I am a senior php dev, and I was recently transferred to a Ruby on Rails project. It's completely foreign to me. Our client has advised us to use LLMs as much as possible. The problem is that it's virtually impossible to learn a codebase when you're using AI to do the coding. You never see more than a few lines of code at a time unless you purposefully dig in, but you might not have the time given velocity demands. And yes, it also results in nobody on the team really knowing any area of the code inside-out. It's very very different from my previous 25 years of coding, and I do enjoy it less, but...
>>It (software development) is sincerely an art form; A craft that takes
>>dedication, perseverance and especially, a strong community to endure.
>>Software was built by humans, for humans.
100 years ago, you could only buy furniture made by crafts people. Real artisans.
Now you have a choice: IKEA or hand made
Most people choose IKEA because they don't care how it was made, as long as it does the job
There are still those who prefer hand made furniture, and they pay a pretty penny for it.
I think that's where this is heading, and I agree it's unfortunate.
Software development will become a hobby (many people do wood working in their spare time). There will be a few real experts left, who largely do consulting. Maybe they create training data? Maybe they design frameworks for the AI to master. I don't know.
But things sure are going to be different from here on out, and not entirely for the better.
>>If it’s not built by humans, then who is it being built for?
Right now it's built by AI for humans (and sometimes other AI).
Very soon it'll be built by AI for other AI (and sometimes humans).
Later it'll be built by AI primarily for AI (rarely humans).
My experience programming is so much different than theirs makes me wonder what I missed out on. I have always programmed on my own, and I can't even think about a single time I have talked to a person in depth about programming (both online and in person). It sounds fun and exciting, but unfortunately I have simply never had the opportunities in life to do so.
For me, AI is the first time I have ever been able to get something resembling an opinion on specific problems/situations that I encounter. I can ask it a very specific question about what the best approach is for what I am working on and it can give me an answer that I read over and consider before deciding on what approach to take. I still frequently get answers that are nonsense, but even then it helps me think deeper on how I should approach the problem because I can ask myself "Are the statements made by the AI true?".
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider.
We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think the users deserve consideration nonetheless.
Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. This is on top of all of the problems that existed before LLMs, like human error and perverse financial incentives. Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people. Real people. Harm is caused in both big and little ways to living, breathing actual people. This “inevitable” slide into generative AI harms every single person it comes into contact with. The devs, the users, the investors, everyone. Those harms may happen at different times and in different ways and the creeping nature of it all might make it easier to ignore, but it’s happening.
“AI” is a blight. You can leave me behind as well.
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world.
Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unintelligent and I don't understand that. The fact that these "stochastic code extruders" can solve Erdos problems is sort of the proof in the pudding. Next token prediction is profound in that it is _a very simple objective_ yet it is _enough_ to take you to extraordinary heights.
Also I wonder how many folks honestly look in the mirror and think: how does the median programmer differ from an LLM. Do you really think humans are universally better and produce universally higher quality code? Not even universally, I would say _typically_. I would trust an LLM to not write a buffer overflow far more than a junior or a mediocre senior engineer. LLMs have built things in my domain that are non-trivial and impressive and correct.
Not to mention, these systems are following a predictable trend in performance improvement so these worries about quality just won't age well, and it seems to be a head-in-the-sand attitude that pretends like quality and reliability are not getting very very good _already_.
> Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people.
Could not agree more. So why do you think humans are inherently better at this?
> This “inevitable” slide into generative AI harms every single person it comes into contact with.
I just don't quite understand this, is it that: (1) agentic code is inherently inferior to human code and thus (2) shipping agentic code is actively harmful?
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
I'm all for open models, open source agents, etc. I don't want to give more power to the big corps, though. Imagine what software engineering could become in 5 years if all thse big corporations gain even more power over us. It's a terrifying scenario (e.g., pay more so we don't show you ads in between claude code prompts; pay more so that the produced code doesn't incrust ads in your app...). Do you really want the same shitty experience we have now in the global internet, but deeply ingrained in your software engineering workflows?
Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked:
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious
Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part
And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels
Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop
And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it
That unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all
Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well.
I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.
Whenever this topic comes up I am reminded of the black and white picture of all the scientist of 19th century together. Each individual in that photo had contributed something to human knowledge. It feels like in 19th century we believed in our scientists and advancing our knowledge. I feel today celebrities are given more importance than our scientists. The best minds of our century are focused on extracting value from rest of the population.
I assume you are here talking about political choices, social media influences, life style choices and so on.
While all those are true they are not reflecting the level of intelligence of people: intelligent people take personal stupid decisions because while intelligence is a function of let's say the more "abstract brain", decisions are emotionally driven and influenced by the "ancient, threat focused, pleasure driven brain".
Here is a quick way to think about this: some intelligent people are obease, some others don't exercise, and others don't take their health seriously while also working on the most amazing problems we ever solved. You know what's the biggest paradox here: they all have the capacity to understand fully the impact of their lifestyle on their health but still making a life style change is hard due to not being driven by knowledge and logic.
What do you mean by intelligence? And by your definition of it, can intelligence be improved intentionally or it happens as it happens like for evolution? If it happens by intention then why we have not pushed it at its maximium yet?
“Pinnacle” just means “highest point” here. They are saying that AI might take human intelligence to a higher point than was previously reached. That’s debatable, of course, but isn’t what you seem to be arguing against.
Neither intelligence nor knowledge, if you mean us average people.
But that shouldn't be any surprise. We're already at more than a hundred years of deliberate dumbing down of the population through schooling and mass media. These effects are exponential through generations.
> I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber
We are at a peak in absolute terms, though the decline is coming quickly:
> I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber
Just mathematically speaking, collectively we're at peak population levels, so the total collective intelligence (sum of all individual human intelligences) is likely at peak as well, even accounting for individual dumbing down?
Also, I think we (non-scientists) might be overestimating the average historical intelligence - see Flynn Effect [1] - perhaps because of a bias in our perception of the past levels based on who published books and thoughts - basically more intelligent members of our species.
> and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders
May I suggest these historical references [2][3][4][5][6][7] as a counterpoint to AI driving lazy thoughtlessness, which rather seems to be innate to humans as a group.
[2] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.20 — 5th c. BCE Greece. “So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.”
[3] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.2 — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/stasis/2017/honeycutt/aris.... Aristotle treats public persuasion as necessary partly because ordinary audiences cannot easily follow complex chains of reasoning. He says rhetoric addresses deliberative matters before people “who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning.”
[4] Plato, Republic, Book V — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://topostext.org/work/768. Plato distinguishes philosophers from the many “lovers of sights and sounds,” who enjoy appearances but do not apprehend deeper truth. The text says their thought is “incapable” of grasping the underlying form or nature of beauty, and that few attain that deeper vision.
[6] Buddhist tradition, Dhammapada, Appamāda-vagga. https://suttacentral.net/dhp21-32/en/sujato. Dhammapada contrasts heedfulness with heedlessness, treating heedlessness as a central human failing. In one translation: “Heedfulness is the state free of death; heedlessness is the state of death. The heedful do not die, while the heedless are like the dead.”
[7] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, “Idols of the Mind” — 1620. https://history.hanover.edu/texts/bacon/novorg.html. Bacon argues that the “Idols of the Tribe” are rooted in human nature itself, and that human understanding distorts reality like a false mirror.
