the action of AI. But in a couple of years, if not already, all the other technical and office jobs will be equally aff…

In one of the scenarios programmers get replaced then the progress slows, thus saving jobs of writers, lawyers, marketing, scientists, artists. At this point I am okay with that scenario seeing how programmers have showed no solidarity while every other field has been rejecting AI. Lawyers have even started hiring junior lawyers back and Art industry has basically shoved AI into a bin of irrelevance.

> Art industry

I don't agree, unless by "art industry" what you actually mean is "art establishment".

If we broaden it to mean "anywhere that money is paid, or used to be paid, to people for any kind of artistic endeavor" - even if we limit that to things related to drawing, painting, illustrating, graphic design, 3d design etc. - then AI is definitely replacing or augmenting a ton of human work. Just go on any Photoshop forum. It's all about AI now, just like everywhere else.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#263

Post by closewith »

teeeew wrote: post #247
omnicognate wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer and from the first line of the article: > I love writing software, line by line. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't write programs "line by line" and typing isn't programming. I work out code in the abstract away from the keyboard before typing it out, and it's not the typing part that is the bottleneck. Last time I…

That’s because you’re a subset of software engineers who know what they’re doing and cares about rigour and so on. There’s many who’s thinking is not so deep nor sharp as yours - LLM’s are welcomed by them but come at a tremendous cost to their cognition and the firms future well-being of its code base. Because this cost is implicit and not explicit it doesn’t occur to them.

Companies don't care about you or any other developer. You shouldn't care about them or their future well-being.

> Because this cost is implicit and not explicit it doesn’t occur to them.

Your arrogance and naiveté blinds you to the fact it is does occur to them, but because they have a better understanding of the world and their position in it, they don't care. That's a rational and reasonable position.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#265

Post by adityaathalye »

thunky wrote: post #250
adityaathalye wrote: post #27

Don't fall into the "Look ma, no hands" hype. Antirez + LLM + CFO = Billion Dollar Redis company, quite plausibly. /However/ ... As for the delta provided by an LLM to Antirez, outside of Redis (and outside of any problem space he is already intimately familiar with), an Apples to Apples comparison would be he trying this on an equally complex codebase he has no idea about. I'll bet... what Antirez can do with Redis…

> And pretty much everyone, no matter how good, cannot get there with code-reading alone. With software at least, we need to develop a mental model of the thing by futzing about with the thing in deeply meaningful ways LLMs help with that part too. As Antirez says: Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this second pa…

How to "understand" what to do?

How to know the "how to do it" is sensible? (sensible = the product will produce the expected outcome within the expected (or tolerable) error bars?)

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#266

Post by simonw »

mmcnl wrote: post #259
simonw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…

Why can't both be true at the same time? Maybe their problems are more complex than yours. Why do you assume it's a skill issue and ignore the contextual variables?

On the rare occasions that I can convince them to share the details of the problems they are tackling and the exact prompts they are using it becomes very clear that they haven't learned how to use the tools yet.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#267

Post by simonw »

systemf_omega wrote: post #186
simonw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…

> Using this stuff well is a deep topic. Just like the stuff LLMs are being used for today. Why wouldn't "using LLMs well" be not just one of the many things LLMs will simplify too? Or do you believe your type of knowledge is somehow special and is resistant to being vastly simplified or even made obsolete by AI?

An interesting trend over the past year is that LLMs have learned how to prompt each other.

Back in ~2024 a lot of people were excited about having "LLMs write the prompt!" but I found the results to be really disappointing - they were full of things like "You are the world's best expert in marketing" which was superstitious junk.

As of 2025 I'm finding they actually do know how to prompt, which makes sense because there's a ton more information about good prompting approaches in the training data as opposed to a couple of years ago. This has unlocked some very interesting patterns, such as Claude Code prompting sub-agents to help it explore codebases without polluting the top level token window.

But learning to prompt is not the key skill in getting good results out of LLMs. The thing that matters most is having a robust model of what they can and cannot do. Asking an LLM "can you do X" is still the kind of thing I wouldn't trust them to answer in a useful way, because they're always constrained by training data that was only aware of their predecessors.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#268

Post by thunky »

embedding-shape wrote: post #111
nielsole wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the late 2000s i remember that "nobody is willing to pay for things on the Internet" was a common trope. I think it'll culturally take a while before businesses and people understand what they are willing to pay for. For example if you are a large business and you pay xxxxx-xxxxxx per year per developer, but are only willing to pay xxx per year in AI tooling, something's out of proportion.

> For example if you are a large business and you pay xxxxx-xxxxxx per year per developer, but are only willing to pay xxx per year in AI tooling, something's out of proportion. One is the time of a human (irreplaceable) and the other is a tool for some human to use, seems proportional to me.

> human (irreplaceable)

Everyone is replaceable. Software devs aren't special.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#269

Post by chii »

phicoh wrote: post #198
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

The problem I see is not so much in how you generate the code. It is about how to maintain the code. If you check in the AI generated code unchanged then do you start changing that code by hand later? Do you trust that in the future AI can fix bugs in your code. Or do you clean up the AI generated code first?

Would it not be a new paradigm, where the generated code from AI is segregated and treated like a binary blob? You don't change it (beyond perhaps some cosmetic, or superficial changes that the AI missed). You keep the prompt(s), and maintain that instead. And for new changes you want added, the prompts are either modified, or appended to.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#270

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #13
dom96 wrote: post #2

> As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than ever that my open source contributions will simply be stolen. Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this? We've already seen some pretty strong evidence of this with Tailwind.

I feel similarly for a different reason. I put my code out there, licensed under the GPL. It is now, through a layer of indirection, being used to construct products that are not under the GPL. That's not what I signed up for. I know the GPL didn't have a specific clause for AI, and the jury is still out on this specific case (how similar is it to a human doing the same thing?), but I like to imagine, had it been mad…

One work-around would be to legislate that code produce by an LLM trained on GPL code would also be GPL.
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