I am leaving the AI party after one drink

For what it’s worth (ie, absolutely nothing), I agree with her 100%. I didn’t get into this field in order to prompt an AI to take care of the details. I got into it because I love the details.

I’m a strong performer on a good team at a company many people would want to work at… and I know the clock is ticking. Sooner or later, I will be too slow.

I’m not going to claim that this is the wrong way to go. It’s obviously the future, and the future doesn’t care what allenrb does or does not want. I’m somewhat hopeful that power and cooling requirements will come down by multiple factors of 10x over time, reducing the environmental damage.

The fact is, I love what I’ve been able to do “the old way” and just don’t feel the urge to move on. So it goes.

The line is fine. Even if I use GPS a lot, I still try to keep my ability to interpret maps and find my way.

Same with calculators, even when today are dirt cheap, are not allowed in school, and being able to do math without it is a valuable skill.

So maybe there are like 2 groups of things: one where using it you are losing nothing, some where you lose some valuable ability.

> The entire point of civilization and society is that we are all "addicted" to technology and progress.

I'm not addicted in any way to an automatic car. I prefer an automatic car, because it's easier to drive than a manual car. There have been numerous studies already into the problematic nature of AI addiction, and calling it simply "progress" is denuding the experiences of tons of people who have been harmed, up to and including dying, as a result of too much AI use.

> But the invention of the plow did not, in fact, make us lazier or stop using our brain.

No but industrial farming practices are not an unalloyed good either.

> But none of us have "lost" the ability to go backwards if we really wanted.

I mean, we kind of have in a few ways, at least insofar as the AI boom is concerned. I can't have a version of Windows that doesn't have copilot in it. I can't have Microsoft Office without Copilot. I can't have Photoshop without generative AI features. Like, say what you will about the AI doomsayers and yes, even this one I think is overstating it a bit? But the AI push is relentless. It's everywhere, in every product, all the time. Last time I was at Home Depot I saw an AI powered microwave for fucks sake.

And, that's not to say there are no problems at which LLMs are good solutions, but it isn't this many. I use Claude to generate code, usually boiler-plate type stuff or to help me solve problems, and it's legitimately quite good. Conversely, generated images and video have always, always looked like absolute shit to me. Generated music is... okay? But as a consumer I barely have a way to choose a non-AI future if that's what I want.

> You can finally ask a computer to think and solve problems, and it will!

Sometimes. Other times it tries for awhile and gives up. Other times it makes some shit up that would solve your problem, and Omnissiah be with you if you follow those instructions. Other times you argue with it for 10 goddamn minutes because it doesn't comprehend your instructions.

> If somebody finally came out with a fusion reactor tomorrow I would half expect people to suddenly come out and say "Oh, I don't think I can support this. What about the soul of solar panels? I think cheap electricity is going to make things too easy."

That is flatly ridiculous. LLMs do a lot of interesting things, that I will grant, but they are not the problem solver you're pitching them as, and certainly nothing like a Fusion reactor.

Customer doesn’t give a fuck how long a billing system took to make, they only care that it works correctly.

A billing system only truly gets built once, then possibly maintained in perpetuity. This makes the advantage of building it 20x times faster pointless. AI builds it in a day, will it matter 5 years from now if that billing system was instead built by hand in 20 days a long time ago? No.

The speed advantage of AI only comes into play when you have a lot of code to crank out continuously.

Do you have a need to constantly build bespoke billing systems at a rate of 1 per day? Probably not. So who cares. Take your little AI grift charging $1000/month somewhere else. It’s not needed.

It’s called a library. It’s free. Plus you get to say microfiche which is fun. :)