I think it's the greatest development in my lifetime, and I don't really worry about my skills atrophying. I worry about getting things done that are valuable.
I thought people here got excited about technology. Now it's just doomer spam. sigh
so what? if you aren't part of inflating the hype beast you're a victim of it. Eventually no one will be left to hype it because we'll all have lost the battle.
I am passionately excited about technology that serves people, but the current hype around AI is not that.
LLMs are, fundamentally, a super cool development. That we can now generate large regions of text that are statistically likely to be perceived as accurate is phenomenally neat.
But that's all they are: statistical text prediction engines. They do not think or reason; they generate next tokens based on prior context[1]. Unfortunately, because they predict really convincing text, a lot of people are willing to believe them to be more capable than they are. As a consequence, the companies developing these technologies have chosen to lean into rhetoric that exacerbates these beliefs because it means more money for them. The people running these companies fundamentally do not care about the human experience when they could instead care about profits[2].
AI, as an industry, is mostly hype — and it's a particularly insidious form of hype that preys on people's desire for cool, new things at the expense of our collective long-term well-being. The exponential ramp-up of AI data centers is wreaking havoc on natural ecosystems and local communities; the humans "employed" for RLHF are severely underpaid and exploited, and are mostly powerless to make other choices; the damage to our digital infrastructure and community is visible daily (how many "are you a human?" captchas do you get today versus ten years ago? how many useless pull requests do repositories big and small receive on a daily basis? how many "look I vibe coded a shitty app in three days and it's riddled with bugs, let me post about it" posts do we see now?). And this is all to say nothing of the rapidity with which huge swaths of people have just decided they don't care about other people fundamentally; they'd rather AI-generate some garbage company logo than employ a graphic designer to do a better job; they'd rather AI-generate copytext rather than hire an editor; they'd rather reach for the cheap, built-from-the-labor-of-others-without-respect-to-them tool that outsources all creativity and effort and gives them an immediately available "eh, it's good enough" solution. Before long, we will be inundated with "good enough", and we will forget what it was like to have good.
I'm excited about technology. I am not excited about the current incarnation of this technology.
[1] I am fundamentally not interested in sophistic arguments that "this is how humans work!" We don't know how humans work, so I make a choice to maintain a belief — based on my own experiences and learning — that LLMs do not accurately reflect the workings of a human brain.
[2] See "Empire of AI" by Karen Hao.
LLMs are not hype, but "AI" is. AI is a marketing term, and always has been.
Tons of people think AI is significantly more capable than it is. We've known for the better part of a century that generating text that merely pretends competence is enough to convince a significant portion of the population that it is competence.
The reductionist, mechanical explanation of what AIs do is not the full picture, and it almost belies first-hand experience with frontier models. AIs know more and can reason better than most humans in increasingly many contexts.
Yes, this means they produce "convincing text." But there's more than one way LLM output can be convincing. The easiest way isn't with rhetorical tricks or sycophancy—it's arguing compellingly, solving difficult problems, and producing good code. The frontier models have all improved dramatically in these respects over the past 1.5 years.
It is the full picture, to a first approximation. The statistical models involved are incredibly complex, and the mechanisms used to tend towards better outputs have improved drastically, but it is still fundamentally just statistics. I don't understand why you would try to argue otherwise. "Just statistics" is not a pejorative; if anything, I think it's incredibly impressive that we can do so much by using statistical models to predict things based on a context. But that means there are inherent limitations, and this is where my concern lies.
> AIs know more and can reason better than most humans
They do not "know" things; they do not "reason". They generate statistically likely outputs based on a huge and complex training set. The distinction is that it is still possible to get even modern cutting-edge models to contradict themselves or express "thoughts" in a way that a self-aware "reasoning" person would never do.
That said, yes, the statistical models have been tuned to generate output that imitates reasoning processes very realistically, and the training data includes copious quantities of "facts" that reflect human knowledge, and this has even led to neat and surprising outcomes. I'm not suggesting otherwise. I just fundamentally do not believe it is the same process that humans use for cognition, and I think the fact that LLMs generate text that appears to follow these processes is misleading to many people.
> The easiest way isn't with rhetorical tricks or sycophancy—it's arguing compellingly, solving difficult problems, and producing good code.
