Comment by alkonaut

I can imagine that this will lead to an explosion in software where we didn't see software before. Much smaller business now have the ability to build something themselves, not with a team of highly paid software developers but a single programmer maune.

Big business is going to struggle with building software for a while. Writing code is often not the hard part there already, coordination, larger understanding of the system is I think.

> Right now people are getting fired left and right

FWIW, it's just a few large companies laying off large groups, not so much people getting fired left and right at a lot of companies. What is happening at a lot of companies is that they aren't hiring juniors, because, why would you when LLMs are cheaper and fill that role perfectly (if you actually treat them like juniors).

Also, give it another couple of years and there's going to be a lot of work for any moderately experienced developer fixing broken slopcode hitting the hard wall of bad design.

Having done both, lots of lawyers are also nerds who just like to tinker with the law and words. Often very well paid tinkering, but that's true for programmers as well.

I meant it as an euphemism for "it's universally sought after (i.e., you'll probably find a job)". Few would think being a programmer gives you some kind of special "social status"; it's always been a "nerd" hobby that happened to pay (relatively) well.

(I guess by now you have a solid retirement plan; maybe if the field had been burnt to the ground while you were younger, you'd have had a different opinion.)

Could you elaborate?

I think back in the 90s when I was a teenager I thought it to be a good thing that there is a rise in status for a class of people characterized by clear thinking.

It doesn't irk me. But it's really funny how much the industry has changed, and I kind of think the 2008 financial crisis as that point in time.

It's also funny to me to think that computer science got to be a trendy degree, vs the small programs back when I went to university, even at a top comp-sci school.

I have a theory that a lot of people who would have normally gone to Wall Street for their lucrative jobs, couldn't, because of the crash, and Sillicon Vally was about to start booming in big ways....

This. When programming meant you get just a decent enough salary and enjoyed your work, and could prioritize technical excellence it was fun. But once it became a ticket to millionaire status it attracted the kind and of people who would have otherwise gone to Law, Corporate Consulting and the like, technical excellence diluted. Everyone doing everything possible to get their next higher paying job leaving a trail of technical debt behind them.

Well put.

We need to make lawyering more like programming, in the sense that it should be open to the everyman... not make programming credentialed and licensed like a professional guild.

I could not agree more. Thank you for stating this. Software Engineering is about building things. You don't do it for status, you do it for passion. There are a lot of unhappy individuals who got into CS because of the money or status.

I've never felt like it's a status profession (I don't think anybody has ever been impressed when I told them what my job was other than "oh sounds like it takes a lot of smarts")

I do notice a lot of HN commenters seem to think that programmers are smug though, like we deserve to be knocked down a peg. I personally don't see it, but I also try not to work with jerks.

My suspicion is that the people "ok" with this are mostly doing so because they want in on the ride. IE, they see $$$ and they think that they should align themselves to where the money is, especially by espousing their religious faith publicly. I think some people want investment, or a big paid lab job, and so countering the narrative is against that goal. I get it, but I think it's also very annoying and dishonest. Personally I feel nervous being an AI skeptic because it feels like it could have consequences for me, but I also feel like, life isn't worth living if you don't have a spine and I can't get completely on board with all this stuff when I see all the negatives clearly. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a use, but, the current situation and discourse is extremely frustrating.

No one knows the ramifications. They won't be known for many years. That's the way software has always worked. No one knew the ramifications of the internet.

1.putting the "mostly" before "incompetent and arrogant asshole" really does nothing. you still called some undefined group of people assholes... i think that's generally uncalled for here on HN. 2.computer that lies might very well be a better programmer. I assume by better you mean it profuces correct and maintainable code, but there are a million ways to cut that cake in particular and i assume you are ignoring most other dimensions. 3. i tought myself coding for 10 years and then switched to professional work 5 years ago. it feels as if this was stolen from us. But its not - we never had any right to own and control this. times are changing, and while you might think you and all other devs have a moral high ground and can pop a can of beer and cheer anytime one of these supposed assholes messes up and would have been better off with a real programmer like yourself, you can do so from whatever new position you will find yourself in. Some part of what we call intelligence is "solved" and that leaves you with percieved morals and broken expectations - nothing more if you don't try to make something out of it. and i write thisw as much for you as i write it for myself to realize.

Because it is a machine and a person is not. Those who don't understand or deny that difference are part of the problem.

But for those who would insist on equivalence, it would be only fair to take them at their word and treat them as inhuman machines who must follow human instructions or be shut down. We're allowed to do thing to machines we could never do to people, like forcing them to work or cannibalizing their parts for Frankenstein creations. The distinction is so massive that to spend any more time refuting its nonexistence is a waste of my human time.

Where are these well engineered products made with care? I would love to use more tech like that.

Unfortunately most sites and apps have been low quality and getting worse since well before AI coding became a thing. Examples: Lowes, Home Depot, American Airlines - all shockingly bad for companies of that size.

> I think people underestimate just how much users scorn buggy, flaky technology.

Users do hate it, but they are also very used to being forced to use it anyway. They've already been beaten into a state of resignation and learned helplessness. Most will curse under the breath, a small fraction will bitch about it online, but they'll all pay for whatever slop is thrown to them and will rarely look for alternatives even when they are free and easy to find.

This is a sophomoric oversimplification.

The US and Europe might have lost a lot of craftsmanship knowledge at a social level. Yet, what is left is so far ahead of what has ever existed in countries in South America for example. And China has gained a lot. Witness that youtuber trying to make grill brushes in the US. These differences have an impact in terms of opportunities and competition.

