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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#321

Post by ugtr3 »

andai wrote: post #303

You can just turn the AI off. I think that's a good idea to do regularly, in the same way it's good to have some time every day without screens and internet in your life. I did some "trad coding" to see how much I'd atrophied, and I was startled at how difficult and unpleasant it was. I was just stuck and frustrated almost the whole time! But I persisted for 7 hours and was able to solve the problem. Then I remembere…

Yep. Something people overlook is the necessary need to condition oneself to enjoy something painful. Just like going gym and lifting weights.

Without being exposed to this, you’re not gonna be a good problem solver in the long run.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#322

Post by forgetfreeman »

khafra wrote: post #264
forgetfreeman wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all." That's been tried several times now and has a tendency to end very badly for capital. You'd think folks with even a grade school level of historical literacy would know better than to stick a fork in that outlet.

It's never been tried before. Capital always required human labor, to be productive. Capital has never closed in on the ability to operate, maintain, defend, and expand itself without human assistance, as it is closing in on that ability now.

Is that what you think is happening right now? This line of reasoning brings to mind the luxury bunkers in New Zealand that are so popular with a certain type of folks. I'm guessing the sales brochures on those things don't mention stuff like the outcome of an 80lb bag of cement poured into the ventilation or the fact that heavy machinery is ubiquitous and shockingly simple to operate. Thinking capital can decouple itself from the larger populace is comically flawed for similar reasons. See also: XKCD where the crypto guy gets worked over with a wrench for his password.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#323

Post by khafra »

grafmax wrote: post #270
khafra wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all. Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep hu…

Capital is a commodity, just like a business' product. It does not produce value. Labor does. This is a central point of LTV! We witnessed the same thing with looms and other automation in the Industrial Revolution. Capital that helps you produce more. But owners faced with increased competition under commoditized production see their profit margins fall. Thus they will turn to squeezing workers - the source of value…

Ok, but when the looms can autonomously analyze the market, design the products, organize purchasing and sales channel, run production, and deliver the products, the workers will not be squeezed. We will be discarded.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#324

Post by rimunroe »

skeledrew wrote: post #176
rimunroe wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Craft lovers can still lovingly craft away, even if they have to do it on their own time instead of on their now-AI-dominated day job, just like in ye olde days. Nothing's stopping them. …except time, which sadly is limited. I’m sad about the real potential that I might not get to be paid to do something I enjoy so much anymore. I care about end products for sure, but that’s not why I’m in this career. I do this be…

> sacrificing time I’ve previously spent on other interests I'd say this is the crux of the matter. Having competing interests and choosing what to do and how much of it is a balancing act, but you can still get that desired satisfaction. You could perhaps even start your own company if it's that important to you. For me, projects just keep accumulating regardless of how much time I dedicate to them (outside of the m…

> I'd say this is the crux of the matter.

That's why my opening paragraph and final paragraphs were devoted to it :)

I feel like a lot of the things I hear from other folks is that I'm missing the possibility of programming the way I used to, rather than being sad that it might no longer be practical within the constraints of my life. Even if I did start doing it on the side, going from eight hours a day programming to squeezing in one or two would be quite the change.

> You could perhaps even start your own company if it's that important to you.

I have no interest in ever starting or running a company. Every person I've known who does it has it consume their life. I'd rather spend time with my family and do stuff which doesn't involve a boatload of stress and additional responsibility. Not to mention that in the case where I'm no longer able to find a job programming the way I used to then I don't think it's likely a company where people did that would be competitive enough to survive, at least not normally. Also, one of the reasons I rarely program on the side is that I don't often have ideas for things to make. I just don't feel the need for much software in my personal life, and certainly don't think of the sorts of things where there's a market for them.

Having a lucrative job where you do something where you find great satisfaction in your daily work isn't the norm and is the privilege of a lucky few, but that doesn't mean they aren't justified in feeling sad at the prospect of it going away.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#325

Post by simonw »

discreteevent wrote: post #282
simonw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting a 53% performance boost on a 20+ year old codebase by running a bunch of experiments is pretty exciting to me: https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/pull/2056

Developers make these kinds of improvements all the time. Are you saying that it would have been impossible without AI?

That codebase existed for 20 years and had contributions from nearly 200 people.

Sure, they could have come up with those optimizations without AI... but they didn't. What's your theory for why that is?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#326

Post by harpiaharpyja »

wiml wrote: post #114

I think the article misunderstands completely. "Craft" coders are chasing results too — we're just chasing results that last and that can be built upon. I've been in this game for a while, and a major goal of every single good programmer I've known has been to make themselves obsolete. Yes, I enjoyed meticulous hand crafted assembly, counting cycles and packing bits, but nobody had to talk me into using compilers. Ye…

Thank you for articulating that.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#327

Post by senko »

oytis wrote: post #278

I think we should already get past pretending it's about people who just like typing words on their stupid mechanical keyboards. The real split is whether you like understanding systems and inventing new things or whether you are OK to delegate this part to someone else and are just happy to take credit for their success. With a small note that when someone else is a human, the credit can be justified if you mentored…

As someone who likes understanding systems and inventing new things AND is happy to delegate drudgery to AI, according to you, I shouldn't exist.

Naturally, I disagree.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#328

Post by maplethorpe »

I suppose I see the split a little bit differently. To me it's more that one camp of developers can still get a hit of satisfaction as if they built something themselves even if it was entirely generated by AI.

Would they get the same satisfaction from cloning a public repo? Probably not. It's too clear to their brain that they didn't have anything to do with it. What about building the project with cmake? That requires more effort, yes, but the underlying process is still very obviously something that someone else architected, and so the feeling of satisfaction remains elusive.

AI, however, adds a layer of obfuscation. For some, that's enough to mask the underlying process and make it feel as if they're still wielding a tool. For others, not so much.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#330

Post by lelanthran »

adriand wrote: post #45
simonw wrote: post #2

This sounds right to me: > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Helps explain why some people are d…

I feel zero sense of sadness about how things used to be. I feel like the change that sucked the most was when software engineering went from something that nerds did because they were passionate about programming, to techbros who were just in it for the money. We lost the idealism of the web a long time ago and the current swamp with apex reptiles like Zuckerberg is what we have now. It became all about the bottom l…

> Excitement about the things I can build now and the opportunities I’m racing towards.

What opportunities? Anything you spend effort over, like PMF and discovery, etc... I can now clone with a few bucks of Claude Code and charge less than you for the same product, at the same quality level :-/

Where is the opportunity here? Technology and knowledge used to be the moat a startup or bootstrapped individual could use to produce a sustainable business.

Why exactly are you excited about producing something that can be cloned for less cost than it took you? Especially as the quality will be almost exactly the same?

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