Why do we need to promote intelligence? If we are all “intelligent”, what is the difference? At best, we have about 50 healthy years on this rock. I do think myself “intelligent”, relatively, but also that the notion is overrated. I want to be dumb and carefree, I’d rather bike, shoot some arrows at the sky, eat some escargot and die in my sleep when it’s time. Instead, we must toil and research nursing homes.
I think probably actually. The fittest people back then probably weren't as fit as people today with specialized diets and medical science, and surely those findings were a result of better equipment, which were a result of better tooling to manufacture that equipment.
Introducing a machine to a manufacturing role obviously makes the manufacturer less fit, but it enables society to break through fitness barriers in general
If your point is that it's not orders of magnitude fitter, that's a good one. I don't think people will be much more intelligent in the future than they are today but they'll probably just be more specialized and have deeper knowledge
>this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
Between the endless slop, loneliness and depression epidemics, record low reading comprehension, attention shortage, we're not in any pinnacle today. We're in a regression from a few decades ago, getting worse.
A slop fork machine is way different though, I dont know why authors never thought about this but imagine a machine that can detect the features and replicate whatever it sees, show it how to make bread once and it can do it infinitely, make it listen to a song and its able to find why it sounds the way it does and just spam variations, even if it doesnt make anything original it demotivates any attempt to push the boundaries or make anything new
Really? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now.
For example, I want to make:
- A mini OS on top of SeL4
- A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust.
- My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends
- A local first data store, built on top of CRDTs
- My own programming language
And lots more.
Each of these projects on their own would take months of time. If LLMs can speed up development, that's great! I don't care if nobody else uses what I make. I want a personal computer full of my own software.
I argue the opposite, that originality will actually become more valuable.
Think about it: everyone has characterized AI slop, as slop. Which means that we negatively value it in terms of originality. Combine that with the fact that there will be a lot of it, this means that original work will 1. stand out or be very distinct from slop, and 2. have its value amplified as a result of this polarization.
basically, we value originality more AND are able to identify it more readily.
related is also the fact that originality will literally be valuable as training data for future models
> Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
How? It's undermining what the human intellicence is made from, learning.
Hasn't all automation up to this point been same input equals same output though? Automation using LLMs feels different to anything before and I don't think there's a comparative time in history to point at and say "look it happened before and we are now better off"
I think we all been fooled by the sentence: "It's yet another automation, it's like horses were replaced by cars". It is not. Industrialization and automation is about manual labor. LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking. And while I'll give two thumbs up for using ML(there is not 'I' in 'AI') as a technology for some tasks, outsourcing thinking is an evolutionary dead-end.
The automation at least built unimaginable amounts of wealth for the rich people while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
No, because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.
Machinists and lathe operators became CNC operators, they didn't lose their jobs, just that instead of turning the inputs by hand, they punch numbers in a machine, but the advent of CNC didn't mean anyone off the street can now punch numbers in the machine and replace the machinists since you still need the years of training and experience.
SW devs will be the new CNC operators, about knowing what data to input and how to wrangle the slop machine to get the desired output faster and better than your competition.
This article was very eye-opening for me. I think I understand the author's pain and I could certainly feel it while reading the article. The fact that it was "the people" that made the difference kind of surprised me, and then I realized it was because I have seldom had the experiences he's had and that this might have a major impact on the way I (and others) view the technology.
For me, building software has often been a solitary process in which I was far more obsessed with it than those around me. I'm not in a tech-heavy area and I don't have a ton of well-informed people to talk to about programming, software engineering, or AI. I have had experiences like the author in which I needed to learn a new technology or a new language but ended up doing so on my own at home, not with the assistance of a much more knowledgeable developer with significantly more experience.
To me LLMs have left us in a situation where the following things are true and moving forward lies somewhere in figuring out how to reconcile / resolve these things:
- You can use LLMs and learn things or not learn things; this is a result of the approach, desire, and willpower of the user.
- There is a level of skill associated with using LLMs much like nearly everything else in existence. The user's skill level impacts their perception of the technology and also affects the way those around them view the technology. Unskilled users will generate more negative sentiment.
- Some people love to do the things the machine is good at and do not want the machine to do them, while others hate to do the things the machine is good at and want the machine to do them. I realized at some point this year that I don't love programming anywhere near as much as I love building and designing systems and solving problems.
- Software development is many things wrapped up in one and talking about it as a single thing makes it more confusing. Some people like to think through the logic of the application and have an LLM write the code while others want the LLM to think up the solution, implement it, and test it. These are two very different people with likely different goals and different desires.
- When someone else looks at Claude or ChatGPT they might see something completely different than what you see.
Very well said. And I'm in the same camp. I've very rarely had someone with whom I could interact, bounce off ideas, brainstorm regarding the nitty gritty of code. Most of the time, I've had to dig through books, online articles and create my own mental framework of how things work.
And this has held me up in good stead.
Now with AI, I've found a tool from which I can learn, show me the right way to do things, and explain in detail what has been done. I can ask questions, point out mistakes, go back and forth on different implementations and at the end of it, come out a better programmer.
As many commentators have mentioned, AI means different things to different people. For me, it has been empowering, enlightening, and humbling.
There have always been so many things to learn, but never enough time. Now, it doesn't quite feel that way.
> “If you don’t learn how to use AI, you’re going to be left behind.”
I don't subscribe to that even to begin with. Learning "how to use AI" in a a dev workflow takes less than a month, just by practice. Assuming "how to use AI" refers to using agents, rather than just a more advanced auto complete, once you've made the couple of mistakes you can make a couple of times (mainly, leave the coding agent to do something too big for too long), you're caught up. Maybe it take a little more time to get the habits into your workflow.
Leveraging a LLM for coding is orders of magnitude simpler than the code it's writing, and the skills you need to review said code.
This really resonates with me, and reminds me of all that I've missed in the years since COVID and going full remote. There's magic in a room when a mob programming session results in a breakthrough that just can't ever be replicated remotely. Not sure I'd jump to sign up for a daily commute again, especially where I live now, an hour away from a major city without traffic, but I do miss that.
I think this post is either LLM-written, or written in a standard blogpost style of today which is increasingly becoming LLM-like. Sam Kriss had a good recent post pointing out some of the "tells": https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...
Most humans derive their purpose and meaning from their work. Has always been that way. What do you think happens when you remove meaning from people’s lives at scale? It won’t be pretty.
It's not about removing meaning. A normal thoughtful person can surely come up with things to do and occopy their lives with. In fact for most of people work just gets in the way of that.
What's it about is once you remove the paycheck that all proletariats need when things get "interesting".
I hear this all the time but where is the explosion in people learning art, music, increased time with friends and family, etc… instead it’s all the opposite. We’re using all our extra free time to doomscroll.
I can relate to this article. My reaction to what is happening is also: "Leave me behind".
However, missing the joy of the old-school way of growing as a developer is not only the wrong reason, but also very dangerous according to Darwin.
Our customers don't care about how it is made after all, but they do care about long-term support, costs, and predictability, etc.
But I'm not sure whether we can say we made a real net positive progress in the industry. The whole thing is a big mess. In many cases, AI moves us in the same direction in turbo mode, making it not only messier and more expensive but also dangerous.
I tell them, "Leave me alone", as I see this mess as an opportunity if you think the right way, starting from the first principles.
Just do it the way you want to do it and have fun [1] (I've recently started doing streams where I showcase a mix of AI + manual coding and why I think that's best).
The "powers that be" would prefer if you sideline yourself. Instead, pop a bird and say "thank you kind sir, but no."