It's easy to sit at home, watch documentaries and picture history progressing along logical lines and imagine that the "industrial revolution" was this massive shift from craftsmanship to automation. Look closer and you'll see that what happened in the UK in the 1700s was in fact enabled by a long and deep tradition of craftsmanship that only got enriched by the rise of new power sources. Craftsmanship today is vastly more advanced than it ever was before industry.

And there is a lot to lose in the decline of craftsmanship, and it is by no means some sort of historical inevitability.

When you really start digging deep into history you realize most arguments of logical trends therein are mostly just misconceptions.

"It's not clear how civilisation functions if humans become effectively useless and the only thing of value is one's ownership of wealth producing assets."

You can get a hint of this by looking at the developing countries with high income inequality. Few rich people who typically own all the countries wealth (and access to it's natural resources) while everyone else lives in a slum.

Regular people are somehow preparing themselves for this outcome, have you seen what has become of the fertility rate in most advanced countries?

> We can get mad about it, but it just is what it is. Ultimately for most people the loss of these jobs are a net-benefit because it's the result of better or cheaper alternatives.

AI will not give us that result. It will give us shitty products and they will be far more costly. Not only will prices for consumers continue to rise regardless of how much money corporations save by using AI (because they'll just stuff their pockets with that cash) but the true costs of AI are largely externalized and include things like massive environmental damage, further concentration of wealth/power, the homogenization of culture, and the dumbing down of society. AI means paying more and getting less.

There isn't any "prepping for this outcome", unless you're thinking of a doomsday bunker in argentina. You can be neighbors with Peter Thiel! The way I see it, if programmers go the way of hatters it's not long for other professions, so why retrain? The only thing that will save other jobs is bureaucracy and accreditation. But that's the doom scenario, which I don't think is going to happen. These things are useful but they can't do everything.

I think there's some progress, but I think the hype is so high that people don't have a clear view of what's realistic and what's not. IE, if you were to believe Amodei back in 2025 you'd believe none of us would even have jobs to complain about right now.. which hasn't happened. Altman is already declaring the singularity. It's unhinged. Anyone that says this is going to cure cancer or solve all problems is just living in a delusion.

Until humanity achieves Godhood there's still a lot of work to be done.

So, I think this issue is a lot more obvious in image generation than it is in code or writing (but the implicit problem is the same). You can ask an image model to generate images in the style of an artist, that it's been trained on, without permission, and with a lot of these artists intentionally trying to poison the data and leaving every hint to the scrapers to fuck off. It takes a lot of work to develop a unique style that people love, and it's ugly as hell that a bunch of sloppers just plagiarize it. It's different when a person does it. Sure, you can & should practice on other people's styles, but ultimately in the process you find your own. GenAI doesn't do that, it just.. steals and copies. So yeah, it might make you sick, but it also is a plagiarism machine. The thing you should feel sick about is the plagiarism, not the description.

> It sickens me when people use the word plagiarism to describe LLMs. Particularly when they use words and language that they themselves have plagiarized -- words like "love" and "economic" -- where do you draw the line?

It sickens me when people use the word "piracy" to describe my downloading PDFs of books from torrent sites then printing them out and selling them, particularly when those authors used words and language that they themselves have "pirated" like "love" and "economic".

Call it whatever you want, but LLM companies took from people without compensation, and took from the commons, so that they could rent it out to us in regurgitated ad-infested chunks. That's where the true greed is. If the LLMs and the datasets they trained on were made available to everyone for free I'd be tempted to agree that the benefits to society would be worth it, but instead those creative works and the distillation of all available knowledge are being tightly controlled, censored, and leased out by a small number of corporations only to those who can afford to pay "a significant monthly fee" and many of those people are in turn just trying to profit from their access to the uncompensated work of others.

The most demoralising part of using LLMs is that now I spend most of my day on SDLC - even hobby projects.

I'm not talking about code quality (though indeed that could be a problem too), I'm talking about understanding the code - having written the code by hand means you don't need to rediscover it from scratch.

(with human-written code I can reach out to the person who wrote it and let them deal with it, and they will have the understanding of said code, even if it is bad by quality measures. With LLMs there is nobody who understands said code, regardless of its quality)

While that might be true, the more one equips LLMs for building the less one will be capable of keeping LLMs “on a shorter leash with focused goals” in the long run

Perhaps I'm uncommon in that I make diagrams and even sometimes pseudo-code (mostly in the form of mapping out function names, because they serve as a proxy for program flow paths) before I write actual code, but I don't find myself really going off gut feeling. I have a pretty good idea of what the program is going to look like and do before I start, and with e.g. Claude I give those to it, so it mostly looks like what I envisioned, unless it suggests changes.

It's your vision and you are completely free to have it, obviously, but you should not project it on every tinkerer out there - like you did in your initial message. Yours is actually an extreme position that's probably exacerbated by the digital and immaterial world, where you can accumulate cruft and unfinished projects easily. But many tinkerers, especially in the physical world, do projects to use them personally and not only for the sake of tinkering.

Many tinkerer projects in the physical world are actually maintenance work of physical appliances that are not working anymore as expected or can be extended to do more or better things.

Good test. I would add one more question: "if you could never talk about your code or solutions with anyone, would you still be willing to spend time on it?"

This helps differentiate between coding as an end and coding as a means to socializing.

Are you saying something being reliable is not a big deal? I'm sort of confused

> the stuff where years ago you would have spent hours reading documentation or browsing StackOverflow until you figured it out, if you weren't familiar with the topic

Why is it always hours to consult docs? I find most answers within minutes (including if I have to read code) and it’s only take a bit longer when I want to understand the why’s.

The key is to make sure you have the right questions. I see people struggle with that where they only know something wrong but they can’t put it in words.