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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

#331

Post by wpm »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311
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…

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.

I'm the same way. LLMs are still somewhat useful as a way to start a greenfield project, or as a very hyper-custom google search to have it explain something to me exactly how I'd like it explained, or generate examples hyper-tuned for the problem at hand, but that's hardly as transformative or revolutionary as everyone is making Claude Code out to be. I loathe the tone these things take with me and hate how much extra bullshit I didn't ask for they always add to the output.

When I do have it one-shot a complete problem, I never copy paste from it. I type it all out myself. I didn't pay hundreds of dollars for a mechanical keyboard, tuned to make every keypress a joy, to push code around with a fucking mouse.

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

#332

Post by s1mplicissimus »

deadbabe wrote: post #298
roncesvalles wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. AI is minimally useful for coding something that you couldn't have been able to code yourself, given enough time, without explicitly investing time in generic learning not specific to that codebase or particular task. Although calling AI "just autocomplete" is almost a slur now, it really is just that in the sense that you need to A) have a decent mental picture of what you want, and, B) recognize a correct…

You could have another LLM tell you which is the correct output.

... and then a third one to check wether the second one was right. then a forth one to... o wait

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

#333

Post by antirez »

theturtletalks wrote: post #137

LLMs are breaking open-source monetization. Group 1 is untouched since they were writing code for the sake of writing and they have the reward of that altruism. Group 2 are those that needed their projects to bring in some revenue so they can continue writing open-source. Group 3 are companies that used open-source as a way to get market share from proprietary companies, using it more in a capitalistic way. Overtime,…

Please note that the majority of OSS efforts where already non monetized and deeply exploited. At least, what it is happening has the potential to change the model towards a more correct one. What you see with Tailwind and similar cases, it is not really an open source business model issue, it is a "low barrier to entry" business model issue, since with AI a lot of things can be done without efforts and without purchasing PRO products. And also documentation is less useful, but this is a general thing, not just related to OSS software. In general people that write OSS are, for the most part, not helped enough by the companies using their code to make money, by users, buy everybody else, basically.

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

#335

Post by tiborsaas »

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.

Yes. If you didn't care before when contributing to open source who uses your code then it shouldn't matter now that a company picks up your code. You are also contributing this way too.

Tailwind is a business and they picked a business model that wasn't resilient enough.

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

#336

Post by chrsw »

jt2190 wrote: post #285
phicoh wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

LLMs remove the familiarity of “I wrote this and deeply understand this”. In other words, everything is “legacy code” now ;-) For those who are less experienced with the constant surprises that legacy code bases can provide, LLMs are deeply unsettling.

This is the key point for me in all this.

I've never worked in web development, where it seems to me the majority of LLM coding assistants are deployed.

I work on safety critical and life sustaining software and hardware. That's the perspective I have on the world. One question that comes up is "why does it take so long to design and build these systems?" For me, the answer is: that's how long it takes humans to reach a sufficient level of understanding of what they're doing. That's when we ship: when we can provide objective evidence that the systems we've built are safe and effective. These systems we build, which are complex, have to interact with the real world, which is messy and far more complicated.

Writing more code means that's more complexity for humans (note the plurality) to understand. Hiring more people means that's more people who need to understand how the systems work. Want to pull in the schedule? That means humans have to understand in less time. Want to use Agile or this coding tool or that editor or this framework? Fine, these tools might make certain tasks a little easier, but none of that is going to remove the requirement that humans need to understand complex systems before they will work in the real world.

So then we come to LLMs. It's another episode of "finally, we can get these pesky engineers and their time wasting out of the loop". Maybe one day. But we are far from that today. What matters today is still how well do human engineers understand what they're doing. Are you using LLMs to help engineers better understand what they are building? Good. If that's the case you'll probably build more robust systems, and you _might_ even ship faster.

Are you trying to use LLMs to fool yourself into thinking this still isn't the game of humans needing to understand what's going on? "Let's offload some of the understanding of how these systems work onto the AI so we can save time and money". Then I think we're in trouble.

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

#337

Post by Juliate »

Philpax wrote: post #271
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.

Of course not. But that's only the raw tech.

The tech will still be there. As much as blockchains, crypto, NFTs and such, whose bubbles have not yet burst (well, the NFT one did, it was fast).

But (Gen)AI today is much less about the tech, and much more about the illegal actions (harvesting copyrighted works) that permit it to run and the disastrous impact it has on ... everything (resources, jobs, mistaken prospectives, distorted IT markets, culture, politics) because it is not (yet) regulated to the extent it should.

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

#338

Post by immibis »

zahlman wrote: post #307
loubbrad wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't know what book you're talking about, but it seems that you intend to compare the switch to an AI-based workflow to using a higher-level language. I don't think that's valid at all. Nobody using Python for any ordinary purpose feels compelled to examine the resulting bytecode, for example, but a responsible programmer needs to keep tabs on what Claude comes up with, configure a dev environment that organizes t…

> Nobody using Python for any ordinary purpose feels compelled to examine the resulting bytecode, for example,

The first people using higher level languages did feel compelled to. That's what the quote from the book is saying. The first HLL users felt compelled to check the output just like the first LLM users.

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

#339

Post by atmavatar »

simonw wrote: post #173
wasmainiac wrote: post #168

These personal blogs are starting to feel like Linkdin Lunatic posts, kinda similar. to the optimised floor sweeping blog, “I am excited to provide shareholder value, at minimum wage”

What does it tell you that programmers with the credibility of antirez - and who do not have an AI product to sell you - are writing things like this even when they know a lot of people aren't going to like reading them?

Just because he doesn't have an AI product to sell doesn't mean he doesn't have a bias. For all we know, he's heavily invested in AI companies.

We have to abandon the appeal to authority and take the argument on its merits, which honestly, we should be doing regardless.

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

#340

Post by otterley »

dzonga wrote: post #277

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 e…

Redis, not Reddit. :)
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