I don't think AI changed anything at all to the possibility of communicating between humans. This is a job that you've always been able to do alone in your cave.
Really? How do you learn how to code with out communicating with another human? Which man pages in a general Linux install will teach you all you need to know? Without communication you get no books, no StackOverflow, no-LLMs even. You were allowed to do it alone but we can't pretend humans communicating isn't how most of the available knowledge for your perusal came to be.
Like the artisans/craftsmen in many places (especially Japan), hand craft will always carry enduring meaning — machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. But historically at least, they can replace over 99.9% of it.
I don't have a quantitative way to argue this, but my intuition says that for humans to build something that matches human capability across every dimension would require a breakthrough at the physical level — and such a breakthrough may itself be bounded by the limits of humans as observers.
That said, this goal might itself be a non-goal. AI is going to be — or already is — more powerful than any individual human in many ways. But what my intuition points to is that humans will still have plenty of interesting work to do, like the author's example of handwriting code: it shifts from being scalable value creation into a form of craftsmanship.
I absolutely understand this sentiment. I've been working in tech since the late 90s and I have had MORE than my share of let-me-off-this-ride moments.
But this post (and the many I see like it) feels like giving up. And now's not the time for empathetic people to give up.
Technology is how we expand human capability. We are well within our rights to pick and choose how we interact with that capability. But it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out. Billionaires are doing a remarkable job at making their vision of the future seem inevitable. Don't fall for it.
If more people aren't willing to help us steer this capability towards a better future, then we all know how this ends.
> it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out
Maybe it's just that the capability is bad. Adtech, for example, isn't something that anyone uses for good. They blow a lot of smoke about it--looking at you, Apple--but despite the "good-washing" it's all just the same extractive, invasive, dehumanizing business. Bad people will naturally concentrate around this capability. I know because I've worked with a few of them.
AI coding tools seem like they're engineered to undermine cautious, rigorous, and pragmatic engineering discipline. Of course the bosses want that, they see a short term path to massive output increases and nothing sounds better. They'll be cashed out by the time the mess needs to be cleaned up, that's someone else's problem. People who are predisposed to this kind of antisocial behavior are the ones who concentrate around AI tools. Rigorous, careful engineers who care about building maintainable systems that will outlast their tenure find less value in them.
I think it's more nuanced than
> Technology is how we expand human capability.
I think as a general statement about technology as a whole it's true. But do all technologies expand human capabilities? I don't think so.
In my mind, I would separate technology from its application.
Advertising tech and AI coding tools are applications of technology stacks that could have been used to create what you and I might agree to be "better" tools. I don't need to tell you why ad tech got created instead of something that is a net societal benefit.
At the same time, I would say that, yes, those applications do indeed expand human capabilities. The important nuance here is whose capability, and to what end.
All I am saying is that opting out of this, in whatever form that takes, hands your agency over to those who would use it to enrich themselves at the cost of others. I sincerely feel that decades of this type of capitulation is exactly how we got to where we are today.
Its classic HN to dismiss the emotional cost of change as sunk cost stages of grief. A person is allowed to love their work and miss deep understanding, and allowed to be nostalgic for a preferred way of working. It's human and everything they have shared in this post is unequivocally true about software dev and moving into a career, arguably even before LLMs took over.
What I mean is that the thrilling buddy system coding starts to happen less frequently over a career, and the time for deep exploring and side projects is organically maximized early and during school.
While LLMs have forced that divide to be more stark, the human connection and sense of wonder has always required maintenance, and it's best to get into the habit of maintaining it before your 36th JIRA triage meeting in a week completely destroyed your love of the industry.
Well before LLMs I went through exactly what TFA describes when I had to adapt from grad school labs to industrial labs, then to project management or task leadership (even just filling in for my boss), and each new job has required me to say goodbye to great friends and colleagues and make new ones.
Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft, we all could probably write this post for our own reasons.
> Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft
This is not some kind of universal truth. I can see how being stuck in an unfulfilling job could lead you to say this. But for the last 20+ years I love the craft of writing efficient, dependable, understandable code more with every new insight from every hard-won experience.
Nice read, and agreed, leave me behind. I have been telling people that I am running a John Henry experiment with LLMs. I don't use them just so I can prove the human is better than the machine, even if it leaves me in the dirt like John.
people need to reframe coding agent usage. i see a lot of framing in zero-sum terms where it's either all dev or all agent, and then people start dooming and glooming over the latter. in reality it's like that one post on here a few days ago about it being like an iron man suit. it is a glowing, bright white power that can be incredible when wielded properly. unfortunately, people characterize it as an adversarial power that can and will take over your soul.
how about some true synergy instead of boring zero-sum people? smh. the true poetry here is that zero-sum thinking will become more of a thing of the past so there is some natural comedy with this title
This is some anecdata, but I'll share it nonetheless as I have a pretty wide network of software and security engineer friends from which I've heard the following.
Almost no one I know wants agent usage to be a zero-sum activity. There are a few oddballs who obviously only got into software for the money, so any means to that end is acceptable. That does not stop those with say-so over things like employment (and, if you're in the USA, the associated healthcare), from treating it as a zero-sum activity.
When engineers are being told to maximize token usage, are constantly being brought into meetings where they're expected to reveal their latest and greatest use of LLMs, and not using enough tokens in your role is seen as a negative, then the pressure starts to creep in. Yes, I know this is silly to most people who read this site, and I agree. It's bonkers. But there is certainly something to the idea of "AI psychosis" in upper management that is making agent use zero-sum company-wide.
That's good to know, because all I really go off of is what I see posted online which is most likely skewed towards the polarizing takes (been unemployed for a while). Sounds like some positive news though, and I hope that these tools can help empower people to the point where they don't feel shackled by their jobs by doing something like lowering the barrier and manpower needed to succeed at entrepreneurship.
That shit with upper management sounds stupid af and I've heard the same type of shit from people I know who are in other fields. I'm guessing it's happening from a combination of ignorance, FOMO, investment, etc etc. But that is more of a systemic issue than anything to do with these tools imo.
The lack of humanity or ability to empathize with someone else’s feelings displayed in these comments, instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
It also is a great example of why AI has such a PR problem among normal people.
Frustratingly, these attitudes have been around long before LLMs, and they'll continue to exist long after. To those individuals who have staunchly refused to broaden their horizons or empathize with their fellow man, these posts are direct threats to the wagons they've hitched themselves to, a challenge to their own narrow passions because they exist in a zero-sum environment where if even one person doesn't think and act like them, then clearly they're in the obvious wrong.
Conflating a preference for manual creation with opposition to the existence of a tool should be the single biggest signal flare that they are someone who will not argue with you in good faith. They're the ones who barnstorm every single one of these posts to denigrate the author rather than even attempt to empathize with their plight or evaluate the validity of their arguments. Surely the current cohort of HN commenters have seen this repeatedly in just the past five years as technical circles have jumped from cryptocurrency to blockchain to NFTs to LLMs to GenAI; every single one is a "must have", every single one something we "must learn or be left behind forever", and every single one refused to be evaluated on its merits in favor of simply embracing something new for its novelty.
I have given up debating with these people, because they do not wish for debate, they wish for dominance. I have better things to do with my time - as do you, as do all of us - than to give a moment of consideration to a viewpoint that relies on pithy quotes out of context and a reductionist narrative of history to justify their own superiority over others, in lieu of nuanced discourse.
Remember that it is not the obligation of the status quo to defend itself, rather the obligation belongs to those advocating changes to justify and defend their position and its benefits. In that regard, the pro-AI camp continues to come up hollow and empty.
