Comment by bawolff

Then robots begin cleaning dishes too. And the other members aren't happy, because what's the point, we are here not for the dishes, but for the process.

I think that also hits what you see universally with every AI product trying to pass worse results off as a benefit: if you’re a business, the prospect of cutting your cost per cookie is really attractive as long as the decline in quality doesn’t cause people to stop buying and that’s going to get the focus of everyone who sees the financial reports more than they talk with customers. Anyone who’s going it because they care about cookies or take pride in your craft will have the opposite weighting.

We’re kind of at the fast food point: before LLMs, bring successful at all in software required some level of skill (witness all of the companies getting very expensive write-offs from off-shoring or big consultancies trying to save on payroll vs. staff), kind of like how the small cafe/bakery model needed to have at least some level of craft to have something people would buy before the option of making food at a factory and shipping it became an option.

Sure, and that probably explains why companies (who sell software) love AI while hobbyists who just like to program hate it.

For the owner/shareholders yes.

The workers will see the fun evaporate but now they have to clean 10x cookie trays in the same 8 hours.

It is, although in this case the cookie-making robot also makes 10% of its cookies with sand instead of flour. So it's still not a very good trade if you have any pride in your business or consequences for bad product.

I used to work at a company that did in-person pair review. I wasn’t an engineer there but the engineers all legitimately enjoyed the process. They hired very capable people as a default, so it was watching two passionate and talented engineers debate.

> ADHD wins over autism in the immediate future. It was balanced in the past for development to need both but now it’s a total hyperactive victory of general knowledge, master of none.

That’s an interesting framing. I’m not sure I agree with your strong conclusion but that’s mostly because I think there’s a second axis about maintenance – you can make a grand strategy game in a couple months but it’s harder to make it balanced, fun, and to keep shipping updates which players like. A prototype or hobby experiment doesn’t have that problem nearly as much and I think that’s where we see such bimodal reactions where some people think it’s a huge productivity boost and others see modest or even negative results.

I think we’re on opposite sides but this is the first time I’ve seen someone in the wild share my suspicions that the LLM conflict is part of some vast ADHD vs autism hyperwar. At one point I was collecting posts I found where LLM boosters explicitly mentioned how it interacted with their ADHD.

> This way one person can implement a whole new hobby project instead of only writing a single specialized part in an existing project.

I still do start from bottom up to refactor everything into workspace members and this way, parallelism is way easier

> LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.

Not just forest. LLMs reward seeing structures and designs, and it still requires a lot of creativity to design it well. I have to do a lot of architect works for that, like package layout, testing strategies (BDD vs TDD vs E2E), setting up access to platforms and digging out what strategies to apply...etc.

> People focused on the trees will however lag behind as implementation details matter less and less.

Trees like demonstrations and example code are even more important. This is because those are literally post-training materials for the LLMs

> Specialists will be fed to the model weights

I don't think so. New labor laws are certainly going to be introduced by the politicans to tackle this.

> generalists will inherit the world.

Now the problem is how far do you want to stretch the systemic thinking, and you also get burned out quicker.

Funny you should mention autism. I'm of the belief that if I really wanted to, my autism could help me become a very effective AI-assisted programmer, because autistic communication traits that actual humans find annoying (and which most people hence train out of themselves), like infodumping and using precise language, are things AI actually loves and produces better results with.

But I don't want to use AI to code, in large part because I iterate on ideas by working directly with code. Attempting to program through an LLM intermediary becomes like attempting to eat using soft silicone chopsticks.