Comment by tptacek
20 hours ago
It might genuinely suck for you. It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can. And there's more of them than you.
20 hours ago
It might genuinely suck for you. It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can. And there's more of them than you.
> It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can.
(Raises hand.) I'm doing things with my online law-school course materials, in just a few minutes using Claude, that I never even considered doing before because I didn't want to take the time to improve my rudimentary JavaScript- and CSS skills. Instead of just a fairly-simple, single-page HTML document, Claude is helping me turn the materials into something genuinely useful for both my students and practitioners.
Yes. I have a really hard time getting past the sheer scale of enablement for normal people, and we're stacking it up against, what, the joy professional developers get out of hand-cutting dovetail keys? And then like a whole cinematic universe about how if all the joinery isn't hand-cut, everything's going to collapse, which, like, obviously no.
One of my favorite journalists is Jerusalem Demsas, who just on a podcast mentioned --- in passing --- that she'd vibe-coded the photo editor they were using for her publication. That's a bananas statement! And we're all just, shrug, or worse: "that's slop!"
Don't get me wrong, I think we'll print money hats off this sentiment. By all means, do whatever you can to leave the lane we're building in as open and stigmatized as possible!
Those people who couldn't build anything before still can't.
This is obviously false.
If I tell you to build me a house and you do so, I have not built the house.
I can give you requirements, give you feedback during the process, and otherwise contribute to the design, but at the end of the day I did not build the house.
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I think that it should not need to be mutually exclusive. You can make it you can enter the programs yourself (if you prefer to do for whatever reason, including, it does not work well (like you mention), or because of Dijkstra objection or other objections to the use of AI for programming the computer or AI in general), but that AI can also be possible.
It sucks that most of those people are going to be entirely dependent on a proprietary service to build things for them and they will never actually bother learning or improving their skills, even though the tools to do so have never been more freely and widely available.
It also sucks that so many people in tech think that the widespread loss of education, knowledge and freedom is a good thing.
I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.
>I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
No one is saying that anyone has to, but being able to is the whole thesis of the hacker ethos. Knowing how to do things yourself versus being a consumer dependent on corporations.
And children are learning how to program nowadays... although that won't be the case for long. My nephew is taking programming classes in school and making games in Roblox. But soon the only thing they'll teach is how to prompt Claude. We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge and that might have enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism. Now we're burning it all down and a depressing number of people like yourself on this erstwhile forum of programmers and hackers are actually dancing on the ashes.
Using a service to generate software for you is not "building programs to solve your problems." You aren't building anything, and you certainly aren't learning anything that would give you any real control over it or let you exercise freedom relative to it. AI is just proprietary software and data theft with more steps and a lot more fascism.
It doesn't just suck for us, it sucks for everyone.
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