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With the shoehorning of certain topics into absolutely every conversation on every platform... agree.

Taking away some of the more monotonous and "uncreative" tasks in any job can be taking away some of the variety in the work. Variety is nice. Variety affords us downtime. As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.

And great for beginners, now they get to pay some chatbot company to cover the gaps left by detereorating software design. Lucky they're already using agents... are they?


I have to disagree. You are already many levels away from the actual pixels. This is what software is for. Drawing a line for you personally is dismissive of the rest of the user base. Just because there is a so called agent added to the mix doesn't remove the human. It includes far more humans and enables them to use the tool. This is design if done right. Also you seem to be critiqueing the concept not the implementation.

I don't mean to be harsh, only passionate.


Hard dissagree, it's just the pot boiling to harvest data and render future users helpless without the chatbot. Your stance is anti-human, and the robots and ceos will not appreciate your efforts in giving capital more power over creativity.

I don't sense that you have thought this out in depth. You are cycling talking points even if you don't mean too - that's what I hear.

I have a hard time seeing your way. I build software. Tools for humans to do stuff. Whatever they want. Then it gets complex. There are methods to make it more accessible to more people including so called agents. I want to go to there I want to enable the humans.

I feel you bro that you see human getting squeezed out. I do not see it that way. The human is still the nexus.

CEOs and tech bros and hype are all a distraction and a fog that will dissipate with time. We need to focus on the functionality and utility. We are engineers

You are a valuable person in the conversation and we all need you to participate with eyes wide open. I assume you are young. That's not discounting it is welcoming.

[edit: cleaned stuff up to hopefully make it more direct and non-confrontational]


> Variety affords us downtime

This feels inverted to me: downtime affords us variety. If I have little downtime then I'll strongly prefer known, efficient methods of doing something, rather than experimenting with new ones.

> As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.

This I agree with, though.


> Taking away some of the more monotonous and "uncreative" tasks in any job can be taking away some of the variety in the work. Variety is nice.

Ultimately, and this applies to so much of life, "to each, their own," right?


This concept of, say, "productive downtime" was the topic of an article I encountered/skimmed not long ago: "There are no easy calls anymore" https://www.customerexperiencedive.com/news/agents-are-overl...

Editing to add my own salient tl;dr: shifting the "easy" tasks onto AI agents leaves the human ones to shoulder the cognitively demanding loads, resulting in burnout.

There are nuances, of course, but if you imagine that while once a human might have been responsible to move 500lbs a day, broken up into primarily small loads, now a robot is moving anything under, say, 20lbs and the human is left to only carry the heavier loads across the same time period so is now hefting 50 or 100lbs at a time and required to do across the same day, so now they're moving 1,500lbs a day.


I've been thinking a lot about this across many different mediums, not just filmmaking, and I think it's one worth digging deeper on.*

What is lost when losing the (understandably annoying) process of the grind? By letting LLMs do the busy work, do you lose the opportunity to stumble into randomness? Do you lose the understanding of what is possible/interesting with the medium?

And do you end up in this derivative future where decisions are made by a system that was trained on all the previous uses of it?

Obviously that's fairly hyperbolic, but I have absolutely felt the pull of it all. When it decides to take a couple extra steps I didn't ask for creatively and I think "eh, that's fine."

*EDIT: I wrote this and looked back and this SOUNDS like an LLM wrote it. See what I mean??????


> Taking away some of the more monotonous and "uncreative" tasks in any job can be taking away some of the variety in the work.

Thank. God.

I never want to rotoscope again.

And frankly I'm not fond of editing either.


Not proprietary.

The pogo connector isn't proprietary.

Good to know. Still wish it wasn't another connector, though.

It isn't proprietary.

Standard or not, it's not the standard.

I'd really rather they did talk and behave more like classic sci-fi said they would. Far less engaging and fluffy with nonsense.

Have you tried asking it to respond to you like Data from star trek, or something?

I tried MUTHR from Alien, but had to keep toning it down because it took it too far, and eventually disabled it (in favour of caveman mode) because it didn't seem to be able to function properly talking like that.

I'd like it if the voice synthesis mode was (licensed!) Majel Barrett's TNG-era computer voice.

This is plainly wrong considering many people's complaints about the ridiculous amount of noise these things spew out. The whiring of gas turbines and cooling systems of complete, fully operational, data centres has nothing to do with construction.


Again, this isn't unknowable, you can literally just pull up next to CHI1 and open your window and listen. You won't hear anything.


Rust requires discipline too. I can go around using Arc, Rc and .clone() everywhere without upsetting the borrow checker, I can use let mut a bunch and pretend if, match, etc. aren't expressions. This results in worse code, and Rust didn't stop me.

The borrow checker prevents a set of errors from being possible, but it doesn't prevent bad code from being written.


It would be easier for you to argument that the user is expected to have discipline to NOT use "unsafe" keyword in all functions.

Because a lot of mechanisms actually still have guards in runtime. And using .clone() on Rc/Arc is actually the idiomatic/preferred way of evading the borrow checker if we can't design the data structure in a different way.

It's a big difference between cases when you need to spend brain energy to find ways to "out-smart" the compiler, and spend brain energy to "fit into the proper set of assumptions" of a programming language.


Where I am from it is common to use "20 to" and "20 past" too.


You speak as though everyone on HN has the same attitude towards these things, but that's just not true.

There were naysayers then and there are naysayers now.


Of course, but I can see general trends.


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