This depends greatly on what you think "easiest" means. The trade-off here is that we have invested a huge amount of compute to get here, which came with a significant cost vis a vis available resources.
probably quite the opposite
> I don't really worry about my skills atrophying
well some folks probably do, which is why they seem "anti-AI" to you (I certainly do care about my skills atrophying, and it's the reason I don't use "AI")
> excited about technology
there is a difference between being excited about technology and falling into marketing traps
You can still do creative thinking while using AI as a powerful tool at your disposal.
Some mathematicians like Terence Tao are comfortable doing this, for example.
Now the skill issue lies in whether your opinion is a good idea or not lol.
We also used to be much better remembering things, when we relied on oral histories, our memory skills have degraded quite a bit. And there's a quote from Socrates criticizing how writing is a crutch that degrades our skill (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1... , the last bit). Over time, we've just moved to valuing other things more.
That's extremely speculative, especially given there was a major event in 2020 which massively disrupted education worldwide.
I think it's just important context to keep in mind that these sorts of takes are very typical to top https://bearblog.dev/discover/ in the same way that certain types of posts are designed to rank well here. I considered migrating my blog there earlier this year and ended up deciding that, while I loved the product, the community was not healthy.
[1] https://forkingmad.blog/ai-summary-blog-post/
[2] https://blog.spu.io/you-dont-want-to-make-things-you-want-to...
[3] https://blog.happyfellow.dev/simulacrum-of-knowledge-work/
While waiting for Claude to finish, we talked about our hobbies outside of work, and the same guy will go into deep details on how steroids and the HPG axis works, and even gave me a spreadsheet with several NCBI PubMed links on the topic.
I think we are all naturally be more creative and opinionated in things we are interested in.
It remains the case that AI _erodes_ your ability to that.
So, eventually, after a few years, no, you can't.
Edit: meanwhile you're making yourself disposable. So, have fun with that.
I see no point in denying the technology, it's best to do what we humans do best: adapt with it.
I've read the article and to me it reads like a very angry rant, which is why I commented with something akin to "bro calm down"
- https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artifi...
But it's definitely possible to use AI without letting it think for you. OP should at least acknowledge that.
Those who dogmatically refuse AI outright may be disadvantaged for some things in the future. But it's also probably hyperbolic to say they will be "left behind".
> [...] they'll forget how to fucking LEARN. I think that's the part that makes me the saddest. What a beautiful thing it is just to learn stuff.
I love learning. My life of self-education is so much richer with LLMs to help me.
There are dozens of other arguments for not engaging with AI. If your reason is "I love learning" I recommend at least dipping your toes in before you declare that AI is a hindrance, not a help, to people who love to learn new things.
I don't think it's hard to catch up if such a person changes their mind, though.
Some people who do use AI will be also left behind - those who use it to replace their skills without developing new ones themselves, and those who use it to do the same or worse work more cheaply. They will be left behind in a competitive world where others will work out how use it to do more or better work with no reduction in effort.
But if I'm to be expected to employ vibecoding in my day to day job as a software engineer, I'll dismantle my house and go live off grid somewhere in Alaska. I have enough power tools and knowledge to do it. Probably massively healthier for my kids.
I don't have any particular predictions going forward about it, but something I think about right now is, do I want to focus my time where the interesting decisions, the valuable contributions I make, are product-level thinking about what to build and what problems to solve? Or do I want to focus my time where the interesting decisions are technical ones, fully wrapping my head around a technical problem and coming up with a solution?
I do think both options are still available, and personally I love them both. But I don't know what types of coding would involve significant amounts of both activities anymore.
Product is when you’re seeing things as the one who have the problem and designing the solution in a way that is usable. Technical is when you shift to see how the solution can be implemented and then balancing tradeoffs (mostly costs in time and monetary resources).
While the code is valuable (as it is the solution). Building it is quite easy once you have a good knowledge on both side.
The issue with AI is not in their capabilities, but in people rushing to accept the first version when there are still unknowns in the project. And then, changes costs almost as much as redoing the project properly.
It sounds more like there is no chance that most of those people will stay employed, regardless of how "ahead" they try to stay.
"Chess players who don't use engines will be left behind", they say. I can't emphasize enough how much I hate it when I hear/read shit like that because I'm pretty sure, in fact, that what will happen is the exact opposite.
