Comment by ApolloFortyNine
1 day ago
What is up with this attitude in this thread? AI has taken off programming basically this year, the end of last at best. The first truly capable LLM, ChatGPT, isn't even 4 years old yet.
Just a crazy amount of doom and gloom all around this thread.
It's kind of weird to say it's "taken off" recently. Yes what we have today is far better than half a year ago and solving new real use cases, but that was far better with more uses than we had half a year before that, etc, for years now. On their best usecases LLMs were already enormously useful years ago, and it's still very spiky.
As a user of software I see no improvements. What I see is that I need to download software more often, it brings more features I don't need and it has been as buggy as ever (if not more). And I can say that about Operating System I use, social networks, games, etc.
Exactly. Where are the results? If AI is really producing value at 20X the rate software engineers produced it earlier, we should be seeing 20X the number of software projects released now. Or they should be getting made 20X faster. Or they should be 20X better. Or the projects should have 20X fewer bugs. But none of this seems to be happening. The only thing that seems to be happening is we're making the same crappy shit, but with 20X fewer people.
It took a long time for internet to transform society. Its still not fully baked in. These models that we have right now are transformational.
In other words, it's taken a highly enjoyable and lucrative vocation from vast swathes of workers - a lot of which make up this sites audience! - and instead concentrated more productive power in the hands of a few megacorps.
You gave your own example for the doom and gloom.
It has made it far more accessible to a lot more people. Being “highly enjoyable” and “lucrative” is why people try to gatekeep it.
The fact that the means of this capability is in a few hands does suck. But I’m increasingly optimistic that it’s going to be commoditized through open weight models and performance improvements. There is enormous demand for innovations on these fronts.
It hasn't made it more accessible to anyone. It's destroyed it. Who still writes code?
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I'm a rare individual that has consistently made choices to earn less money in order to have more enjoyment. I would clock fewer hours than they wanted me to during college for my internships, I left a FAANG to go back to startups, I quit a startup to work on volunteer work and try to bootstrap a business.
At multiple jobs I've noted that I felt the pay should have been less. Not so that the employers could take a bigger slice of the pie (in fact, my preference is to be in an anarchist co-op, but I understand that's a wild take and might be terrible in practice). My hope was that we could filter for people that genuinely want to do the work and take on fewer people that were there for the money. At the same time more money is more better. And I like having money. It's complicated.
As I've said many times before, I didn't come to Silicon Valley to get paid. I came here to make computers do cool things alongside other people. I need income to do that, but I try to make sure I'm in a situation where the income isn't something I need to think about all of the time. If you're doing mercenary work that's not possible.
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