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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

#271

Post by Philpax »

Juliate wrote: post #105

> What is the social solution, then? Innovation can't be taken back after all. It definitely can. The innovation that was the open, social web of 20 years ago? still an option, but drowned between closed ad-fueled toxic gardens and drained by AI illegal copy bots. The innovation that was democracy? Purposely under attack in every single place it still exists today. Insulin at almost no cost (because it costs next to…

You cannot stop someone from running llama-server -m glm-4.7.gguf on their own hardware. That is the argument: even if all the AI companies go bust and the datacenters explode, the technology has been fundamentally proliferated and it is impossible to return to a world in which it does not exist.

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

#272

Post by kruuuder »

What happens if the bubble bursts - can we still use all the powerful models to create all this code? Aren't all the agents effectively using venture capital today? Is this sustainable?

If I can run an agent on my machine, with no remote backend required, the problem is solved. But right now, aren't all developers throwing themselves into agentic software development betting that these services will always be available to them at a relatively low cost?

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

#273

Post by layer8 »

loubbrad wrote: post #149
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…

> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer... Reminds me of this excerpt from Richard Hamming's book: > Finally, a more complete, and more useful, Symbolic Assembly Program (SAP) was devised—after more years than you are apt to believe during which most programmers continued their heroic absolute binary programming. At t…

I think this is beside the point, because the crucial change with LLMs is that you don’t use a formal language anymore to specify what you want, and get a deterministic output from that. You can’t reason with precision anymore about how what you specify maps to the result. That is the modal shift that removes the “fun” for a substantial portion of the developer workforce.

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

#274

Post by thunky »

adityaathalye wrote: post #265
thunky wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?)

> How to "understand" what to do?

How did you ever know? It's not like everyone always wrote perfect code up until now.

Nothing has changed, except now you have a "partner" to help you along with your understanding.

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

#275

Post by victorbjorklund »

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?

Is it really much different from maintaining code that other people wrote and that you merged?

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

#276

Post by simonw »

kruuuder wrote: post #272

What happens if the bubble bursts - can we still use all the powerful models to create all this code? Aren't all the agents effectively using venture capital today? Is this sustainable? If I can run an agent on my machine, with no remote backend required, the problem is solved. But right now, aren't all developers throwing themselves into agentic software development betting that these services will always be availab…

If the bubble bursts we club together to buy one of those big GPU servers (now available at rock bottom prices thanks to the bubble bursting) and run a shared instance of GLM-4.7 (the current best-at-coding Chinese open weight model) on it.

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

#277

Post by dzonga »

antirez gave us reddit - but somehow I think the part him and other smart folks who talk about A.I so much is they forget about agency | self-sufficiency.

If A.I writes everything for you - cool, you can produce faster ? but is it really true ? if you're renting capacity ? what if costs go up, now you can't rent anymore - but you can't code anymore, the documentation is no longer there - coz mcp etc assumption that everything will be done by agents then what ?

what about the people that work on messy 'Information Systems' - things like redis - impressive but it's closed loop software just like compilers -

some smart guy back in the 80s - wrote it's always a people problem -

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

#278

Post by SirensOfTitan »

crote wrote: post #182
falloutx wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you are very high up the chain like Linus, i think doing vibe coding gives you more feedback than any average dev. So they are having a positive feedback loop. For most of us vibe coding gives 0 advantage. Our software will just sit there and get no views and producing it faster means nothing. In fact, it just scares us that some exec is gonna look at this and write us for low performance because they saw someone…

Except that Linus does basically zero programming these days. He's a manager, combining code from the subsystem managers below him into a final release.

Right, but Linus also has an extremely refined mental model of the project he maintains, and has built up a lot of skills reading code.

Most engineers in my experience are much less skillful at reading code than writing code. What I’ve seen so far with use of LLM tools is a bunch of minimally edited LLM produced content that was not properly critiqued.

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

#279

Post by jt2190 »

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…

> … not all programmers program for the same reason, for some of us, LLMs helps a lot, and makes things even more fun. For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them. Hence we get this constant back and forth of "Can't believe others can work like this!" vs "I can't believe others aren't working like this!", but both sides seems to completely miss the other side.

Unfortunately the job market does not demand both types of programmer equally: Those who drive LLMs to deliver more/better/faster/cheaper are in far greater demand right now. (My observation is that a decade of ZIRP-driven easy hiring paused the natural business cycle of trying to do more with fewer employees, and we’ve been seeing an outsized correction for the past few years, accelerated by LLM uptake.)

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

#280

Post by layer8 »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #270
RadiozRadioz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are licenses that are incompatible with each other, which implies that one wouldn’t be allowed to train LLMs on code based on multiple such licenses.
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