Wonderfully put, thank you. Ultimately, we’re supposed to be “engineers,” and that means (for our jobs) assessing tools and practices in terms of their net benefit on the products we create: there is no free lunch, and a thing’s downside is often proportional to its upside, so it seems wise to approach these things with caution and to have the kind of nuanced discussions that you note have been lacking.
I’d also hope, though, that as humans, we can recognize that tools do not exist in a vacuum, and that their effect on ourselves and society at large can be net negative even if they have a net positive effect on our work (whether due to something fundamental to the tool or due to the way it is being applied at scale). We can’t responsibly leave these discussions out of our analysis of the tool itself and its fitness for purpose, because we are members of society, and our adoption/use of the tool helps to determine that societal impact.
> instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
I’ll be the devil’s advocate and suggest that it might not be AI usage, but the technology attracting vilest scum of the Earth. It’s just they were staying mostly silent before, or wasted someone else’s time in different circles.
The funniest thing about this post is that Java Android programming circa 2014 is somehow romanticized as "real programming." 2014 Android code has got to be peak corpo-slop with the most inane abstractions, unintuitive paradigms, and copy-paste boilerplate syndrome. Ironically, exactly why we need AI these days, since like 90% of the code you wrote didn't technically do anything.
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics
Yeah yeah back to Reddit
For real though: you can keep doing artisanal hand-written code as a hobby. Just like you can still write a web server in assembly if you really want to. But that’s just not how professional software development is done anymore. Just a new tool, I don’t think it’s as deep as the author is making it out to be.
Per learning from others after encountering an unfamiliar problem, I think there are rose-tinted glasses here. 90%+ of the time, either someone else had already provided the relevant answer at Stack Overflow or I could find it on a documentation page, a blog. There is no social engagement then. Just search. That also hasn't gone away, as LLMs can also provide sources to justify their answers.
Per the human element, the author is in part relaying about formative experiences from youth that you won't easily repeat, and also experiences that are not decoupled from the work as it still exists, unless you are entirely remote, which is not a LLM-specific problem.
All of which to say, the emotional element behind it is valid, but the diagnosis is off the mark. I think the human element, should it be jeopardized, is in part through the complacent convenience of remote work and disinterest in community participation. But, communities still exist, and tech communities historically were always niche. As it stands they're probably bigger now than they ever were.
There are still new frontiers with software where LLMs will be less effective. Yes, there is less friction than before for learning technologies, but all this does is move the goalpost as we can accomplish more with our time.
Instead of hacking things out through trial and error on mature stacks (with or without others), you'll be closer to the cutting edge and have different problems. Many of which will still be technological in nature.
This will inevitably lead to tired discussion of “there are two types of developers, those who care about the craft and those who want to get things” done. I believe that to be a false dichotomy, and will link to someone else’s comment in another thread who makes the argument that caring about the craft is part of caring about the product.
More specifically to the submission, I’ll say I agree with the author. This “being left behind” fear mongering is an exhausting uncritical talking point. Life isn’t about rushing through the end and killing yourself to be “productive”. “Being left behind” is only bad if what’s “ahead” is an improvement to your situation, and that’s not a given. Humans aren’t built to be pushed to 11 without rest. Stopping to smell the roses is good. Immediatelly thinking “how can I kill these to package the smell to sell to others at a profit” is not.
AI is repulsive. You either feel it, maybe not immediately, or don't. When you feel it, you'll rationalize it one way or another. The rationalization does not matter that much. It's essentially arbitrary and is a product of whatever experience you've accumulated so far. (E.g. could be a Communist rationalization of alienation under capitalism.) Yet the underlying feeling is true. Stick to it.
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics, trained on the years and years of dedication by brave engineers willing to learn and build in the open. Building in the open meant we were not gatekeeping technology, but creating tangible examples for young engineers to explore, understand, and learn from.
Another grief-post with people unable to cope with the fact that the whole structure of learning and work is going to change so they resort to pseudo nostalgia and romanticism. Not to mention that "They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics" is basically incorrect and belongs in 2024.
These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics,
Always a shame to see good meaning, smart humans let their anxieties and fears drive them into empirical falsehoods.
Anyone still have some hope for humanity? Or yourselves as a person? Asking for a friend who thinks that the dark horizon has already swallowed all but our eyes, leaving us the brief observers of our oblivion
Not gonna pretend that this is anything other than the author's personal gripe with this whole thing, but this is really just the sunk cost fallacy with extra steps.
Even by trying to reassure (the reader? Himself?) that LLMs are just a tool for humans, he asserts in the final paragraph that software is no longer made by humans. Something something linotype operators.
> I desire to connect with people. I long for the days where I was vulnerable and shared my struggles with engineers who charitably stepped up to support me.
Main character syndrome. AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.
The quality of hacker news commenters has been steadily declining, yet I'm still constantly surprised by just how mentally shallow and lazy some can be
What makes an appeal to experience, subjective or otherwise, an expression of Main Character Syndrome? Just because somebody pushes back against the tides doesn't mean they fancy themself more important than others. Further, they're not saying "we should all stop using LLMs". The title of the article is literally "Leave Me Behind", an expressed desire to no longer participate in a system they believe to be harmful.
They explicitly state a position they take for themself, whereas you make an implicit value judgement of all practitioners who feel similarly. This could be read in a way as an assumption that everyone else should be as miserable as you.
Do you even know what that means or you just saw a phrase online and like how it sounds? There’s nothing about main character here, the author doesn’t even advocate for anything.
> AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.
I am a senior php dev, and I was recently transferred to a Ruby on Rails project. It's completely foreign to me. Our client has advised us to use LLMs as much as possible. The problem is that it's virtually impossible to learn a codebase when you're using AI to do the coding. You never see more than a few lines of code at a time unless you purposefully dig in, but you might not have the time given velocity demands. And yes, it also results in nobody on the team really knowing any area of the code inside-out. It's very very different from my previous 25 years of coding, and I do enjoy it less, but...
>>It (software development) is sincerely an art form; A craft that takes >>dedication, perseverance and especially, a strong community to endure. >>Software was built by humans, for humans.
100 years ago, you could only buy furniture made by crafts people. Real artisans. Now you have a choice: IKEA or hand made Most people choose IKEA because they don't care how it was made, as long as it does the job There are still those who prefer hand made furniture, and they pay a pretty penny for it. I think that's where this is heading, and I agree it's unfortunate. Software development will become a hobby (many people do wood working in their spare time). There will be a few real experts left, who largely do consulting. Maybe they create training data? Maybe they design frameworks for the AI to master. I don't know. But things sure are going to be different from here on out, and not entirely for the better.
>>If it’s not built by humans, then who is it being built for?
Right now it's built by AI for humans (and sometimes other AI). Very soon it'll be built by AI for other AI (and sometimes humans). Later it'll be built by AI primarily for AI (rarely humans).
My experience programming is so much different than theirs makes me wonder what I missed out on. I have always programmed on my own, and I can't even think about a single time I have talked to a person in depth about programming (both online and in person). It sounds fun and exciting, but unfortunately I have simply never had the opportunities in life to do so.
For me, AI is the first time I have ever been able to get something resembling an opinion on specific problems/situations that I encounter. I can ask it a very specific question about what the best approach is for what I am working on and it can give me an answer that I read over and consider before deciding on what approach to take. I still frequently get answers that are nonsense, but even then it helps me think deeper on how I should approach the problem because I can ask myself "Are the statements made by the AI true?".
