There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it That unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all
Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.
> Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence?
of the post you responded to?
Mechanical replacement cannot be compared with thought replacement anyway, but the most thoughtless pro-AI comment tends to be at the top.
Think about it: everyone has characterized AI slop, as slop. Which means that we negatively value it in terms of originality. Combine that with the fact that there will be a lot of it, this means that original work will 1. stand out or be very distinct from slop, and 2. have its value amplified as a result of this polarization.
basically, we value originality more AND are able to identify it more readily. these two facts are synergistic
related is also the fact that originality will literally be valuable as training data for future models
For example, I want to make:
- A mini OS on top of SeL4
- A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust.
- My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends
- A local first data store, built on top of CRDTs
- My own programming language
And lots more.
Each of these projects on their own would take months of time. If LLMs can speed up development, that's great! I don't care if nobody else uses what I make. I want a personal computer full of my own software.
There are a ton of opportunities available right now to make new things. And make them better, more customizable, and more sovereign.
To the replies: be the change you want to see in the world, guys. That may be trite but focusing only on the negative will just make your own life shitty.
For example, the photo backup system I want to make will let me manage my ~400gb photo library. I want my library backed up on a couple devices, running linux and freebsd. I want my mac and iphone to have a local mirror of all the favorited photos, and when I'm at home, I want to be able to browse all photos from those devices by streaming them over the local network. I want native macos & ios app interfaces to view and manage all that.
I don't know any existing software that meets my requirements. I don't think any such software exists. Apple, Dropbox and Google will solve this problem for me if I store all my photos in their cloud and pay them an ongoing subscription for the privilege. I'd much rather make something myself, and back up my photos on my own hard drives.
Making something like this is simple enough, but very time consuming. If claude can take the drudgery out of it, well, I think that's just delightful.
AI is seen as a way out of drudgery but you're just trading one problem for another.
You can accomplish most of that by installing Syncthing.
But the objection is that you’re not really building anything new even if you think it’s a new idea. By your definition you’re building for yourself and not sharing…so what good are your little projects. Reading your original list it just seems like you want to build and run software without having to do any research, even if a solution already exists.
Is it not engineering anymore even if you micromanage and relegate the machine to a better typist, following patterns and doing research around?
How? It's undermining what the human intellicence is made from, learning.
No it isn't. I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.
If you also outsource thinking to it, that's your choice though. Or the company's choice. But ultimately the free market will deiced with products made using LLMs outcompete those made without.
I've said this elsewhere before but I single-handedly produced more actual tangible business value with Microsoft Access than anything else since. What was an hour's work is now a procurement process and thousands of lines of tedious configuration and boilerplate that involves pipelines and tens of services all coordinated and hosted by someone who has created a moat to extract money out of me.
All I want is a fucking report.
The LLM makes us blind to the gigantic fucking shit show we built.
AI is automated irresponsibility, and it is nothing like any earlier transition.
When a technology trend means people literally won’t be able to tell if you are living or dead, and also stop caring about the difference— that’s unprecedented in the history of humans.
How can people say false things like this with a straight face?
Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to death, cars, planes, MRI machines, helicopter ambulances, vaccines, personal heating and air conditioning, OZEMPIC, etc
Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Meanwhile the cool homeless guy outside my building has 3 hot meals a day and a daily shower in the homeless shelter nearby, warm clean sleeping bag for winter, shades for summer, a bicycle for moving around town, a smartphone which he uses to watch youtube all day in his sleeping bag, plus access to medical care that kings of kings never had. All this with no job, and no care in the world.
You can thank people dying in Chinese and African mines to extract the resources to build your planes and MRI machines.
You can thank the people working tirelessly until their hands are crippled in bengladesh to make the cheap clothes that make it seem to your western eyes that a poor person here can live a life of luxury. Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rana_Plaza_collapse
hit them and kills a thousand under your total westoid apathy.
You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet. They have suicide prevention nets so that their precious slave labor doesn't die from jumping from their buildings. How amazing.
>the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Indeed, the wealth that kings couldn't dream of hundreds of years ago, because kings back then didn't have the power a billionaire can wield today to pollute, enslave and ruin millions of lives at a scale that makes things like the Napoleon wars look like a footnote to history.
>All this with no job, and no care in the world.
This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people. You are blind to the reality of the humans you are exploiting.
Have you ever been without a job and/or homeless to say shit like this?
Also, how nice of you to ignore my entire argument on how the poor today are NOT as poor as they were hundreds of years ago, and instead sidetrack the conversation one offtopic tangent for a cheap jab in the name of scoring some emotional virtue signaling brownie points.