People who rely on engines are the ones who will be left behind. They'll forget how to think, how to move the pieces, how to solve a simple straightforward mate in 3, how to tell victory from stalemate... they'll forget how to fucking LEARN. I think that's the part that makes me the saddest. What a beautiful thing it is just to play chess.
If you think Deep Blue can do better than you, why would you just let it? Why wouldn't you aim to be better, to learn how to be or do something that a chess computer would never do?
Also, the world isn't as trivially solved by computation as a game of chess, so maybe delegating your job or how to be a better human to ChatGPT isn't as much of a winning strategy as getting the computer to suggest chess moves.
Deeper reasoning, longer term planning, and more efficient solutions have always separated amateurs from experts. That experience cannot be applied asynchronously or reduced to supervision. It has to be "in the loop" and there is always a lot of out-of-band information that only an experienced eye would notice and can't be trained into a model.
Maybe there's a way AI can be used to make developers better but it mostly just seems to be the equivalent of grand masters saying how great vibe playing is because now they can play 1000x more games every day. But don't worry, they're still steering the games.
Unfortunately this is absolutely true for classical chess at the professional level, w.r.t. preparation.
Not detracting from your point though, for the other 99.9% of chess players.
This AI/LLM push from leadership is so damn tone deaf, like "you better do this", "ai layoffs", etc. I feel like they are jumping way too hard and fast into the "post-employee" thinking and deserve every bit of scorn from laymen.
If you didn't embrace OOP Test driven development Behavior driven development Events driven development Pants in head driven development SOLID DRY Cloud first Virtualization everything Microsservices Serverless Everything js Everything ts Everything Microsoft
This will never stop.
You either let someone be in the middle of you and what you want to accomplish, or you will be left behind.
Think about the most mediocre person you know. Now remember 50% of people around you is dumber than that
The only real risk is that today there's an expectation from employers that you've got some AI experience under your belt you can articulate. But you can get that experience today.
We could replace "AI" here with many different terms and the argument would remain unchanged.
Sadly I think the author is wrong though I agree with the spirit of what they're saying.
Economic pressures will force workers to use AI as part of their work. Categorically refusing to use AI under any circumstances will guarantee being left behind.
Like others are pointing out, if we define "using AI" as "outsourcing all your thinking to AI" then yeah, those people will perhaps not do well...or will they?
Most people consider quality work a hassle. It takes a long time and it gets in the way of shipping. I've worked with quite a few people who were lousy engineers but boy could they ship. They were universally beloved by the business and tolerated/loathed by the engineering side. But they're the ones who get promoted and get ahead.
Life is hard, but at least on the other hand, it's also unfair.
I've seen some produce stuff without really understanding it, barely review anything, and pretty much suffer from imposter syndrome.
Obviously people who are motivated by curiousity will have a different view and those who value creativity will end up thinking otherwise.
Also, it's basically impossible to separate the technical capabilities with the big money fascists pushing it.
Sure, he'll get it done twice as fast and you might notice some tricks as you look over his shoulder. But when you need a second door hung, you'll either have to start learning from scratch or call him again.
Everyone seems to know you can't trust the AI output, and that it is on you to review it. But whenever I talk to people who claim to be getting big benefits, there is always a moment they reveal that they are not really reviewing the output. They are just going with it.
Similarly, so many who claim to use AI as a search index eventually seem to just trust the summary instead of checking the references to figure out whether it is regurgitating fact or fiction.
I don't really know if these users always had low quality standards or low diligence, or whether the tool usage degrades them. But I see the correlation among the friends-of-friends network I can observe.
Why spend your life "learning" something whose whole deal is about not needing to learn? Even if you gamble incorrectly, its not going to be hard to get into!
Like, what, if I don't start practicing now I am not going to be able to... express concepts with natural language as well?
it's clear that LLMs are unique in that you actually do have the capability to turn your brain off and blindly trust whatever it does for you. but it should be equally clear that that's a stupid approach. people will still use their minds, and this use gets empowered with proper use of LLMs. it's that simple. ffs, we take the fact that they pass the Turing Test routinely for granted now. let's not forget that this technology is legitimately incredible. it stands to reason that you are seriously handicapping yourself by not trying to use it.
