My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

Does no-one think ahead, for more than a moment?

> Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code.

Are we? Is that our job? You might think it is, and it might even feel like it. But it is not. Our job, in 99% of cases, is to make stock price go up. That means making software that people will buy, making people want to keep buying it, and doing whatever makes your investors happy.

So what happens as you use these tools? Your job changes from coder to "LLM manager", but let's assume you're happy with that. You're more "productive", which is an artificial metric and nothing to do with your real job as described above. That's fine for now, but what happens down the road? Now your company is paying more and more money to these LLM services, and paying you less and less.

> "but they take-rr jerbs" So does open source.

This is a gross misunderstanding of open source. Most open source developers are paid to be, full time, by companies. Why? Warm fuzzy feeling? Goodness of their heart? No. It's because it's good for business. These open source techs are a baseline, there' not worth being competitive on. Build the open base in the direction you want, and build the "business value" ontop for profit.

> We used to pay good money for databases.

We still do. Have you looked at managed PostgreSQL prices lately? Also if you haven't noticed, Oracle hasn't gone anywhere.

> LLMs really might displace many software developers. That’s not a high horse we get to ride. Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades.

This isn't the same thing as replacing punch cards, or moving away from Java 6, or replacing artisans with factory machines. This is centralisation and rent-seeking. As companies become more and more dependant on a handful of companies with the upfront capital to build massive server farms... what do you think is going to happen? Once they've convinced enough people that LLMs are essential to their work it's going to cost a lot more than $20/month. Once these companies are entrenched they will wring every last dollar out of every company that's grown to depend on them, many will simply fold.

Maybe we are in a seismic shift in our industry. But the beneficiaries are not going to be whole-hearted LLM adopters, no amount of saying "you need to change how you work" is going to save any of us. The only people that will benefit are going to be the people that own the data centres.

> But often prompting is more complex than programming something. It may be more complex, but it is in my opinion better long term. We need to get good at communicating with AIs to get results that we want. Forgive me assuming that you probably didn't use these assistants long enough to get good at using them. I'm web developer for 20 years already and AI tools are multiplying my output even in problems I'm very good at. And they are getting better very quickly.

I agree with your points but I'm also reminded of one my bigger learnings as a manager - the stuff I'm best at is the hardest, but most important, to delegate.

Sure it was easier to do it myself. But putting in the time to train, give context, develop guardrails, learn how to monitor etc ultimately taught me the skills needed to delegate effectively and multiply the teams output massively as we added people.

It's early days but I'm getting the same feeling with LLMs. It's as exhausting as training an overconfident but talented intern, but if you can work through it and somehow get it to produce something as good as you would do yourself, it's a massive multiplier.

> I get up in the morning to make things, not to watch others make things.

If you ever followed down the rabbit hole of children content on YouTube, the one that infants and toddlers end up after an hour of autoplay with some innocent cartoon at the beginning, you'd find among the piles of morbid psychotic trash a variety of videos of children watching someone else playing some games, a whole class of videos in itself.

I can't explain this with anything else but a coordinated effort to flash the norm of watching someone/something doing something as opposed to being engaged in immediate action yourself into the firmware of future people. This lines up with many other current trends pretty well. Talk about incrementing Baudrillard's level of simulation a notch up.

Rage bait and little more.