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Two kinds of AI users are emerging

martinalderson.com

261–270 of 358 posts

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you really care? Its a job.

Historically (I'm 48), professionals have cared about their jobs, generally speaking, and often do make serious attempts to logically derive sociological benefits from their personal efforts. There's been a seismic shift over the past 5-6 years, though, and this sense of care has massively eroded.

I feel you. I’m 46 and now on the hunt for the right company to work for, and hopefully finish out my career there. While the company values haven’t technically changed, the actions taken in the past 5 years have eroded my trust so much I barely recognize the place. When you no longer have a sense of pride working somewhere, it’s time to move on. At least that is what I believe to be true.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you really care? Its a job.

Historically (I'm 48), professionals have cared about their jobs, generally speaking, and often do make serious attempts to logically derive sociological benefits from their personal efforts. There's been a seismic shift over the past 5-6 years, though, and this sense of care has massively eroded.

I'm 44. It's been more than five or six years. I would say 15 or 20, if not more.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your experience, can you take the tech debt riddled code, and ask claude to come up with an entirely new version that fixes the tech debt/design issues you've identified? Presumably there's a set of tests that you'd keep the same, but you could leverage the power of ai in greenfield scenarios to just do a rewrite (while letting it see the old code). I dont know how well this would work, i havn't got to the heavy t…

I built an inventory tracking system as an exercise in "vibe coding" recently. I built a decent spec in conversation with Claude, then asked it to build it. It was kind of amazing - in 2 hours Claude churned out a credible looking app. It looked really good, but as I got into the details the weirdness really started coming out. There's huge functions which interleave many concepts, and there's database queries everyw…

At the moment, good code structure for humans is good code structure for AIs and bad code structure for humans is still bad code structure for AIs too. At least to a first approximation.

I qualify that because hey, someone comes back and reads this 5 years later, I have no idea what you will be facing then. But at the moment this is still true.

The problem is, people see the AIs coding, I dunno, what, a 100 times faster minimum in terms of churning out lines? And it just blows out their mental estimation models and they substitute an "infinity" for the capability of the models, either today or in the future. But they are not infinitely capable. They are finitely capable. As such they will still face many of the same challenges humans do... no matter how good they get in the future. Getting better will move the threshold but it can never remove it.

There is no model coming that will be able to consume an arbitrarily large amount of code goop and integrate with it instantly. That's not a limitation of Artificial Intelligences, that's a limitation of finite intelligences. A model that makes what we humans would call subjectively better code is going to produce a code base that can do more and go farther than a model that just hyper-focuses on the short-term and slops something out that works today. That's a continuum, not a binary, so there will always be room for a better model that makes better code. We will never overwhelm bad code with infinite intelligence because we can't have the latter.

Today, in 2026, providing the guidance for better code is a human role. I'm not promising it will be forever, but it is today. If you're not doing that, you will pay the price of a bad code base. I say that without emotion, just as "tech debt" is not always necessarily bad. It's just a tradeoff you need to decide about, but I guarantee a lot of people are making poor ones today without realizing it, and will be paying for it for years to come no matter how good the future AIs may be. (If the rumors and guesses are true that Windows is nearly in collapse from AI code... how much larger an object lesson do you need? If that is their problem they're probably in even bigger trouble than they realize.)

I also don't guarantee that "good code for humans" and "good code for AIs" will remain as aligned as they are now, though it is my opinion we ought to strive for that to be the case. It hasn't been talked about as much lately, but it's still good for us to be able to figure out why a system did what it did and even if it costs us some percentage of efficiency, having the AIs write human-legible code into the indefinite future is probably still a valuable thing to do so we can examine things if necessary. (Personally I suspect that while there will be some efficiency gain for letting the AIs make their own programming languages that I doubt it'll ever be more than some more-or-less fixed percentage gain rather than some step-change in capability that we're missing out on... and if it is, maybe we should miss out on that step-change. As the moltbots prove that whatever fiction we may have told ourselves about keeping AIs in boxes is total garbage in a world where people will proactively let AIs out of the box for entertainment purposes.)

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically (I'm 48), professionals have cared about their jobs, generally speaking, and often do make serious attempts to logically derive sociological benefits from their personal efforts. There's been a seismic shift over the past 5-6 years, though, and this sense of care has massively eroded.

I'm 44. It's been more than five or six years. I would say 15 or 20, if not more.

It feels like covid turbocharged it though. The amount of grift outright corruption is unrecognizable compared to even 2019. Maybe it was always there but it feels like companies have gone full mask off now.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#265

I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…

I think there's some middle ground possible between those two black and white groupings

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#267
Software engineers don't understand how user hostile all these AI gizmos are. Terminals are scary. AI running local code is scary. Random Github software is scary. And in my experience, normies are far more security paranoid than developers when it comes to AI.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#268

I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…

You can split the second group into two sub-buckets.

Junior devs: who have limited experience or depth in knowledge. They are unable to analyze the output of AI coding agents sufficiently to determine long term viability of the code. I think this is the entirety of who you're speaking of.

Senior devs: who are using it for more than a basic task executor. They have a decade+ of experience and can quickly understand if what the AI coding agent suggests is viable long term or not. When it's not, they understand how to steer it into a more appropriate direction.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started to outsource thinking at my job as my company made it very clear that they do not want/cant afford thinking engineers. Thinking requires time and they want to deliver quickly. So they cater towards the very realistic deadlines our PMs set for features (/s). Funnily enough the features have to be implemented ASAP according to the customers, but the customer feedback takes like 6 months due to them using the…

What do you really care? Its a job.

> What do you really care? Its a job.

Because having a job that's somewhat satisfying and not just a grind is great for one's own well-being. It's also not a bad deal for the employer, because an engaged employee delivers better results than one who doesn't give a shit.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started to outsource thinking at my job as my company made it very clear that they do not want/cant afford thinking engineers. Thinking requires time and they want to deliver quickly. So they cater towards the very realistic deadlines our PMs set for features (/s). Funnily enough the features have to be implemented ASAP according to the customers, but the customer feedback takes like 6 months due to them using the…

As a product manager, this makes me think the features you're building are not the things your customers need or want most. I'm curious if you were to ask your product manager about that six-month timeframe, and just ask the open-ended question of is there anything on the backlog that we can build that the product manager thinks users would pick up within days instead of months?

As a product manager, this feels like they're in the pretty typical B2B SaaS trap of building the stuff that the people who pay for the product insist they need but the people using the product don't necessarily want, so they've gotta invest a bunch of time and effort getting usage/feedback.

Could be for good reasons (e.g. they're security features that are important to the business but add friction for the user) or just because management is disconnected from the reality of their employees. Either way, not necessarily the wrong decision by the PM - sometimes you've gotta build features fast because the buyer demands them in a certain timeframe in order to get the contract signed. Even if they never get used, the revenue still pays the bills.

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