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
AI is your Google and your yellow rubber ducky (rubber duck debugging) all rolled into one.
Absolutely. It can also be your brain if you let it, so…don’t let it.
It’s an absolutely fantastic educational tool if you choose to use it that way.
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Second order effects should enumerated and reasoned about. This companion perspective is perhaps only one, but very strong indeed
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There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider.
We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think the users deserve consideration nonetheless.
Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. This is on top of all of the problems that existed before LLMs, like human error and perverse financial incentives. Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people. Real people. Harm is caused in both big and little ways to living, breathing actual people. This “inevitable” slide into generative AI harms every single person it comes into contact with. The devs, the users, the investors, everyone. Those harms may happen at different times and in different ways and the creeping nature of it all might make it easier to ignore, but it’s happening.
“AI” is a blight. You can leave me behind as well.
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world.
Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unintelligent and I don't understand that. The fact that these "stochastic code extruders" can solve Erdos problems is sort of the proof in the pudding. Next token prediction is profound in that it is _a very simple objective_ yet it is _enough_ to take you to extraordinary heights.
Also I wonder how many folks honestly look in the mirror and think: how does the median programmer differ from an LLM. Do you really think humans are universally better and produce universally higher quality code? Not even universally, I would say _typically_. I would trust an LLM to not write a buffer overflow far more than a junior or a mediocre senior engineer. LLMs have built things in my domain that are non-trivial and impressive and correct.
Not to mention, these systems are following a predictable trend in performance improvement so these worries about quality just won't age well, and it seems to be a head-in-the-sand attitude that pretends like quality and reliability are not getting very very good _already_.
> Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people.
Could not agree more. So why do you think humans are inherently better at this?
> This “inevitable” slide into generative AI harms every single person it comes into contact with.
I just don't quite understand this, is it that: (1) agentic code is inherently inferior to human code and thus (2) shipping agentic code is actively harmful?
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
I'm all for open models, open source agents, etc. I don't want to give more power to the big corps, though. Imagine what software engineering could become in 5 years if all thse big corporations gain even more power over us. It's a terrifying scenario (e.g., pay more so we don't show you ads in between claude code prompts; pay more so that the produced code doesn't incrust ads in your app...). Do you really want the same shitty experience we have now in the global internet, but deeply ingrained in your software engineering workflows?
Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked:
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it That unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all
Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
> take human intelligence to another pinnacle
I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.
Whenever this topic comes up I am reminded of the black and white picture of all the scientist of 19th century together. Each individual in that photo had contributed something to human knowledge. It feels like in 19th century we believed in our scientists and advancing our knowledge. I feel today celebrities are given more importance than our scientists. The best minds of our century are focused on extracting value from rest of the population.
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I assume you are here talking about political choices, social media influences, life style choices and so on.
While all those are true they are not reflecting the level of intelligence of people: intelligent people take personal stupid decisions because while intelligence is a function of let's say the more "abstract brain", decisions are emotionally driven and influenced by the "ancient, threat focused, pleasure driven brain".
Here is a quick way to think about this: some intelligent people are obease, some others don't exercise, and others don't take their health seriously while also working on the most amazing problems we ever solved. You know what's the biggest paradox here: they all have the capacity to understand fully the impact of their lifestyle on their health but still making a life style change is hard due to not being driven by knowledge and logic.
Maybe peak human intelligence is like peak oil - it only goes down from here.
Like renewables were on track to bring us peak oil, maybe AI will bring us peak human intelligence.
If we train AI on human works and humans only do what the AI says, we're at a maximum.
When was the historical pinnacle in your opinion?
What do you mean by intelligence? And by your definition of it, can intelligence be improved intentionally or it happens as it happens like for evolution? If it happens by intention then why we have not pushed it at its maximium yet?
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Yeah, we peaked somewhere near the end of XIX century IMO. Before the transition to mass society.
“Pinnacle” just means “highest point” here. They are saying that AI might take human intelligence to a higher point than was previously reached. That’s debatable, of course, but isn’t what you seem to be arguing against.
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Neither intelligence nor knowledge, if you mean us average people.
But that shouldn't be any surprise. We're already at more than a hundred years of deliberate dumbing down of the population through schooling and mass media. These effects are exponential through generations.
> I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber
We are at a peak in absolute terms, though the decline is coming quickly:
https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/2034755779501105321
But in relative terms intelligence has indeed been declining for a long time:
https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/2034912319256330729
Just mathematically speaking, collectively we're at peak population levels, so the total collective intelligence (sum of all individual human intelligences) is likely at peak as well, even accounting for individual dumbing down?
Also, I think we (non-scientists) might be overestimating the average historical intelligence - see Flynn Effect [1] - perhaps because of a bias in our perception of the past levels based on who published books and thoughts - basically more intelligent members of our species.
May I suggest these historical references [2][3][4][5][6][7] as a counterpoint to AI driving lazy thoughtlessness, which rather seems to be innate to humans as a group.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[2] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.20 — 5th c. BCE Greece. “So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.”
[3] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.2 — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/stasis/2017/honeycutt/aris.... Aristotle treats public persuasion as necessary partly because ordinary audiences cannot easily follow complex chains of reasoning. He says rhetoric addresses deliberative matters before people “who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning.”
[4] Plato, Republic, Book V — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://topostext.org/work/768. Plato distinguishes philosophers from the many “lovers of sights and sounds,” who enjoy appearances but do not apprehend deeper truth. The text says their thought is “incapable” of grasping the underlying form or nature of beauty, and that few attain that deeper vision.
[5] Confucius, Analects, Book 2 — 5th c. BCE China. https://www.chinastory.cn/ywdbk/english/v1/detail/20190722/1.... "Learning without thought is pointless, Thought without learning is dangerous".
[6] Buddhist tradition, Dhammapada, Appamāda-vagga. https://suttacentral.net/dhp21-32/en/sujato. Dhammapada contrasts heedfulness with heedlessness, treating heedlessness as a central human failing. In one translation: “Heedfulness is the state free of death; heedlessness is the state of death. The heedful do not die, while the heedless are like the dead.”
[7] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, “Idols of the Mind” — 1620. https://history.hanover.edu/texts/bacon/novorg.html. Bacon argues that the “Idols of the Tribe” are rooted in human nature itself, and that human understanding distorts reality like a false mirror.
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Are you implying that all the scientific achievements of the last hundred years don't count somehow?
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Why do we need to promote intelligence? If we are all “intelligent”, what is the difference? At best, we have about 50 healthy years on this rock. I do think myself “intelligent”, relatively, but also that the notion is overrated. I want to be dumb and carefree, I’d rather bike, shoot some arrows at the sky, eat some escargot and die in my sleep when it’s time. Instead, we must toil and research nursing homes.
Did the previous tools, which freed us from physical work, take human physique to another pinnacle?
I think probably actually. The fittest people back then probably weren't as fit as people today with specialized diets and medical science, and surely those findings were a result of better equipment, which were a result of better tooling to manufacture that equipment.
Introducing a machine to a manufacturing role obviously makes the manufacturer less fit, but it enables society to break through fitness barriers in general
If your point is that it's not orders of magnitude fitter, that's a good one. I don't think people will be much more intelligent in the future than they are today but they'll probably just be more specialized and have deeper knowledge
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it wasn't about industrialization, but about not being complicit, the machine was the metaphor for the system (this was the 1960s)
Who is "we"? Do you operate a machine in a factory? Do you know how someone operating a machine felt in 1900?