I kind of agree in general that it is a learned skill, but considering how unclear people generally are when they communicate, I'm guessing it'll take longer than a weekend to be able to catch up, especially catch up to people who've been working on precise and careful communication and language for years already in a professional environment.
the level of teaching involved would always mean the overall velocity of work slowed down.
some people say you can throw them the drudge work but i find that if you're doing coding right (e.g. you dont let your code base degenerate into a mess of boilerplate), there is barely any drudge work to do.
Me, too. But that doesn't mean I'm a great developer, just a shitty manager.
I let the AI make decisions all the time. I often approve them, and I sometimes revert them. Most of the time they’re really good decisions based on my initial intent, but followed by analysis I didn’t make but agree with.
There's clearly some level where you want a human making decisions for even the most vibey of project, because without some kind of a spec about what you're trying to build and what features you want you'd get nonsense.
But like... maybe don't stress the details too much.
If one has been reading a wide variety of books/papers/articles/whatever their whole life, and one has been mindful of how to communicate with the "written word" as it were, it takes about 3 hours to be wildly effective with this technology. I think it took longer to learn google-fu than it did to learn how to use this technology effectively.
That said - what we have learned in the last year could be compressed quite a lot - there are a lot steps we could skip, and 'learn by failure' that need not be repeated.
It takes a while to get the subtleties of it, it's among the most highly nuanced things we've ever encountered.
They're great at some stuff and terrible at other stuff in ways that are very hard to predict.
I'm figuring out new and better ways to use them in a daily basis, and I've been an almost daily user for nearly three years.
And I'm sorry to nitpick - but "People who rely on AI are the ones who will be left behind" is NOT the opposite of "People who don't use AI will be left behind".
Well of course too much is bad for you, that's what "too much" means you blithering twat. If you had too much water it would be bad for you, wouldn't it? "Too much" precisely means that quantity which is excessive, that's what it means. Could you ever say "too much water is good for you"? I mean if it's too much it's too much. Too much of anything is too much. Obviously. Jesus.
If it's good, lots of people will use it commercially. If it's generationally good, everybody will use it commercially because commercial use is about competition. It either gets banned outright, like steroids, or — if it doesn't get banned — those who use it will have a clear advantage and that will lead to a very small number of people who don't use it (in business).
This is not really something that opinions are required for because if you think LLMs are going away, your opinion is historically incorrect. Things that reduce toil and increase output do not go away.
There is absolutely not doubt; and it will be impossible to avoid as using 'plastic' or 'electricity'.
The narrow challenges of 'AI aided development' or 'AI aided creative work' are legitimate - that part is real and fair, but it'd be an over-statement to contemplate 'not using it'.
The cyclists who keep their muscles strong the 'hard way' ... will win the delivery war vs. cars!?
The carpenter who hammers every nail and saws every plank by hand 'the hard way' ... will win over the guys using power saws and nail guns!?
No - AI is changing the landscape.
What is 'hard and easy' are changing.
We won't need some skills, we will need others.
It maybe harder to maintain some critical skills, but the upside is obvious.
What is fundamentally missing from this treatise is that 'there is always a hard way'.
Personally - I have never been more 'cognitively overloaded' than ever. The AI 'amplifies' the depth of complexity one can reach, it's just at 1/2 a layer of abstraction above the code.
Driving a 'race car' at the highest speeds - is as challenging - and perhaps more so - than riding a horse.
The 'instinct to push back' is fair and there are innumerable legit criticisms ...
... but AI is just a new part of the stack and it will be as horizontally applied as 'software or the transistor' - it's not reasonable to think one could or should avoid it entirely.
with AI agents, you're obtaining a mildly lossy perspective of the code itself. whereas if you wrote it by hand, you'd have a more concrete understanding.
This is not too different from an engineering manager directing junior developers.
The stereotype of the engineering manager who forgot to write a line of code is not wrong.
i - AI is going to interject in so many things and so many ways beyond 'helping you write some modules' so consider that.
ii - AI 2 years ago was useless for code, you can see how well it works not, and this progress is still very real. By this time next year, the power will be more evident, making the position harder to take.
iii - to your point - the real answer is 'abstractions'. We used to write machine code by hand as well, until someone came up with FORTRAN and C etc. Now, people have 'forgotten' how to do that, largely, because we don't need people to do it.