Machinists and lathe operators became CNC operators, they didn't lose their jobs, just that instead of turning the inputs by hand, they punch numbers in a machine, but the advent of CNC didn't mean anyone off the street can now punch numbers in the machine and replace the machinists since you still need the years of training and experience.
SW devs will be the new CNC operators, about knowing what data to input and how to wrangle the slop machine to get the desired output faster and better than your competition.
For now. Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?
If you're a programmer, your skills have been devalued significantly in the last 12 months. What makes you think the remaining value you offer will be required 12 months from now?
However, missing the joy of the old-school way of growing as a developer is not only the wrong reason, but also very dangerous according to Darwin.
Our customers don't care about how it is made after all, but they do care about long-term support, costs, and predictability, etc.
But I'm not sure whether we can say we made a real net positive progress in the industry. The whole thing is a big mess. In many cases, AI moves us in the same direction in turbo mode, making it not only messier and more expensive but also dangerous.
I tell them, "Leave me alone", as I see this mess as an opportunity if you think the right way, starting from the first principles.
For me, building software has often been a solitary process in which I was far more obsessed with it than those around me. I'm not in a tech-heavy area and I don't have a ton of well-informed people to talk to about programming, software engineering, or AI. I have had experiences like the author in which I needed to learn a new technology or a new language but ended up doing so on my own at home, not with the assistance of a much more knowledgeable developer with significantly more experience.
To me LLMs have left us in a situation where the following things are true and moving forward lies somewhere in figuring out how to reconcile / resolve these things:
- You can use LLMs and learn things or not learn things; this is a result of the approach, desire, and willpower of the user.
- There is a level of skill associated with using LLMs much like nearly everything else in existence. The user's skill level impacts their perception of the technology and also affects the way those around them view the technology. Unskilled users will generate more negative sentiment.
- Some people love to do the things the machine is good at and do not want the machine to do them, while others hate to do the things the machine is good at and want the machine to do them. I realized at some point this year that I don't love programming anywhere near as much as I love building and designing systems and solving problems.
- Software development is many things wrapped up in one and talking about it as a single thing makes it more confusing. Some people like to think through the logic of the application and have an LLM write the code while others want the LLM to think up the solution, implement it, and test it. These are two very different people with likely different goals and different desires.
- When someone else looks at Claude or ChatGPT they might see something completely different than what you see.
I hope some of this resonates with others.
What I mean is that the thrilling buddy system coding starts to happen less frequently over a career, and the time for deep exploring and side projects is organically maximized early and during school.
While LLMs have forced that divide to be more stark, the human connection and sense of wonder has always required maintenance, and it's best to get into the habit of maintaining it before your 36th JIRA triage meeting in a week completely destroyed your love of the industry.
Well before LLMs I went through exactly what TFA describes when I had to adapt from grad school labs to industrial labs, then to project management or task leadership (even just filling in for my boss), and each new job has required me to say goodbye to great friends and colleagues and make new ones.
Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft, we all could probably write this post for our own reasons.
This is not some kind of universal truth. I can see how being stuck in an unfulfilling job could lead you to say this. But for the last 20+ years I love the craft of writing efficient, dependable, understandable code more with every new insight from every experience.
But this post (and the many I see like it) feels like giving up. And now's not the time for empathetic people to give up.
Technology is how we expand human capability. We are well within our rights to pick and choose how we interact with that capability. But it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out. Billionaires are doing a remarkable job at making their vision of the future seem inevitable. Don't fall for it.
If more people aren't willing to help us steer this capability towards a better future, then we all know how this ends.
I have a spreadsheet now of people I can't be fucked with.
It also is a great example of why AI has such a PR problem among normal people.
I’m forever getting asked for help by people who suddenly value the human experience when their machine god fails them.
Sometimes fuck ‘em because they devalued me first.
Conflating a preference for manual creation with opposition to the existence of a tool should be the single biggest signal flare that they are someone who will not argue with you in good faith. They're the ones who barnstorm every single one of these posts to denigrate the author rather than even attempt to empathize with their plight or evaluate the validity of their arguments. Surely the current cohort of HN commenters have seen this repeatedly in just the past five years as technical circles have jumped from cryptocurrency to blockchain to NFTs to LLMs to GenAI; every single one is a "must have", every single one something we "must learn or be left behind forever", and every single one refused to be evaluated on its merits in favor of simply embracing something new for its novelty.
