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Comment by sublinear

1 day ago

Nice attempt at slipping one past, but the industry is far from doomed. Where do you work now that you believe that?

37 comments

sublinear

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echelon  1 day ago

Holdouts feel everything is doomed.

Adopters feel the future is brighter than ever.

Article author is excited. I am too.

  • bigstrat2003  19 hours ago

    There's nothing to be excited for. Even if AI works as well as people say (and to be clear: it very much doesn't), that future sucks ass. No more fun making things, no fun solving problems, just hand it off to the machine that does things for you. That's an awful future where every shred of joy is gone from computing.

    • sublinear  18 hours ago

      I have never been able to understand this perspective. It's come up so often that it almost feels like a pro-AI propaganda strawman in the style of the "virgin vs chad" meme.

      You can and should still write most of the code yourself and use AI to assist when you get stuck. Apart from saving yourself some hours because you no longer hit dead ends on google, I don't understand how that's meaningfully different from using a search engine and finding solutions on StackOverflow and GitHub. I don't even understand how people think this traditional workflow I'm suggesting is any slower than reviewing LLM output either. It takes the same cognitive load and the same time in the end. The only people who believe they can go faster and reduce cognitive load aren't just inexperienced, but also seem to have ADHD or something. Like they just wanna bask in the vibes of the machine-generated text scrolling by.

      If your goal is to make something you're going to live with and maintain long term, or is more generally the foundation of a bigger idea, you can't ignore any part of the code or delegate it away. It's still writing that you're bound by like any other document.

      1 reply →

    • echelon  19 hours ago

      You're welcome to not make things.

      Are you telling us the only reason why making things was fun is because it made you "special"? And now that anyone can do it it isn't worth it for you anymore?

      That's the wrong reason to do something.

      3 replies →

  • sublinear  21 hours ago

    I exist outside your dichotomy.

    I feel like the future is bright precisely because AI sucks so bad while also lowering the bar.

    It made people not take software and software engineers for granted. Public perception of software has also finally matured. Boomers and tech CEOs fell into a tarpit that harshly exposes their stupidity while laypeople now feel like they can change the system.

    This is all exciting in the best ways. My usage of AI at work and for personal projects goes as far as whatever the AI summary is on google. That's more than enough for me to get enough of a productivity boost on par with those who embarrassingly thrust themselves balls deep and refuse to pull out. Not everyone has to push the "I'm feeling lucky" button to get the same work done at the same pace.