AI is crudely that abstraction. You don't have to know a lot about some things.
Now - it's very fair to highlight the fact that the abstraction isn't very clean (!!!) but that will come over time.
So yes - for writing software today, we're '1/2 a layer abstraction up' - and it's 100% essential to keep an eye on the code, the architecture etc. - it's 'not fully there' but it's better to look at this through the lens of growing capabilities because over the horizon, the argument starts to tilt.
It's so completely obvious, that anyone denying it has to be living in some kind rhetorical bubble.
It's truly a feature of 'online rhetoric' like HN/Reddit where people can consider these asymptotic postures and take themselves seriously.
We will use AI like you use plastics, cars, electricity, computers etc..
That's it.
I'm sure there were a few people who thought that 'hand writing machine instructions' was the 'one true way' of writing software, but hey, what would we call them in hindsight?
There are so many legitimate ways to be curmudgeon or wary of AI, but this reactionary stuff is anti-reason. It's not an argument, it's guttural, we should just ignore it.
The author chose to take offense by connecting with a false dichotomy presented vaguely in a way that serves no purpose other than dividing and poorly labeling everyone in an area where much nuance applies.
I think this is perhaps a side effect of consuming too much content and feeling overwhelmed with it.
Engaging with stuff like this only amplifies its effects, how about do anything else instead? Maybe learn something new, like how to channel your anger.
I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it.
IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and rent-seeking, to my own bought-and-paid-for computer sitting on my desk that did exactly what I told it to do using software that never changed unless I wanted it to change, and now we're back to dumb terminals (browsers) that talk to mainframes (the cloud) that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software and have gone back to renting me the software and pushing changes that I never asked for and never wanted in the first place.
I will never use spicy autocomplete for anything, and I find it depressing that people are being forced to use it in order to keep their job. I see a very dark future for computing if real skills are all replaced with garbage being vomited out by rules engines that harvested their "guess the next word" results from today's internet.
If there's an ethos that emphasizes the boomer mindset it's this one.
>and I find it depressing that people are being forced to use it in order to keep their job
You know what, when numerical control systems started arriving in the machine shops in the 1960's, that's exactly and EXACTLY what machinists were saying. Now fast forward today, are CNC operators today much worse off than machinists doing everything by hand in the 1950s?
I don't even blame you for not seeing the picture of history repeating itself again, just because you're old doesn't mean you're also wise(no offense). Us newer SW devs we'll adapt and survive in the AI age, like humans always have, even if we missed the golden age of computers, 8-inch floppies, and dial-up internet. Nature always finds a way.
The bigger challenges for us will be the fiscal, societal, housing, economical, labor, political, we have to deal with now versus your generation. Being forced to use AI at work isn't gonna be even in the top 10 of our issues we'll face before retirement, so no need to pity us for this one thing.
I do agree with you on a spiritual level, that the constant worldwide economic chase for optimisations, efficiency and productivity in order to "make line go up", hasn't made many workers happier or wealthier, but that's not something I can control, but I do have to adapt to survive, and neither is it something that tech bros invented, but a product of decades of post-Reagan post-Jack Welch capitalism.
Which the people retiring soon, like the one I'm replying to, helped build with their labor, funded with their investments to get rich and enjoy their 401ks, leaving the current generations holding the bag.
Nobody's innocent here. When Zuckerberg brought out his checkbook to poach engineers to build the Spybook 9000 social network, everyone flocked there without thinking, "hey, are we fucking up the future of the world?".
When people here were flaunting Crypto as the second coming of Jesus, they weren't thinking "hey, are we maybe helping people get scammed?"
Every past generation of workers has their own guilt in to how we got here to the present situation.
I'm not as old as the GPP who is thankful to be retiring, but that's absurd. What would it take, in your mind, not to be complicit in this? Would we have to form militant groups who fire bomb datacenters and social media operators..?
We didn't all work for Facebook, nor any FAANG, nor embrace or hype the crypto scams. Hell, I abstained from using Facebook due to my principles.
I spent my career writing open source software, at academic salary levels. Though I'm not happy to end my career today, the AI agent stuff may well be the hill I retire on, if the mass delusion spirals hard enough and employers demand that I bend my principles.
There are plenty of bright kids out there, but they're going to be operating from a position of dependence on the OpenAIs, Googles, and Apples of the world if they want to ship a product.