Mechanical replacement cannot be compared with thought replacement anyway, but the most thoughtless pro-AI comment tends to be at the top.
>and yet we all function well
Sure...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/694199/u.s.-depression-rate-rem...
>this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
Between the endless slop, loneliness and depression epidemics, record low reading comprehension, attention shortage, we're not in any pinnacle today. We're in a regression from a few decades ago, getting worse.
A slop fork machine is way different though, I dont know why authors never thought about this but imagine a machine that can detect the features and replicate whatever it sees, show it how to make bread once and it can do it infinitely, make it listen to a song and its able to find why it sounds the way it does and just spam variations, even if it doesnt make anything original it demotivates any attempt to push the boundaries or make anything new
Really? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now.
For example, I want to make:
- A mini OS on top of SeL4
- A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust.
- My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends
- A local first data store, built on top of CRDTs
- My own programming language
And lots more.
Each of these projects on their own would take months of time. If LLMs can speed up development, that's great! I don't care if nobody else uses what I make. I want a personal computer full of my own software.
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I argue the opposite, that originality will actually become more valuable.
Think about it: everyone has characterized AI slop, as slop. Which means that we negatively value it in terms of originality. Combine that with the fact that there will be a lot of it, this means that original work will 1. stand out or be very distinct from slop, and 2. have its value amplified as a result of this polarization.
basically, we value originality more AND are able to identify it more readily.
related is also the fact that originality will literally be valuable as training data for future models
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> Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
How? It's undermining what the human intellicence is made from, learning.
Hasn't all automation up to this point been same input equals same output though? Automation using LLMs feels different to anything before and I don't think there's a comparative time in history to point at and say "look it happened before and we are now better off"
I think we all been fooled by the sentence: "It's yet another automation, it's like horses were replaced by cars". It is not. Industrialization and automation is about manual labor. LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking. And while I'll give two thumbs up for using ML(there is not 'I' in 'AI') as a technology for some tasks, outsourcing thinking is an evolutionary dead-end.
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The automation at least built unimaginable amounts of wealth for the rich people while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
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No, because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.
Machinists and lathe operators became CNC operators, they didn't lose their jobs, just that instead of turning the inputs by hand, they punch numbers in a machine, but the advent of CNC didn't mean anyone off the street can now punch numbers in the machine and replace the machinists since you still need the years of training and experience.
SW devs will be the new CNC operators, about knowing what data to input and how to wrangle the slop machine to get the desired output faster and better than your competition.
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This article was very eye-opening for me. I think I understand the author's pain and I could certainly feel it while reading the article. The fact that it was "the people" that made the difference kind of surprised me, and then I realized it was because I have seldom had the experiences he's had and that this might have a major impact on the way I (and others) view the technology.
For me, building software has often been a solitary process in which I was far more obsessed with it than those around me. I'm not in a tech-heavy area and I don't have a ton of well-informed people to talk to about programming, software engineering, or AI. I have had experiences like the author in which I needed to learn a new technology or a new language but ended up doing so on my own at home, not with the assistance of a much more knowledgeable developer with significantly more experience.
To me LLMs have left us in a situation where the following things are true and moving forward lies somewhere in figuring out how to reconcile / resolve these things:
- You can use LLMs and learn things or not learn things; this is a result of the approach, desire, and willpower of the user.
- There is a level of skill associated with using LLMs much like nearly everything else in existence. The user's skill level impacts their perception of the technology and also affects the way those around them view the technology. Unskilled users will generate more negative sentiment.
- Some people love to do the things the machine is good at and do not want the machine to do them, while others hate to do the things the machine is good at and want the machine to do them. I realized at some point this year that I don't love programming anywhere near as much as I love building and designing systems and solving problems.
- Software development is many things wrapped up in one and talking about it as a single thing makes it more confusing. Some people like to think through the logic of the application and have an LLM write the code while others want the LLM to think up the solution, implement it, and test it. These are two very different people with likely different goals and different desires.
- When someone else looks at Claude or ChatGPT they might see something completely different than what you see.
I hope some of this resonates with others.
Very well said. And I'm in the same camp. I've very rarely had someone with whom I could interact, bounce off ideas, brainstorm regarding the nitty gritty of code. Most of the time, I've had to dig through books, online articles and create my own mental framework of how things work.
And this has held me up in good stead.
Now with AI, I've found a tool from which I can learn, show me the right way to do things, and explain in detail what has been done. I can ask questions, point out mistakes, go back and forth on different implementations and at the end of it, come out a better programmer.
As many commentators have mentioned, AI means different things to different people. For me, it has been empowering, enlightening, and humbling.
There have always been so many things to learn, but never enough time. Now, it doesn't quite feel that way.
> “If you don’t learn how to use AI, you’re going to be left behind.”
I don't subscribe to that even to begin with. Learning "how to use AI" in a a dev workflow takes less than a month, just by practice. Assuming "how to use AI" refers to using agents, rather than just a more advanced auto complete, once you've made the couple of mistakes you can make a couple of times (mainly, leave the coding agent to do something too big for too long), you're caught up. Maybe it take a little more time to get the habits into your workflow.
Leveraging a LLM for coding is orders of magnitude simpler than the code it's writing, and the skills you need to review said code.
This really resonates with me, and reminds me of all that I've missed in the years since COVID and going full remote. There's magic in a room when a mob programming session results in a breakthrough that just can't ever be replicated remotely. Not sure I'd jump to sign up for a daily commute again, especially where I live now, an hour away from a major city without traffic, but I do miss that.
I think this post is either LLM-written, or written in a standard blogpost style of today which is increasingly becoming LLM-like. Sam Kriss had a good recent post pointing out some of the "tells": https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...
I definitely don't have time for AI-generated crap. I've got to get back to asking Claude to write code for me. ;)
Most humans derive their purpose and meaning from their work. Has always been that way. What do you think happens when you remove meaning from people’s lives at scale? It won’t be pretty.
It's not about removing meaning. A normal thoughtful person can surely come up with things to do and occopy their lives with. In fact for most of people work just gets in the way of that.
What's it about is once you remove the paycheck that all proletariats need when things get "interesting".
I hear this all the time but where is the explosion in people learning art, music, increased time with friends and family, etc… instead it’s all the opposite. We’re using all our extra free time to doomscroll.
They shouldn't do this.
> What do you think happens when you remove meaning from people’s lives at scale?
You get some AI-slop like this:
> Your AI email deliverability specialist that tests and fixes your emails — backed by a Top-Rated expert.
I can relate to this article. My reaction to what is happening is also: "Leave me behind".
However, missing the joy of the old-school way of growing as a developer is not only the wrong reason, but also very dangerous according to Darwin.
Our customers don't care about how it is made after all, but they do care about long-term support, costs, and predictability, etc.
But I'm not sure whether we can say we made a real net positive progress in the industry. The whole thing is a big mess. In many cases, AI moves us in the same direction in turbo mode, making it not only messier and more expensive but also dangerous.
I tell them, "Leave me alone", as I see this mess as an opportunity if you think the right way, starting from the first principles.
Maybe our customers do care about how it's made.
Just do it the way you want to do it and have fun [1] (I've recently started doing streams where I showcase a mix of AI + manual coding and why I think that's best).
The "powers that be" would prefer if you sideline yourself. Instead, pop a bird and say "thank you kind sir, but no."
