Comment by sanderjd
3 hours ago
I mean, to me, this is very similar to how it was when "the web" came into its current pervasive form. You could write exactly this comment about how people were writing about how they liked the web, on the web, and also about how they didn't like it, maybe shockingly, also on the web, etc. etc.
To me, this is just how it is when a new paradigm hits the scene. Whether it's good or bad, whether you care for it or not, it is pervasive.
The web was a shared experience, by its very nature. The interconnection was the point. LLMs allow anyone to put themselves in a one-man bubble of their own creation. In a way, it is the antithesis of the internet - if the web is a global public square, the API is a digital cloister.
Pretty much by definition, a new paradigm will be very different from the previously new paradigm.
Personally, I don't think the interconnected "social" nature of the web turned out very well. Maybe (probably) the "one-man bubble" nature of AI also won't turn out well. But I'm skeptical of holding up the web's social nature as a positive. I think it turned out pretty bad. (I shared everyone's optimism in the late 90s and early 2000s and I used to just be mad at Facebook / Zuckerberg for screwing it up, but I dunno, maybe it was always going to end up this way.)
But you could still focus on backend stuff and desktop or CLI programs, think and discuss about programming languages and software engineering on the code level in all the non-web related ways with a large community. You could opt-out of most of the web-related things (which is what I did) and still have a wide community to interact with. Whereas AI appears to be dissolving almost all that community. I hope that will turn out to be a false appearance, but the thesis is that it won’t.
Ok but I think this is just a kind of myopic view that is specifically focused on the things you were / are interested in. AI is a different paradigm that is changing things for a different contingent of people.
To try to demonstrate my point with an example: If you were a journalist, the web changed literally everything in a way that was inescapable. As a software engineer, it changed a lot for a lot of people but it was not inescapable. The situation with AI is, so far, the reverse. Journalists have mostly (and correctly IMO) concluded that this isn't actually that useful to their writing, and it hasn't changed their distribution channels in the way the web did. But for software engineers, it's changing things dramatically.
I guess my perspective is just that new paradigms are not uniformly disruptive.