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AI Tribalism

nolanlawson.com

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Re: AI Tribalism

#81

Post by kranner »

vidar wrote: post #32
lins1909 wrote: post #20

What if I just enjoy how I work at the moment and don't really care about this stuff? Why do I _have_ to give it a go? Why don't LLM evangelists accept this as an option? Choosing not to use AI agents is maybe the only tool position I feel I've had to defend or justify in over a decade of doing this, and it's so bizarre to me. It almost reeks of insecurity from the Agent Evangelists and I wonder if all the "fear" and…

Your work will eventually be driven by the same economics as the industry as a whole, project estimates 12 months from now will be done based on how long it takes a dev with full LLM backing, not your current speed. Then you need to be prepared to work at that speed.

This confidence may be somewhat premature at this stage. The industry is extremely fashion-driven and may decide that agentically-based development results in mediocre and unmaintainable code. It depends too on how the flagship models develop.

Also not all of us need to sell ourselves as high-speed AI-boosted developers, especially those with decades of experience. Investors might well choose to invest in artisanal coding, and many of us can act as our own investors as well. So the inevitability of agentism is still undecided IMHO.

Re: AI Tribalism

#82

Post by themafia »

wvenable wrote: post #73
themafia wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not suggest that; however, the law is clear. If I use my knowledge to produce code, under a specific license, then you take that code, and reproduce it without the license, you have broken the law. You can twist this around as much as you like but there are several studies showing that LLMs and and will happily reproduce content from their training data.

> If I use my knowledge to produce code, under a specific license, then you take that code, and reproduce it without the license, you have broken the law. Correct. But if read your code, produce a detailed specification of that code, and then give that code to another team (that has never seen your code) and they create a similar product then they haven't broken the law. LLMs reproducing exact content from their trai…

> and they create a similar product then they haven't broken the law.

That costs significantly more and involves the creation of jobs. I see this as a great outcome. There seems to be a group of people who share the opposite of my views on this matter.

> and is an error that needs correcting

It's been known for years. They don't seem interested in doing that or they simply aren't capable. I presume because most of the value in their service _is_ the copyright whitewashing.

> Memorizing specific training data means that it is not generalizing enough.

Is that like a knob they can turn or is it something much more fundamental to the technology they've staked trillions on?

Re: AI Tribalism

#83

Post by themafia »

rpdillon wrote: post #78
themafia wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now this process is heavily automated. And comes with a price tag paid to people who neither own nor generated that content. You don't think that shifts the ethical boundaries _significantly_?

I don't. The general trend is that, in US rulings, courts have found that if the material was obtained legally, then training can be fair use. My understanding is that getting LLMs to regurgitate anything significant requires very specific prompting, in general. I would very much like someone to give me the magic reproduction triple: a model trained on your code, a prompt you gave it to produce a program, and its out…

> My understanding is that getting LLMs to regurgitate anything significant requires very specific prompting, in general.

Then you have been mislead:

https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3...

> I would very much like someone to give me the magic reproduction triple

Here's how I saw it directly. Searched for "node http server example." Google's AI spit out an "answer." The first link was a Digital Ocean article with an example. Google's AI completely reproduced the DO example down to the content of the comments themselves.

So.. don't know what to tell you. How hard have you been looking yourself? Or are you just trying to maintain distance with the "show me" rubrick? If you rely on these tools for commercial purposes then the onus was always on you.

> So the ground-truth exists

And you expect a civil trial to be the most reliable oracle of it? I think you know what I know but would rather _not_ know it.

Re: AI Tribalism

#84

Post by wvenable »

themafia wrote: post #82
wvenable wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I use my knowledge to produce code, under a specific license, then you take that code, and reproduce it without the license, you have broken the law. Correct. But if read your code, produce a detailed specification of that code, and then give that code to another team (that has never seen your code) and they create a similar product then they haven't broken the law. LLMs reproducing exact content from their trai…

> and they create a similar product then they haven't broken the law. That costs significantly more and involves the creation of jobs. I see this as a great outcome. There seems to be a group of people who share the opposite of my views on this matter. > and is an error that needs correcting It's been known for years. They don't seem interested in doing that or they simply aren't capable. I presume because most of th…

> That costs significantly more and involves the creation of jobs. I see this as a great outcome.

I don't see it that way. If whatever you're doing can now be automated then it's become a bullshit job. It no longer a benefit to humanity to have a human sit on their ass, stand on their feet, or break their back to do a job that can be automated. As a software developer, it's my job to take the dumb repetitive stuff that humans do and make it so that humans never have to do that job again.

If that's a problem for society, it's because society is messed up.

> It's been known for years. They don't seem interested in doing that or they simply aren't capable.

I don't find that to be particularly big problem. Fundamentally an AI isn't just compressing all human knowledge and decompressing it on demand; it's tweaking parameters in a giant matrix. I can reproduce the lyrics of songs that I've heard but that doesn't mean there is a literal copy of that song in my brain that you could extract out with a well placed scalpel. It just means I've heard it a bunch of times and the giant matrix in my brain is tuned to be able to spit it out.