Whether you like it or not, the computing environment of today is a product of the labor and financial participation of older folk of the past. Google, Facebook and Microsoft weren't built by Zoomers. Everyone contributed to the current state of things, either direct thought labor and fiance or indirectly by just using the products.
>We're heading into a world of centralized control where your personal computer is mostly a "thin client" for a bunch of online services
And who built those online services?
People make it sound like Azure, AWS, Facebook, X, etc were just snapped into existence one day by Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk, and aren't decades of labor by hundreds of thousands of workers who voluntarily did this in exchange for cash.
> This is in contrast to the 1990-2010 era where software was generally "buy once use forever" and general purpose, open hardware was the norm. You could hook your homemade server up to the internet with a minimum of fuss and start running a service or forum or website or whatever.
I know, but how does remanenceing help here? You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube same how you can't turn back housing affordability back to how it was in 1995, or bring back those lucrative union manufacturing jobs that could support a family from just bolting bumpers to a Chevy on an assembly line.
Those are all one-time things of the past now, never to return again in the same form. You have to work with the cards you've been dealt today, not moan about how much better the past was since that doesn't help anyone.
In the long arc of history, I'm doubtful we'll see 'the last 50 years' as 'the Golden Age' - that's just a personal, contemporary romanticization. More than likely, the advent of computers -> web -> AI etc. will be one block of the 'informational industrial revolution'.
The people who made the ostensible 'Golden Era' were pioneers, just as those breaking new ground are pioneers today, it's honestly 'depressing' that people who consider themselves 'Engineers' wouldn't see that as clear as day, an be hopeful for the future on some level.
AI is very real phenom, obviously vastly over-hyped in many ways, and it doesn't feel nice to have to get caught up in a tectonic shift against one's will, but it is bringing about legitimate progress in every sense that the Engineers and Creators before us did.
In the exact same spirit as DaVinci or Babbage.
If one wants to keep a horse in the stable, or a typewriter around for posterity or any other reason that's fine, but not under the notion that somehow they are better or more useful.
Nothing the parent said was arrogant.
The fact of the matter is, a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person. It makes research faster. It makes experimentation faster. It makes output cleaner. And this is true across many disciplines, not just tech.
Also, it is a skill. Yes, anyone can chat with an LLM. But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult. Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined.
If i had to guess, I'd say we'll probably see major breakthroughs across multiple disciplines within the next decade, largely because researchers and engineers can cover much more ground individually now, freed from the slow moving coordination mechanisms that team dynamics require. Pretty good for "spicy autocomplete" as you put it.
There are jobs outside of IT. They are harder, they have less benefits, they pay less. It's a whole project to switch your lifestyle so you can even afford them.
I know nobody who regrets making the jump. I hope to make it within this year. I'll be poor, but at least I won't work in IT.
> But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult.
No it's not, you can learn it in less than a day. I've done it a few times while evaluating how much the agents have progressed (despite what people keep saying, not much).
> Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined.
Some of us learned technical writing to communicate with _humans_ before, and we're sitting here alternating crying and laughing as y'all scramble to figure it out just to put all that into a hallucination machine.
What's your plan?
To me the idea that a GPU which costs as much as a car must read its entire VRAM just to output a word sounds incredibly wasteful. I'm exaggerating here, but it is literally reading gigabytes of data and processing it to produce relatively little information.
Some data is truly worth the effort, but the majority won't be able to afford this long term - especially when those who capture the market increase prices.
Kind of how I feel about Bitcoin at this point. The coins take so incredibly long to mine if you aren't in a pool that it could cost hundreds of dollars in electricity to own a fraction of the coin months later.
It is a tool just like syntax highlighting, code completion and refactoring tools before it. You need to know how to use them, where their usefulness ends and you should probably have an idea how to do it yourself without the tool. It is okay if you will be less efficient, but it's bad if you just can't.
Just as many people leading sedentary lifestyles have to make a deliberate effort to exercise, because inactivity is really bad for our bodies, I think we're going to realise that a similar process is necessary for our minds.
You really want to be spending a bit of time every day operating at your cognitive limits - trying to fully engage your System 2 - if you want to avoid brain atrophy. Coding used to kind of give you this exercise for free, but you can go really far with just your System 1 nowadays - literally get things done while scrolling Reddit.