[1] https://youtu.be/KqQpYgvrEqM?si=gfGCOqgmF4iy4077
I don't think AI changed anything at all to the possibility of communicating between humans. This is a job that you've always been able to do alone in your cave.
Really? How do you learn how to code with out communicating with another human? Which man pages in a general Linux install will teach you all you need to know? Without communication you get no books, no StackOverflow, no-LLMs even. You were allowed to do it alone but we can't pretend humans communicating isn't how most of the available knowledge for your perusal came to be.
It has. Some utter morons seem to run everything they receive and send through it at work.
I have a spreadsheet now of people I can't be fucked with.
> but it is a necessity to maintain humanity in software development
Seems like I'm reading the pope encyclical
We we all be left behind my friend. Soon enough.
Like the artisans/craftsmen in many places (especially Japan), hand craft will always carry enduring meaning — machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. But historically at least, they can replace over 99.9% of it.
> machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands.
What about 'machines' with hands and human-level cognition?
I don't have a quantitative way to argue this, but my intuition says that for humans to build something that matches human capability across every dimension would require a breakthrough at the physical level — and such a breakthrough may itself be bounded by the limits of humans as observers.
That said, this goal might itself be a non-goal. AI is going to be — or already is — more powerful than any individual human in many ways. But what my intuition points to is that humans will still have plenty of interesting work to do, like the author's example of handwriting code: it shifts from being scalable value creation into a form of craftsmanship.
Summarize this text into one or two paragraphs.
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I absolutely understand this sentiment. I've been working in tech since the late 90s and I have had MORE than my share of let-me-off-this-ride moments.
But this post (and the many I see like it) feels like giving up. And now's not the time for empathetic people to give up.
Technology is how we expand human capability. We are well within our rights to pick and choose how we interact with that capability. But it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out. Billionaires are doing a remarkable job at making their vision of the future seem inevitable. Don't fall for it.
If more people aren't willing to help us steer this capability towards a better future, then we all know how this ends.
> it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out
Maybe it's just that the capability is bad. Adtech, for example, isn't something that anyone uses for good. They blow a lot of smoke about it--looking at you, Apple--but despite the "good-washing" it's all just the same extractive, invasive, dehumanizing business. Bad people will naturally concentrate around this capability. I know because I've worked with a few of them.
AI coding tools seem like they're engineered to undermine cautious, rigorous, and pragmatic engineering discipline. Of course the bosses want that, they see a short term path to massive output increases and nothing sounds better. They'll be cashed out by the time the mess needs to be cleaned up, that's someone else's problem. People who are predisposed to this kind of antisocial behavior are the ones who concentrate around AI tools. Rigorous, careful engineers who care about building maintainable systems that will outlast their tenure find less value in them.
I think it's more nuanced than
> Technology is how we expand human capability.
I think as a general statement about technology as a whole it's true. But do all technologies expand human capabilities? I don't think so.
In my mind, I would separate technology from its application.
Advertising tech and AI coding tools are applications of technology stacks that could have been used to create what you and I might agree to be "better" tools. I don't need to tell you why ad tech got created instead of something that is a net societal benefit.
At the same time, I would say that, yes, those applications do indeed expand human capabilities. The important nuance here is whose capability, and to what end.
All I am saying is that opting out of this, in whatever form that takes, hands your agency over to those who would use it to enrich themselves at the cost of others. I sincerely feel that decades of this type of capitulation is exactly how we got to where we are today.
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Its classic HN to dismiss the emotional cost of change as sunk cost stages of grief. A person is allowed to love their work and miss deep understanding, and allowed to be nostalgic for a preferred way of working. It's human and everything they have shared in this post is unequivocally true about software dev and moving into a career, arguably even before LLMs took over.
What I mean is that the thrilling buddy system coding starts to happen less frequently over a career, and the time for deep exploring and side projects is organically maximized early and during school.
While LLMs have forced that divide to be more stark, the human connection and sense of wonder has always required maintenance, and it's best to get into the habit of maintaining it before your 36th JIRA triage meeting in a week completely destroyed your love of the industry.
Well before LLMs I went through exactly what TFA describes when I had to adapt from grad school labs to industrial labs, then to project management or task leadership (even just filling in for my boss), and each new job has required me to say goodbye to great friends and colleagues and make new ones.
Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft, we all could probably write this post for our own reasons.
> Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft
This is not some kind of universal truth. I can see how being stuck in an unfulfilling job could lead you to say this. But for the last 20+ years I love the craft of writing efficient, dependable, understandable code more with every new insight from every hard-won experience.
What if you could finish your passion project in an evening? Would that increase not the time, but capacity for deep exploring and side projects?
Only if having a set of competed projects is what makes you happy. Some love learning and overcoming challenges.
Nice read, and agreed, leave me behind. I have been telling people that I am running a John Henry experiment with LLMs. I don't use them just so I can prove the human is better than the machine, even if it leaves me in the dirt like John.
people need to reframe coding agent usage. i see a lot of framing in zero-sum terms where it's either all dev or all agent, and then people start dooming and glooming over the latter. in reality it's like that one post on here a few days ago about it being like an iron man suit. it is a glowing, bright white power that can be incredible when wielded properly. unfortunately, people characterize it as an adversarial power that can and will take over your soul.
how about some true synergy instead of boring zero-sum people? smh. the true poetry here is that zero-sum thinking will become more of a thing of the past so there is some natural comedy with this title
This is some anecdata, but I'll share it nonetheless as I have a pretty wide network of software and security engineer friends from which I've heard the following.
Almost no one I know wants agent usage to be a zero-sum activity. There are a few oddballs who obviously only got into software for the money, so any means to that end is acceptable. That does not stop those with say-so over things like employment (and, if you're in the USA, the associated healthcare), from treating it as a zero-sum activity.
When engineers are being told to maximize token usage, are constantly being brought into meetings where they're expected to reveal their latest and greatest use of LLMs, and not using enough tokens in your role is seen as a negative, then the pressure starts to creep in. Yes, I know this is silly to most people who read this site, and I agree. It's bonkers. But there is certainly something to the idea of "AI psychosis" in upper management that is making agent use zero-sum company-wide.
That's good to know, because all I really go off of is what I see posted online which is most likely skewed towards the polarizing takes (been unemployed for a while). Sounds like some positive news though, and I hope that these tools can help empower people to the point where they don't feel shackled by their jobs by doing something like lowering the barrier and manpower needed to succeed at entrepreneurship.
That shit with upper management sounds stupid af and I've heard the same type of shit from people I know who are in other fields. I'm guessing it's happening from a combination of ignorance, FOMO, investment, etc etc. But that is more of a systemic issue than anything to do with these tools imo.
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The lack of humanity or ability to empathize with someone else’s feelings displayed in these comments, instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
It also is a great example of why AI has such a PR problem among normal people.
Exactly this.
I’m forever getting asked for help by people who suddenly value the human experience when their machine god fails them.
Sometimes fuck ‘em because they devalued me first.
Frustratingly, these attitudes have been around long before LLMs, and they'll continue to exist long after. To those individuals who have staunchly refused to broaden their horizons or empathize with their fellow man, these posts are direct threats to the wagons they've hitched themselves to, a challenge to their own narrow passions because they exist in a zero-sum environment where if even one person doesn't think and act like them, then clearly they're in the obvious wrong.