> Is that like a knob they can turn or is it something much more fundamental to the technology they've staked trillions on?

In a sense, it a knob. It's not fundamental to the technology; if it's reproducing something exactly that likely means it's over-trained on that data. It's actually bad for the models (makes them more incorrect, more rigid, and more repetitive) so that is a knob they will turn.

Re: AI Tribalism

#85

Post by JoshTriplett »

rpdillon wrote: post #76
JoshTriplett wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't care what authority he's arguing from. The "just try it" pitch here is fundamentally a tribalist argument: tribes don't want another tribe to exist that's viewed as threatening to them.

Trying a new technology seems like what engineers do (since they have to leverage technology to solve real problems, having more tools to choose from can be good). I'm surprised it rings as tribalist.

The impression I get from this post is that anyone who doesn't like it needs to try it more. It doesn't really feel like it leaves space for "yeah, I tried it, and I still don't want to use it".

I know what its capabilities are. If I wanted to manage a set of enthusiastic junior engineers, I'd work with interns, which I love doing because they learn and get better. (And I still wouldn't want to be the manager.) AIs don't, not from your feedback anyway; they sporadically get better from a new billion dollar training run, where "better" has no particular correlation with your feedback.

Re: AI Tribalism

#86

Post by soulofmischief »

rpdillon wrote: post #77
soulofmischief wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand how much things are about to change in a relatively short time. A lot of people are rightfully confused and concerned. Many people are seeing this as an existential moment requiring careful navigation and planning, not just another language or browser or text editor war.

This is exactly my position. Landscape-changing technology is impossible to get away from, because it follows you. It's like a local business owner in 1998 telling me they didn't care about the stupid "internet" thing, and then the internet blew away their business within 10 years. Similar story with the PC: folks didn't get the option to just "opt out" of a digital office because they liked typewriters and paper. Ce…

100%, even if models stopped advancing today, there's already enough utility that just needs to be constrained by traditional software. It's not going away; it's going to change our interfaces completely, and change how services interface with each other, how they're designed, and change the pace at which software evolves.

This is a tipping point and most anti-AI advocates don't understand that other software developers who keep telling them to reevaluate their positioned are often just trying to make sure no one is left behind.

Re: AI Tribalism

#87

Post by oytis »

crazygringo wrote: post #54
oytis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I'm gonna go full agentic coding the day I can do it with open-weight models on my machine. Until then feeding someone else's models with more data on how to replace me in particular sounds insane to me.

If you think it's going to replace you, then it's going to replace you regardless of whether you personally are feeding it data or not. If it produces value for you, you should use it. If not, don't.

So far I have been able to trade some efficiency for more control in my professional life. All of my tooling is open-source and local. I hope I can get away with it this time as well though sure some adjustment will be needed

Re: AI Tribalism

#88

Post by munksbeer »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #25
WA wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of that post Nolan is a pretty interesting guy and deep in the web tech stack. He’s really one of the last people I’d call "tribal", especially since you mention React. This guy hand-writes his web components and files bug reports to browsers and writes his own memory leak detection lib and so on. If such a guy is slowly dipping his toes into AI and comes to the conclusion he just posted, you should take a…

I really don't care what authority he's arguing from. The "just try it" pitch here is fundamentally a tribalist argument: tribes don't want another tribe to exist that's viewed as threatening to them.

There is of course an option here, you can just completely ignore the suggestion and all of these posts.

Re: AI Tribalism

#89

Post by munksbeer »

There is a very ironic meta being demonstrated here. The author's blog predicts exactly how the comment section here would unfold. It's like we're little puppets and we don't have control of our strings. I'm here to say "I agree with the author, I was very underwhelmed initially, but in the last few months I now use claude code a huge amount".

Others will be here to say "Just another evangelist telling us we're going to miss out".

To add a bit more of an interesting take (because all the arguments at this point are soooooo boring), my main issue at this point isn't whether I find it useful or not (I 100% do), it is that I'm now relying on claude a bit too much and I find it frustrating when I work offline. I am wary of that, a lot actually.

Re: AI Tribalism

#90

Post by munksbeer »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #75
WA wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of that post Nolan is a pretty interesting guy and deep in the web tech stack. He’s really one of the last people I’d call "tribal", especially since you mention React. This guy hand-writes his web components and files bug reports to browsers and writes his own memory leak detection lib and so on. If such a guy is slowly dipping his toes into AI and comes to the conclusion he just posted, you should take a…

Honestly that's what makes this all the more dangerous. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too: accept all of the hype and all of the propaganda, but then couch it in the rhetoric of "oh I'm so concerned I can remain in a sort of moderate & empathetic position and not fall prey to tribalism and flame wars." There's no both-sides-ing of genAI. This is an issue akin to street narcotics, mass weapons of war, or for…

> You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity.

I don't think this has yet been established. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out. My inclination is it'll turn out like most other technological advancements - short term pain for some industries, long term efficiency and comfort gain for humans.

Despite the anti-capitalist zeitgeist, more humans of today live like kings compared to a few hundred years ago, or even 100 years ago.

But you seem to have jumped to a conclusion that everyone agrees: AI is harmful.

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