I have given up debating with these people, because they do not wish for debate, they wish for dominance. I have better things to do with my time - as do you, as do all of us - than to give a moment of consideration to a viewpoint that relies on pithy quotes out of context and a reductionist narrative of history to justify their own superiority over others, in lieu of nuanced discourse.
Remember that it is not the obligation of the status quo to defend itself, rather the obligation belongs to those advocating changes to justify and defend their position and its benefits. In that regard, the pro-AI camp continues to come up hollow and empty.
I’ll be the devil’s advocate and suggest that it might not be AI usage, but the technology attracting vilest scum of the Earth. It’s just they were staying mostly silent before, or wasted someone else’s time in different circles.
Per the human element, the author is in part relaying about formative experiences from youth that you won't easily repeat, and also experiences that simply are not decoupled from the work as it still exists, unless you are entirely remote which has nothing to do with AI.
All of which to say, this is a bit dramatic and overstated. The emotional element behind it is valid, but the diagnosis is off the mark. I think the human element, should it be jeopardized, is in part through the complacent convenience of remote work and disinterest in community participation. But, communities still exist, and tech communities historically were always niche. As it stands they're probably bigger now than they ever were, LLMs or not.
Yeah yeah back to Reddit
For real though: you can keep doing artisanal hand-written code as a hobby. Just like you can still write a web server in assembly if you really want to. But that’s just not how professional software development is done anymore. Just a new tool, I don’t think it’s as deep as the author is making it out to be.
how about some true synergy instead of boring zero-sum people? smh. the true poetry here is that zero-sum thinking will become more of a thing of the past so there is some natural comedy with this title
Almost no one I know wants agent usage to be a zero-sum activity. There are a few oddballs who obviously only got into software for the money, so any means to that end is acceptable. That does not stop those with say-so over things like employment (and, if you're in the USA, the associated healthcare), from treating it as a zero-sum activity.
When engineers are being told to maximize token usage, are constantly being brought into meetings where they're expected to reveal their latest and greatest use of LLMs, and not using enough tokens in your role is seen as a negative, then the pressure starts to creep in. Yes, I know this is silly to most people who read this site, and I agree. It's bonkers. But there is certainly something to the idea of "AI psychosis" in upper management that is making agent use zero-sum company-wide.
That shit with upper management sounds stupid af and I've heard the same type of shit from people I know who are in other fields. I'm guessing it's happening from a combination of ignorance, FOMO, investment, etc etc. But that is more of a systemic issue than anything to do with these tools imo.
My biggest problem as an independent contractor is marketing and notoriety. Security has been a race to the bottom for over a decade now, but it's gotten exponentially worse. LLMs can't just do my job, but there are enough people with checkbooks who believe that it can and enough companies out there with an incentive to confirm that belief that it's getting harder for me to find work organically.
If that's indeed the case, then it sounds like an opportunity to get ahead of them since you know they will trip and fall at some point.
That's what I make of what you're describing, while sleep deprived and having given it some light thought LOL. So take that with a lot of salt. But it's kind of what I've been thinking these days anyways. Add to that that entrepreneurship is most likely getting empowered, and I think investing in yourself is the move these days. It will probably characterize the coming years strongly.
The 2008 housing crisis affected everyone. Bubbles that get too big pop across the population, whether they're complicit or not. As a little guy in a big world, with no expertise to truly know if there's a meaningful difference, I have a bit of anxiety about it all. I just don't want to catch collateral.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591796
More specifically to the submission, I’ll say I agree with the author. This “being left behind” fear mongering is an exhausting uncritical talking point. Life isn’t about rushing through the end and killing yourself to be “productive”. “Being left behind” is only bad if what’s “ahead” is an improvement to your situation, and that’s not a given. Humans aren’t built to be pushed to 11 without rest. Stopping to smell the roses is good. Immediatelly thinking “how can I kill these to package the smell to sell to others at a profit” is not.
Another grief-post with people unable to cope with the fact that the whole structure of learning and work is going to change so they resort to pseudo nostalgia and romanticism. Not to mention that "They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics" is basically incorrect and belongs in 2024.
Even by trying to reassure (the reader? Himself?) that LLMs are just a tool for humans, he asserts in the final paragraph that software is no longer made by humans. Something something linotype operators.
Main character syndrome. AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.
Then why are the extroverts trying to replace engineers with AI?
Do you even know what that means or you just saw a phrase online and like how it sounds? There’s nothing about main character here, the author doesn’t even advocate for anything.
> AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.
Get help, even if it is from the AI, seriously.