AI is turning us into glue

I would highly caution against recommending DMT to random strangers. It is not for the faint of heart and it is also nowhere near a magic fix-all. Also, its routes of administration mostly suck (smoking/vaping or MAOIs).

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#6

Post by spacebanana7 » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 11:23 PM UTC

AI is unlikely to take away jobs from software engineers. There’s no natural upper bound on the amount of software people can consume - unlike cars, food or houses.

Software engineers ultimately are people with “will to build”. Just as hedge fund people have a “will to trade”. The code or tooling is just a means to an end.

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#7

Post by myhf » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 11:23 PM UTC

Why do articles like this always say things like "I've used LLMs to get some stuff done faster" and then go on to describe how LLMs get them to spend more time and money to do a worse job? You don't need LLMs to frustrate you into lowering your standards, the power to do that was within you all along.

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#8

Post by newbie578 » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 11:24 PM UTC

Well written, I agree with the basic premise of the idea, I just think the changes will be even more dramatic.

A lot of us are stationary, thinking stuff and other people around us will be automated, but not us, “I am special”, well I fear a lot of people will find out just how much special they unfortunately are (not).

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#9

Post by rglover » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 11:24 PM UTC

Really enjoyed this post.

> Putting aside existential risks, I don't see a future where a lot of jobs don't cease to exist.

I'm personally betting on the plateau effect with LLMs. There are two plateaus I see coming that will require humans to fix no matter what we do:

1. The LLMs themselves plateau. We're already seeing new models get worse, not better at writing code (e.g., Sonnet 3.5 seems to be better than 3.7 at coding). This could be a temporary fluke, or, an inherent reality of how LLMs work (where I tend to land).

2. Humans will plateau. First, humans themselves will see their skills atrophy as they defer more and more to AI than struggling to solve problems (and by extension, learn new things). Second, humans will be disincentivized to create new forms of programming and write about them, so eventually the inputs to the LLM become stale.

Short-term, this won't appear to be true, but long-term (on the author's 10+ year scale), it will be frightening. Doubly so when systems that were primarily or entirely "vibe coded" start to break in ways that the few remaining humans responsible for maintaining them don't understand (and can't prompt their way out of).

And that's where I think the future work will be: in fixing or replacing systems unintentionally being broken by the use of AI. So, you'll either be an "AI mess fixer" or more entrepreneurial doing "artisan, hand-crafted software."

Either of those I expect to be fairly lucrative.

Re: AI is turning us into glue

#10

Post by spencerflem » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 11:25 PM UTC

spacebanana7 wrote: post #6

AI is unlikely to take away jobs from software engineers. There’s no natural upper bound on the amount of software people can consume - unlike cars, food or houses. Software engineers ultimately are people with “will to build”. Just as hedge fund people have a “will to trade”. The code or tooling is just a means to an end.

Huh, I have the opposite feeling- that people already have most of the software they want a this point.