I mean it’s cool and all but it’s like making a painting entirely out of tiny dots with your hands tied behind your back. I’m happy for their achievement and it looks cool but it shouldn’t throw any shade on those of us who just like to use a paint brush instead.
Some? I'd be shocked if it's less than 70% of everything AI-related in here.
For example a lot of pro-OpenAI astroturfing really wanted you to know that 5.3 scored better than opus on terminal-bench 2.0 this week, and a lot of Anthropic astroturfing likes to claim that all your issues with it will simply go away as soon as you switch to a $200/month plan (like you can't try Opus in the cheaper one and realise it's definitely not 10x better).
"some", where "some" is scaled to match the overwhelmingly unprecedented amount of money being thrown behind all this. plus all of this is about a literal astroturfing machine, capable of unprecedented scale and ability to hide, which it's extremely clearly being used for at scale elsewhere / by others.
so yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if it was well over most. I don't actually claim that it is over half here, I've run across quite a few of these kinds of people in real life as well. but it wouldn't surprise me.
But (the thinking) goes, with AI in the mix, spinning up a new project or feature will be so low-friction that there will be 10x as many projects created. So our jobs are saved!
It's like learning to cook and regularly making your own meals, then shifting to a "new paradigm" of hiring a personal chef to cook for you. Food's getting made either way, but it's not really the same deal.
No, it's more like moving from line cook, to head chef in charge of 30 cooks.
Food's getting made, but you focus on the truly creative part -- the menu, the concept, the customer experience. You're not boiling pasta or cutting chives for the thousandth time. The same way now you're focusing on architecture and design now instead of writing your 10,000th list comprehension.
Except the cooks don't exist anymore as they all have become head chefs (or changed careers) and the food is being cooked by magical cooking black boxes
Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests?
For me, the act of sitting down and writing the code is what actually leads to true understanding of the logic, in a similar way to how the only way to understand a mathematical proof is to go trough it. Sure, I'm not doing anything useful by showing that the root of 2 is irrational, but by doing that I gain insights that are otherwise impossible to transfer between two minds.
I believe that coding was one of the few things (among, for example, writing math proofs, or that weird process of crafting something with your hands where the object you are building becomes intimately evident) that get our brains to a higher level of abstraction than normal mammal "survival" thinking. And it makes me very sad to see it thrown out of the window in the name of a productivity that may not even be real.
> Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests?
For 99% of the functions I've written in my life? Absolutely drudgery. They're barely algorithms. Just bog-standard data transformation. This is what I love having AI replace.
For the other 1% that actually requires original thought, truly clever optimization, and smart naming to make it literate? Yes, I'll still be doing that by hand, although I'll probably be getting the LLM to help scaffold all the unit tests and check for any subtle bugs or edge cases I may have missed.
The point is, LLMs let me spend more time at the higher level of abstraction that is more productive. It's not taking it away!
I do agree with this, and in fact I do often use LLMs for for these tasks! I guess my message is more intended towards vibe-only coders (and, I guess, the non-technical higher ups drooling at the idea of never having to hire another developer).
I see junior PM types glowing about being able to lead teams of agents, doing their bidding without putting up a fuss or argument. Short term, developers are in for a world of hurt. Long term, we're going to need a lot more to clean this crap up.
Noone will clean it up, it's a societal problem. The koolaid is produce more, like we need another app for X . We are celebrating owning nothing, as a liberating act. People hate mental load yes, this is the perfect drug. You don't need to think or challenge anything. If the model says it's okay, it's okay. Local models will never be able to democratise this. People will do as they are told, and another generation of consumers will follow. The matrix won't be a prison, it will be a prompt from birth to death. And y'all clapping cause you can have X number of agents running around burning tokens like kids looking at the fire cracker on their hand about to blow up, giggling. The world was always mad, and this is proof it will always be mad while people are still around.
I think there is room for a hybrid approach. You can delegate most of the "drudgery" to AI, but keep the parts that require creative solutions for yourself. There is undoubtedly a lot of crappy work we have to do as engineers. This is stuff that needs to be done but has also been done many times before.
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