I find it curious that nobody in this whole thread does once mention AI communism. I think after much pain and sorrow, and many deaths, this is the most likely outcome. Probably in a dystopian fashion.
My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
651–660 of 1001 posts
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#652basically nails every point i've wanted to say but couldn't lol. also in the end the endless posturing gets tired and we go back to getting shit done. either it helps you are it doesn't.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#653I was quite happy and entlohntes when I dropped an HTML table Formates with Emojies into my prompt and told to turn it into a terraform module.
But how do you quality check this part? I am proofreading all these transformations and I am not sure if this is really faster than actually recording a VIM macro, which will do the steps I need.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#654One point is missing for me - you get lazy. People are less and less equiped to think about complex problems the more they RELY on this for coding. Also this article is just about coding.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#655I think people fail to realize that to value software to $0 is to destroy the point of most of it. If it becomes so easy to write apps, then everyone can build their own. They won't need your app. The entire point of most SaaS business revolves around the simple concept/question: build vs. buy. So if there's no point in buying since building is so easy, then AI isn't helping you like your software product/SaaS. I thi…
No.
The issue is maintenance and focus. Sure, smash out an AI accounting app, payroll app, CRM, etc but now you're not in the business of selling hamburgers or whatever, you've become a conglomerate.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#656Please stop this. It’s clear to me that you’re not a software engineer. You weren’t one before AI, and you are not one after. You can do whatever you want, but please don’t push this AI narrative down everyones throat. I’ve had enough of this.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#657Weird to claim the llm does all the boring learning and boilerplate for you as a selling point, but then also insist we still need to responsibly read all the output, and if you can't understand it's a "skill issue". Also the emphasis on greenfield projects? Starting is by FAR the easiest part. That's not impressive to me. When do we get to code greenfield for important systems? Reminds me of the equally absurd examp…
I don't have a huge dog in this fight apart from AI advocates being annoying... but I would say that for greenfield projects the interesting thing is that I can get a skeleton of a working iOS app for something simple in like an hour of some copy/pasting stuff from ChatGPT. Instead of spending a good amount of time trying to get through learning material to do it.
It's nice to build throwaway things _so fast_, especially in the sort of fuzzy stuff like frontend where it's fine for it to be completely wrong. And then I can just use my own sense of how computers work to fix up what I care about, delete a bunch of what I don't care about... It's pretty amazing.
For existing projects I have only witnessed garbage output. I know people have success. I haven't seen it.
I have witnessed PMs taking a bullet pointed list of requirements and then use ChatGPT to generate paragraphs of text for some reason. You had the list!
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#658You’re the goat, Ptacek.
Seriously, this is the most based defense of LLM that I’ve read over the years. All the yapping in the thread only proves your points.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#659I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
I don't fear people using AI for evil. The destruction comes from something far more benign. These coders won't really be able to code, and they won't teach anybody else to code. Skills will be lost. Once something breaks, nobody will be able to fix it.
It may get worse. Imagine the police using AI to interpret evidence against you, get judged by a court that uses AI to write your sentence, based on laws that were also written by AI. Nobody understands this, just listen to the AI.
The other aspect of this is the flood of inane and untrue content. It may go to such an extent that the outlook of the typical person may become incredibly local again, limited to their immediate surroundings and personal experiences, not by choice, but because there won't be any way to obtain any reliable information about the outside world, with no way to sift the real from the unreal.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#660A couple of thoughts:
On 'just read the code' - all well and good. Of course this implies insisting on team members who can read the code, will read the code and are empowered to read the code.
Otherwise orgs will try to hire pure vibe coders who aren't interested in that and only allow time for literally just instructing agents to generate code because it sounds cheaper and execs don't understand the nuance so long as it looks like product is shipping - until it all blows up and the one standing senior developer on hand is supposed to fix a prod issue buried in millions of lines of vibe reviewed code ASAP.
On 'but it's cheaper than a junior': cloud hosted LLM systems are currently massively subsidised to an absurd degree. The cost side of things is all smoke and mirrors geared towards accelerated market adoption at all costs. It's not a profitable enterprise at the model development level.
At some point that AI economy is going to expect to make that money back, and future (especially near-future) hardware advancements don't explain where all of that is going to come from.