I'm trying to allocate 30-60 minutes a day to doing something difficult, like writing code by hand for an unfamiliar problem or reading and summarising difficult papers without AI.
Nevertheless, the responsibility of whatever a human produces with AI is still on the human.
With that said, knowing how to use AI the way it's right for you can give you a huge advantage. You don't have to though. And there is not a standard way of doing it.
What I recommend to everyone is give it a try and see if and how it could help you. At the end, you have to make the decision based on your constraints and what you're aiming to and can sacrifice, including but not limited to speed, accuracy, learning, etc.
Today, we are hearing a similar claim: “If you can describe the program in natural language, programming is basically finished.” But the industry is now discovering that \describing the program well\ is the hard part.
This is also why ideas like harness engineering are appearing: methods for controlling the range of outputs, from poor to excellent, that can emerge from minimal input.
And honestly, I do not think the “vibe coding” phenomenon is entirely bad. The essence of programming is automation. Many people were previously limited because they did not know programming languages. Now, through AI, they can express themselves and turn that expression into working apps. Seeing this, I understand how deeply people have wanted to create.
I write industrial software that runs in large factory environments, and because of the nature of my work, it is difficult for me to use AI directly. These environments are usually closed networks, so AI does not really benefit my own production work. Even so, I still defend AI, because it functions as a new kind of voice that allows more people to express themselves..
Of course, capitalism distorts this. Many people use AI to chase money and capital, and as a result, a lot of low-quality apps are being produced. But on the other hand, what is wrong with the motivation of wanting to make something one wants to make?
I have been studying the history of programming, and I like Dijkstra’s famous line:
> Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes..
To me, this means that computing is fundamentally about \automation\.
AI has existed as a research topic almost since the birth of computers. We tend to think of it as recent, but it is a field with a history of more than sixty years. Starting from early work such as the Perceptron, there have always been people claiming that AI was a fraud or an illusion.
But now a new seed has germinated. The amount of complexity that a single human can handle has increased. Historically, the techniques for managing that complexity were things like programming patterns and software architecture. And even people who strongly argued for software architecture also warned that if architecture becomes detached from code, then something has gone wrong.
Memes always damage the essence of ideas. As information circulates, it degrades, and eventually the original meaning disappears.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a good example. The original paper was not simply saying, “ignorant people show off, while knowledgeable people do not.” It was more about how both less competent and more competent people can have difficulty accurately assessing their own metacognition. But the idea became distorted.
The same thing happens to many famous ideas in programming. Knuth’s statement about premature optimization is also constantly distorted as it circulates.
In that situation, can we really say it is always bad to step away from online communities and learn through AI while cross-checking against books?
When I see people making extreme claims about this, I sometimes find it absurd. Of course, many people may flag or downvote my comment. But this is how I see it.
If it can be done by AI, then you have no hope of competing with the quantity of AI output that anyone can trigger in very little time.
As my job seems pretty secure, I can ignore AI for as long as I like.
Because it doesn't make sense to be better than a tool. A woodworker could use a hand saw and take an hour to cut wood... Or he could use a buzz saw and cut it in a few minutes. Is the woodworker any less of a woodworker when he uses a buzzsaw vs a hand saw?
Outsourcing thinking to AI is not healthy, and certainly if everyone used AI like this we're doomed.
I still think it's true that those who don't use AI will be left behind, but it's a bit tautalogical because the thing they're behind left behind on is AI. A lot of the biggest companies on earth are putting a lot of money in AI, but if you're OK with working for a company that is not putting all their money in AI that's perfectly fine.
Just like block chain was everywhere ten years ago and now is just kinda _there_. If you got in before the hype you could have made a lot of money. If you didn't, you were left behind. I was left behind and I'm OK with that.
panny•1h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932937
Left behind with my money,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47933355
Left behind with my intact data,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911524
Oh, the horror. I am being left behind.
jeffbee•1h ago
convolvatron•1h ago
embedding-shape•1h ago
But "your dignity"? You mean like "I feel shameful over that people saw that my writing was actually AI?" or something else?
freejazz•1h ago
Well if you don't have dignity in the first place, its hard to have any shame over losing it
embedding-shape•1h ago
freejazz•19m ago