Comment by tptacek

> That argument, in particular, survived multiple rounds of reviews with friends outside my team who do not fully agree with me about this stuff. It's a deeply sincere, and, I would say for myself, earned take on this.

Which argument? The one dismissing all arguments about IP on the grounds that some software engineers are pirates?

That argument is not only unpersuasive, it does a disservice to the rest of the post and weakens its contribution by making you as the author come off as willfully inflammatory and intentionally blind to nuance, which does the opposite of breaking the unproductive equilibrium. It feeds the sense that those in the skeptics camp have that AI adopters are intellectually unserious.

I know that you know that the law and ethics of IP are complicated, that the "profession" is diverse and can't be lumped into a cohesive unit for summary dismissal, and that there are entirely coherent ethical stances that would call for both piracy in some circumstances and condemnation of IP theft in others. I've seen enough of your work to know that dismissing all that nuance with a flippant call to "shove this concern up your ass" is beneath you.

What really resonated with me was your repeated calls for us at least to be arguing about the same thing, to get on the same page.

Everything about LLMs and generative AI is getting so mushed up by people pulling it in several directions at once, marketing clouding the water, and the massive hyperbole on both sides, it's nearly impossible to understand if we're even talking about the same thing!

It's a good post and I strongly agree with the part about level setting. You see the same tired arguments basically every day here and subreddits like /r/ExperiencedDevs. I read a few today and my favorites are:

- It cannot write tests because it doesn't understand intent

- Actually it can write them, but they are "worthless"

- It's just predicting the next token, so it has no way of writing code well

- It tries to guess what code means and will be wrong

- It can't write anything novel because it can only write things it's seen

- It's faster to do all of the above by hand

I'm not sure if it's the issue where they tried copilot with gpt 3.5 or something, but anyone who uses cursor daily knows all of the above is false, I make it do these things every day and it works great. There was another comment I saw here or on reddit about how everyone needs to spend a day with cursor and get good at understanding how prompting + context works. That is a big ask but I think the savings are worth it when you get the hang of it.

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