I read this article completely thru, twice, and I still have no idea what the author is trying to say. All I can read here is a bunch of sarcastic dismissals of stuff that I don't believe and have no way to evaluate.
My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#972Everything about that is true but, and that's a big BUT, the code I write with LLM I can only iterate on it with an LLM. My mind doesn't develop a mental model of that code, I don't know where the relevant parts are, I can't quickly navigate through it and I have to reach the LLM for every small change. Which is why I like Copilot style editing more than agents as a working model but agents are just so much more powe…
This is exactly right. This is what's happened with every vibe coded codebase I've made. As a result, I only selectively use LLMs now with sections of the codebase. Or I'll just relinquish control to the LLM. I think the latter will happen en masse, which is scary.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#973LLM fanatics throw me nuts, instead of learned helplessness, at least try to understand what the token predictor outputs and be honest when you used LLM to generate your code dump when asking for help. Otherwise you are just wasting time and being simply a middle man for a machine and person who expects an interaction with actual human being with their valuable time.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#974I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even…
Love all of this.
Most importantly, I'll embrace the change and hope for the possible abundance.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#975Here's an idea... imagine you are just starting, you know nothing... an AI can and will help you.
Tell me you won't use it and explain properly, without appeal to "legacy" or "human values" or other abstracts which don't self validate.
Now note that this is POV for every child on earth.
The new discipline is provider of LLM/AI guard rails, and absolutely requires knowing what is/not correct.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#976I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even…
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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#977I know this is a website for programmers and I am not one. I like LLMs for quick answers and simple tasks like proofreading (just to fix errors, not to add or change anything) and simple text formating. I absolutely hate for everything else. I am a writer and LLMs prose may be correct and sometimes whimsical but it has soulless quality to it that makes me forget about what I just read after five seconds. My friends use Meta AI on our chat groups on WhatsAppp and I hate it so much, I delete every single AI message as soon as I see it.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#978"Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged." I would jump off a bridge before I…
Same, thank you.
I have a friend and coworker who is currently struggling with this thing and similar "not making anything" issues from having worked a "maintenance/support" job consisting of little day-to-day make-creation. He took a leave for two months. I really don't think he's coming back.
It is a loss for people he works with and the things he touches. Not to mention a loss for me, because he was the one person I found at my current job with the "make stuff, be useful" attitude. Already people who see that writing on the wall are dropping out.
Sooner or later, me too, if that is in fact the way it goes. The only thing that really keeps me going is that I don't have anything else to turn to, and I do have some cloudy optimism about getting a lot of money and satisfaction in a couple years to help clean up or rework the garbage-deluge.
Your other comment about extroversion makes me think of Gifts Differing (not the best book in the universe, but some good bits especially around intro/extroversion). I just want to hit flow state and smash my head into a problem that costs me sleep and come out on top bloodied but happy and feeling like I've done something. And this is/was a really great career for that.
> This faculty of concentration is likely to characterize the introverts' careers. Whereas extraverts tend to broaden the sphere of their work, to present their products early (and often) to the world, to make themselves known to a wide circle, and to multiply relationships and activities, the introvert takes the opposite approach. Going more deeply into their work, introverts are reluctant to call it finished and publish it, and when they do, they tend to give only their conclusions, without the details of what they did. This impersonal brevity of communication narrows their audience and fame, but saves them from overwhelming external demands and allows them to return to another uninterrupted stretch of work. As Jung is reported to have said, the introverts' activity thereby gains in depth and their labor has lasting value.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#979I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even…
For what it's worth: I'm not dismissive of the idea that these things could be ruinous for the interests of the profession. I don't automatically assume that making applications drastically easier to produce is just going to make way for more opportunities. I just don't think the interest of the profession control. The travel agents had interests too!
Let's be real. Software engineers are skeptical right now not because they believe robots are better than them. Quite the opposite. The suits will replace software engineers despite its mediocrity.
It was just 2 weeks ago when the utter incompetence of these robots were in full public display [1]. But none of that will matter to greedy corporate executives, who will prioritize short-term cost savings. They will hop from company to company, personally reaping the benefits while undermining essential systems that users and society rely on with robot slop. That's part of the reason why the C-suites are overhyping the technology. After all, no rich executive has faced consequences for behaving this way.
It's not just software engineering jobs that will take a hit. Society as a whole will suffer from the greedy recklessness.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
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