Conflating a preference for manual creation with opposition to the existence of a tool should be the single biggest signal flare that they are someone who will not argue with you in good faith. They're the ones who barnstorm every single one of these posts to denigrate the author rather than even attempt to empathize with their plight or evaluate the validity of their arguments. Surely the current cohort of HN commenters have seen this repeatedly in just the past five years as technical circles have jumped from cryptocurrency to blockchain to NFTs to LLMs to GenAI; every single one is a "must have", every single one something we "must learn or be left behind forever", and every single one refused to be evaluated on its merits in favor of simply embracing something new for its novelty.
I have given up debating with these people, because they do not wish for debate, they wish for dominance. I have better things to do with my time - as do you, as do all of us - than to give a moment of consideration to a viewpoint that relies on pithy quotes out of context and a reductionist narrative of history to justify their own superiority over others, in lieu of nuanced discourse.
Remember that it is not the obligation of the status quo to defend itself, rather the obligation belongs to those advocating changes to justify and defend their position and its benefits. In that regard, the pro-AI camp continues to come up hollow and empty.
Wonderfully put, thank you. Ultimately, we’re supposed to be “engineers,” and that means (for our jobs) assessing tools and practices in terms of their net benefit on the products we create: there is no free lunch, and a thing’s downside is often proportional to its upside, so it seems wise to approach these things with caution and to have the kind of nuanced discussions that you note have been lacking.
I’d also hope, though, that as humans, we can recognize that tools do not exist in a vacuum, and that their effect on ourselves and society at large can be net negative even if they have a net positive effect on our work (whether due to something fundamental to the tool or due to the way it is being applied at scale). We can’t responsibly leave these discussions out of our analysis of the tool itself and its fitness for purpose, because we are members of society, and our adoption/use of the tool helps to determine that societal impact.
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> instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
I’ll be the devil’s advocate and suggest that it might not be AI usage, but the technology attracting vilest scum of the Earth. It’s just they were staying mostly silent before, or wasted someone else’s time in different circles.
Ok you're doing exactly what GP said, but in the opposite direction
The funniest thing about this post is that Java Android programming circa 2014 is somehow romanticized as "real programming." 2014 Android code has got to be peak corpo-slop with the most inane abstractions, unintuitive paradigms, and copy-paste boilerplate syndrome. Ironically, exactly why we need AI these days, since like 90% of the code you wrote didn't technically do anything.
It's apparently very funny though, cause the author was laughing a lot. Systems and embedded programmers like myself are grumpy af with or without AI
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics
Yeah yeah back to Reddit
For real though: you can keep doing artisanal hand-written code as a hobby. Just like you can still write a web server in assembly if you really want to. But that’s just not how professional software development is done anymore. Just a new tool, I don’t think it’s as deep as the author is making it out to be.
Per learning from others after encountering an unfamiliar problem, I think there are rose-tinted glasses here. 90%+ of the time, either someone else had already provided the relevant answer at Stack Overflow or I could find it on a documentation page, a blog. There is no social engagement then. Just search. That also hasn't gone away, as LLMs can also provide sources to justify their answers.
Per the human element, the author is in part relaying about formative experiences from youth that you won't easily repeat, and also experiences that are not decoupled from the work as it still exists, unless you are entirely remote, which is not a LLM-specific problem.
All of which to say, the emotional element behind it is valid, but the diagnosis is off the mark. I think the human element, should it be jeopardized, is in part through the complacent convenience of remote work and disinterest in community participation. But, communities still exist, and tech communities historically were always niche. As it stands they're probably bigger now than they ever were.
There are still new frontiers with software where LLMs will be less effective. Yes, there is less friction than before for learning technologies, but all this does is move the goalpost as we can accomplish more with our time.
Instead of hacking things out through trial and error on mature stacks (with or without others), you'll be closer to the cutting edge and have different problems. Many of which will still be technological in nature.
This will inevitably lead to tired discussion of “there are two types of developers, those who care about the craft and those who want to get things” done. I believe that to be a false dichotomy, and will link to someone else’s comment in another thread who makes the argument that caring about the craft is part of caring about the product.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591796
More specifically to the submission, I’ll say I agree with the author. This “being left behind” fear mongering is an exhausting uncritical talking point. Life isn’t about rushing through the end and killing yourself to be “productive”. “Being left behind” is only bad if what’s “ahead” is an improvement to your situation, and that’s not a given. Humans aren’t built to be pushed to 11 without rest. Stopping to smell the roses is good. Immediatelly thinking “how can I kill these to package the smell to sell to others at a profit” is not.
“So leave me behind.”
That’s easy to say for someone in their 50s who built wealth under favorable conditions.
But it’s quite ignorant and inhumane to say that to someone in their 20s who is just starting their career.
Too bad to see these boomer antics continue to be perpetuated.
The second sentence of TFA: "I learned to build Android applications in 2014. I was in college taking a Java programming class".
So this person's twelve years out of college. You may want to train your fire elsewhere.
???
But that's exactly my point. He got twelve good years out of it.
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AI is repulsive. You either feel it, maybe not immediately, or don't. When you feel it, you'll rationalize it one way or another. The rationalization does not matter that much. It's essentially arbitrary and is a product of whatever experience you've accumulated so far. (E.g. could be a Communist rationalization of alienation under capitalism.) Yet the underlying feeling is true. Stick to it.
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics, trained on the years and years of dedication by brave engineers willing to learn and build in the open. Building in the open meant we were not gatekeeping technology, but creating tangible examples for young engineers to explore, understand, and learn from.
Another grief-post with people unable to cope with the fact that the whole structure of learning and work is going to change so they resort to pseudo nostalgia and romanticism. Not to mention that "They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics" is basically incorrect and belongs in 2024.
Always a shame to see good meaning, smart humans let their anxieties and fears drive them into empirical falsehoods.
Anyone still have some hope for humanity? Or yourselves as a person? Asking for a friend who thinks that the dark horizon has already swallowed all but our eyes, leaving us the brief observers of our oblivion
Not gonna pretend that this is anything other than the author's personal gripe with this whole thing, but this is really just the sunk cost fallacy with extra steps.
Even by trying to reassure (the reader? Himself?) that LLMs are just a tool for humans, he asserts in the final paragraph that software is no longer made by humans. Something something linotype operators.
What's your take on it?
> I desire to connect with people. I long for the days where I was vulnerable and shared my struggles with engineers who charitably stepped up to support me.
Main character syndrome. AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.
The quality of hacker news commenters has been steadily declining, yet I'm still constantly surprised by just how mentally shallow and lazy some can be
Is that something you say whenever someone doesn't follow the nostalgic hivemind ?
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Do you respond with 'main character syndrome' to everyone who shares an opinion?
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You don't even know what "main character syndrome" is.
What makes an appeal to experience, subjective or otherwise, an expression of Main Character Syndrome? Just because somebody pushes back against the tides doesn't mean they fancy themself more important than others. Further, they're not saying "we should all stop using LLMs". The title of the article is literally "Leave Me Behind", an expressed desire to no longer participate in a system they believe to be harmful.
They explicitly state a position they take for themself, whereas you make an implicit value judgement of all practitioners who feel similarly. This could be read in a way as an assumption that everyone else should be as miserable as you.
> AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves
Then why are the extroverts trying to replace engineers with AI?
Because it seems to be economically the right thing to do.
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> Main character syndrome.
Do you even know what that means or you just saw a phrase online and like how it sounds? There’s nothing about main character here, the author doesn’t even advocate for anything.
> AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.
Get help, even if it is from the AI, seriously.