Comment by mg794613
9 hours ago
It's because a lot of people that werent skilful werent on your path before. Now that pandora's box has been re-opened, those people feel "they get a second chance at life". It's not that they have no shame, they have no perspective to put that shame.
You on the other hand, have for many years honed your craft. The more you learn, the more you discover to learn aka , you realize how little you know. They don't have this. _At all_. They see this as a "free ticket to the front row" and when we politely push back (we should be way harsher in this, its the only language they understand) all they hear is "he doesn't like _me_." which is an escape.
You know how much work you ask of me, when you open a PR on my project, they don't. They will just see it as "why don't you let me join, since I have AI I should have the same skill as you".... unironically.
In other words, these "other people" that we talk about haven't worked a day in the field in their life, so they simply don't understand much of it, however they feel they understand everything of it.
This is so completely spot on. It’s happening in other fields too, particularly non-coding (but still otherwise specialized or technical) areas. AI is extremely empowering but what’s happening is that people are now showing up in all corners of the world armed with their phone at the end of their outstretched arm saying “Well ChatGPT says…” and getting very upset when told that, no, many apologies, but ChatGPT is wrong here too.
It's why artists despise the AI art users. In that field it isn't simply them trying to contribute but instead insisting that you wasted your time learning to create art and if you're a professional you deserve to starve. All while being completely ignorant to the medium or the process.
That all makes sense. But the more I know, the more I realize that a lot of software engineering isn't about crazy algorithms and black magic. I'd argue a good 80% of it is the ability to pick up the broken glass, something even many students can pull off. 15% of that comes down to avoiding landmines in a large field as you pick up said glass.
But that care isn't even evident here. People submitting prs that don't even compile, bug reports for issues that may not even exist. The minimum I'd expect is to check the work of whatever you vibe coded. We can't even get that. It's some. Odd form of clout chasing as if repos are a factor of success, not what you contribute to them.
I find that interesting because for the first 10 years of my career, I didn’t feel any confidence in contributing to open source at all because I didn’t feel I had the expertise to do so. I was even reluctant to file bugs because I always figured I was on the wrong and I didn’t want to cause churn for the maintainers.
It's not as if there weren't that sort of people in our profession even before the rise of LLMs, as evidenced by the not infrequent comments about "gatekeeping" and "nobody needs to know academic stuff in a real day-to-day job" on HN.
This is easily the most spot-on comment I've read on HN in a long time.
The humility of understanding what you don't know and the limitations of that is out the window for many people now. I see time and time again the idea that "expertise is dead". Yet it's crystal clear it's not. But those people cannot understand why.
It all boils down to a simple reality: you can't understand why something is fundamentally bad if you don't understand it at all.
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