You all using Latin and believing in the old Greek gods to honor the dead?

Muricans still owning slaves from Africa?

All ways in which old social contracts were broken at one point.

We are not VHS cassettes with an obligation to play out a fuzzy memory of history.

Business schools teach that breaking the social contract is a disruption opportunity for growth, not a negative,

The Hacker in Hacker News refers to "growth hacking" now, not hacking code

Right now, the biggest issue open-source maintainers are facing is an ever-increasing supply of PRs. Before coding assistants, those PRs didn't get pushed not because they were never written (although obviously there were fewer in quantity) but because contributors were conscious of how their contributions might be perceived. In many cases, the changes never saw the light of day outside of the fork.

LLMs don't second-guess whether a change is worth submitting, and they certainly don't feel the social pressure of how their contribution might be received. The filter is completely absent.

So I don't think the question is whether machine-generated code is low quality at all, because that is hard to judge, and frankly coding assistants can certainly produce high-quality code (with guidance). The question is who made the contribution. With rising volumes, we will see an increasing amount of rejections.

By the way, we do this too internally. We have a script that deletes LLM-generated PRs automatically after some time. It is just easier and more cost-effective than reviewing the contribution. Also, PRs get rejected for the smallest of reasons.

If it doesn't pass the smell test moments after the link is opened, it get's deleted.

As you point out this of course predates the age of LLM, in many ways it's basic human tribal behavior.

This does have its own set of costs and limitations however. Judgement is hard to measure. Humans create sorting bonds that may optimize for prestige or personal ties over strict qualifications or ability. The tribe is useful, but it can also be ugly. Perhaps in a not too distant future, in some domains or projects these sorts of instincts will be rendered obsolete by projects willing to accept any contribution that satisfies enough constraints, thereby trading human judgement for the desired mix of velocity and safety. Perhaps as the agents themselves improve this tension becomes less an act of external constraint but an internal guide. And what would this be, if not a simulation of judgement itself?

You could also do it in stages, ie have a delegated agent promote people to some purgatory where there is at least some hope of human intervention to attain the same rights and privileges as pre-existing contributors, that is if said agent deems your attempt worthy enough. Or maybe to fight spam an earnest contributor will have to fork over some digital currency, to essentially pay the cost of requesting admission.

All of these scenarios are rather familiar in terms of the history of human social arrangements.

That is just to say, there is no destruction of the social contract here. Only another incremental evolution.

So far this doesn't seem to be the case, despite it being repeated endlessly over the last few years.

>while also having to live in a world increasingly built around something they see as immoral

Should people just decide that things they think are immoral are actually fine and get over it? Doesnt really seem coherent...

It's the exact same as seen with many past hypes, and every time the result is a lot more nuanced than those fans claim. It wasn't that long ago that people were claiming MongoDB was going to revolutionize the world and make relational databases obsolete, or how cryptocurrencies were going to change the world, or NFTs, and the list goes on.

You're essentially saying the very concept of a moral objection is to be pitied. Maybe you believe that's true but I'd say that reflects poorly on our values today.

The people more at risk of being left behind are the ones that don't learn when not to trust their output.

I imagine there will be a lot of regrets in the future from people that were early adopters that eventually got pushed out by the AI they love so much

I strongly doubt that is going to be the case - picking up these tools is not rocket science, even if you want to be able to use them fairly effectively. In addition, there is so much churn in AI tooling these days that an early investment might not really be worth a lot in the longer run.

On the other hand, hands-on experience in programming and architecture is currently a must-have to use the tools effectively - and continuing without AI in the short term might just buy an inexperienced engineer some time to learn, and postpone skill atrophy for an experienced engineer.

Of course, who can know what the future looks like, but I doubt a "wait and see" approach is that dangerous to anyone's career.