81–90 of 424 posts
one axis that is missing from the discussion is how fast they are improving. We need ~35 years to get a senior software engineer (from birth to education to experience). These things are not even 3.5 years old. I am very interested in this space, if you are too dm me on X:@fabmilo I am in SF.
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> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. Are you genuinely saying you never saw a critique of AI on environmental impact, or how it amplifies biases, or how it widens the economic gap, or how it further concentrates power in the hands of a few, or how it facilitates the dispersion of misinformation and surveillance, directly he…
I'm not an AI zealot but I think some of these are over blown. The energy cost is nonsensical unless you pin down a value out vs value in ratio and some would argue the output is highly valuable and the input cost is priced in. I don't know if it will end up being a concentrated power. It seems like local/open LLMs will still be in the same ballpark. Despite the absurd amounts of money spent so far the moats don't se…
> You don’t have to agree with any of those. You don’t even have to understand them. But to imply anti-AI arguments “hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless” is at best misinformed.
We can certainly discuss some of those points, but that’s not what is in question here. The OP is suggesting there is only one type of anti-AI argument they are familiar with and that they’d “love” to see something different. But I have to question how true that is considering the myriad of different arguments that exist and how easy they are to find.
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Here's one AI can only recycle the past.
Most of us do nothing but remix the past solutions. Since we don't know what else might already exist in the world without digging very deep, we fool ourselves into thinking that we do something very original and unique.
This AI will be built from it's own excretions, recursively.
That might be a hilarious trap.
It's a fine post, but two canards in here: First, skilled engineers using LLMs to code also think and discuss and stare off into space before the source code starts getting laid down. In fact: I do a lot, lot more thinking and balancing different designs and getting a macro sense of where I'm going, because that's usually what it takes to get an LLM agent to build something decent. But now that pondering and planning…
>First, skilled engineers using LLMs to code also think and discuss and stare off into space before the source code starts getting laid down Yes, and the thinking time is a significant part of overall software delivery, which is why accelerating the coding part doesn't dramatically change overall productivity or labor requirements.
If their job is basically to generate code to close jira tickets I can see the appeal of LLMs.
I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…
> If the thinking bit is your favorite part, AI allows you to spend nearly all of your time there if you wish, from concept through troubleshooting. This argument is wearing a little thin at this point. I see it multiples times a day, rephrased a little bit. The response, "How well do you think your thinking will go if you had not spent years doing the 'practice' part?" , is always followed by either silence or a non…
It's a fine post, but two canards in here: First, skilled engineers using LLMs to code also think and discuss and stare off into space before the source code starts getting laid down. In fact: I do a lot, lot more thinking and balancing different designs and getting a macro sense of where I'm going, because that's usually what it takes to get an LLM agent to build something decent. But now that pondering and planning…
> Most of my initial prompts to agents start with "DO NOT WRITE ANY CODE YET." I really like that on IntelliJ I have to approve all changes, so this prompt is unnecessary. There's a YOLO mode that just changes shit without approval, that I never use. I wonder if anyone does.
Even Claude Code lets you approve each change, but it's already writing code according to a plan that you reviewed and approved.
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> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The article sort of goes sideways with this idea but pointing out that AI coding robs you a deep understanding of the code it produces is a valid and important criticism of AI coding. A software engineer's primary job isn't producing code, but producing a functional software system. Most…
> And you will never know code as well as a reader and you would have as the author for anything larger than a very small project. This feels very true - but also consider how much code exists for which many of the current maintainers were not involved in the original writing. There are many anecdotal rules out there about how much time is spent reading code vs writing. If you consider the industry as a whole, it see…
The difference is the hope of getting out of that situation. If you've inherited a messy and incoherent code base, you recognize that as a problem and work on fixing it. You can build an understanding of the code through first reading and then probably rewriting some of it. This over time improves your ability to reason about that code.
If you're constantly putting yourself back into that situation through relegating the reasoning about code to coding agent, then you won't develop a mental model. You're constantly back at Day 1 of having to "own" someone else's code.
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More specifically for (1), the combined set of predators, advertisers, businesses, and lazy people using it to either prey or enshittify or cheat will make up the vast majority of use cases.
But notice how I got automatically heavily downvoted by merely mentioning legitimate downsides of AI
I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…
> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The article sort of goes sideways with this idea but pointing out that AI coding robs you a deep understanding of the code it produces is a valid and important criticism of AI coding. A software engineer's primary job isn't producing code, but producing a functional software system. Most…
Why? Code has always been the artifact. Thinking about and understanding the domain clearly and solving problems is where the intrinsic value is at (but I'd suspect that in the future this, too, will go away).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. Are you genuinely saying you never saw a critique of AI on environmental impact, or how it amplifies biases, or how it widens the economic gap, or how it further concentrates power in the hands of a few, or how it facilitates the dispersion of misinformation and surveillance, directly he…
I'm not an AI zealot but I think some of these are over blown. The energy cost is nonsensical unless you pin down a value out vs value in ratio and some would argue the output is highly valuable and the input cost is priced in. I don't know if it will end up being a concentrated power. It seems like local/open LLMs will still be in the same ballpark. Despite the absurd amounts of money spent so far the moats don't se…