Discussion
I quit. The clankers won.
cl0ckt0wer: I have a lot of fun and profit using AI. But the way they force it everywhere is counterproductive.Maybe if they made it more exclusive? I wonder if they've considered making a Gucci branded AI?
cl0ckt0wer: Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging.
pitched: I really like the sentiment and will quote this in the future! My own thoughts line up a bit closer to the article though, with this quote being a good summary of it:> The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates.
erelong: "You can just blog things"
bitmasher9: Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading.More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.
btreecat: "No AI" right above a robot voice playback button.Mixed messages frHot take, folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AI, and wouldn't be difference makers after it either.I agree with the author, keep writing. It helps hone your ability to communicate effectively which we all need for some time to come (at least until we become batteries).
wiseowise: This. And you can mog others with your toned body too.
gkoenig: Man I love the design of your site, and that goldfish made my day.For the article it was nice, but the font is really what got me.
bjourne: Fucking hilarius domain name . David is unfortunately not announcing a rewrite of the Linux IPC stack!
bicx: When they invented cars (and cars became popular and affordable), people did stop walking everywhere. Jogging wasn’t popularized until the 1970s, when we all realized we needed to be intentional with fitness in our car-based society.
poopwagon: This writing style sucks.“Here is a sentence. Here is another sentence. Here is another sentence.”I’ll take AI
cyanydeez: I'm pretty sure all this AI is built on top of Silicon valley's technobabble of "permanent underclass" which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology.But besides that, it's interesting so many people are willing to tailor their entire workflow and product to indeterminate machines and business culture.I recommend everyone stop using these infernal cloud devices and start with a nice local model that doesn't instantly give you everything, but is quite capabable of removing a select amount of drudgery that is rather relaxing. And as soon as you get too lazy to do enough specifying or real coding, it fucks up your dev environment and you slap yuorself a hundred times wondering why you ever trusted someone else to properly build your artifaces.There's definitely some philosophy being edged into our spaces that need to be combatted.
farfatched: > The AI industry is 99% hype; a billion dollar industrial complex to put a price tag on creation. At this point if you believe AI is ‘just a tool’ you’re wilfully ignoring the harm.> (Regardless, why do I keep being told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I decide not to buy something?)> The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates.This sort of reasoning is why you might have been called extreme.It's less extreme to say "many people see and/or get lots of benefit, but it's wrong to use the tool due to the harms it has".There's nothing wrong with extreme, but since you asked.
Spacecosmonaut: "Generative AI is art. It’s irredeemably shit art; end of conversation."I think most people cannot destinguish between "genuine" creativity and an artificial almalgamation of training data and human provided context. For one, I do not know what already exsists. Some work created by AI may be an obvious rip off of the style of a particular artist, but I wouldnt know. To me it might look awesome and fresh.I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.
pitched: > folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AIAnecdotal but I’ve been seeing a lot of the opposite. Some of those leaning in strongly are being propped up by the tools. Holding onto them like a lifeboat when they would have fallen off earlier.
keybored: What does a synthesized audio playback button have to do with AI as commonly and hotly discussed?
ramon156: I can confidently say that, yes, reading helps a lot. My mental model has shifted a bit that words are cheap (printing -> writing -> typing -> generating) and that we should accept there is something like high quality text.I haven't really been a reader, but I can definitely notice when a book/text is "hard". I'm currently reading the old testament, and I understand very little (even the oxford one that has a lot of annotations is hard for me). I like this, because its a measurement of what I don't know (if that makes sense).
xnorswap: Yes, declaring AI to be 99% hype just turns away people like me from what the author has to say.I was an AI sceptic for a long time until toward the end of last year when I seriously evaluated them, and came to realise it could add tremendous value.When someone comes along and declares that it's all hype, it goes against my experience that it's getting things done.I can also see the harm it does, and I hope the tooling improves to reduce that harm. For example, there's a significant lack of caching in the tooling. It's constantly re-reading the same files every day, and more harmfully, constantly fetching the same help pages and blog-posts from the web.If it had a generous built in HTTP cache, and instruction to maximise use of the cache, then it could avoid a lot of re-fetching of content, which would help reduce the harms.Declaring my experience to be invalid and based on nothing but hype doesn't engage people like me at all.And it's the people like me, the middle-of-the-road developer working on enterprise software, that either need convincing to not use the tools, or for our habits to change to minimise the harm.Because otherwise we're quietly getting on with using it, potentially destroying forests and lakes as we do.
flir: I'm pretty sure the -as-a-service stage is only temporary.The local models are only going to get better, and the improvement curve has to top out eventually. Maybe the cloud models will still give you a few extra percentage points of performance, but the local models will have a lot of advantages too.
jordanb: > Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging.They literally made it a crime to walk down the street.
bombcar: across the street, no?It's also a crime to jog on the railroad tracks.
guzfip: > which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology.You’ve let them in and given them power in many aspects of your life without even a whimper of resistance. Of course you’ll accept them as your lords.
simgt: They did make it very hard for people to do anything else but use a car in many, many places though...
projektfu: It's not just one sentence after another. It's a completely new paradigm of paragraph creation./s
dare944: "Let them write blogs!"
chii: most people are just utilitarian and do not care for "art" (in the high art sense).AI is perfect for that. It reveal, perhaps to the dismay of those who revel in high art, that it might be an illusion that art has genuine creativity, if most people find ai to produce acceptable output.
nslsm: David Bushell, your writing was boring before AI. The bar can't be lowered any further.
Waterluvian: Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably a smart one.Adoption of AI at a FOMO corporate pace doesn't seem to include this consideration. They largely want your skills to atrophy as you instead beep boop the AI machine to do the job (arguably) faster. I think they're wrong and silly and any time they try to justify it, the words don't reconcile into a rational series of statements. But they're the boss and they can do the thing if they want to. At work I either do what they want in exchange for money or I say no thank you and walk away.Which led me to the conclusion I'm currently at: I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact taht I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years. I can still code at home.
none2585: Further I'd argue we KNOW people don't care if you look at the music industry.Pop music is often composed by dozens of people who specialize in a thin sliver of the track - lyrics, vocals, drums, &c. - and then it's given a pretty face and makes the charts. That's really no different than something like Suno.I think AI is forcing people who thought that THEIR thing was too nuanced or too complex to be replaced by technology to reckon with what makes them special.
EdgeNRoots: I agree on the over-reliance part, but I don’t think it’s AI itself .It’s how people choose to use it.Most people are outsourcing thinking instead of using it to go deeper. The tools aren’t the problem, the default behavior is.
mday-edamame: True, but the tools make the default behavior so tempting.I have a friend who uses Google Maps to find places, then memorizes the route there and closes the app to navigate because he wants to build a better mental map of our city. Meanwhile, I just check the app every five seconds like a dummy, and my hippocampus stays small.
keybored: Do you want a Stairmaster with that elevator? Life is for living, ostensibly. This Inevitabilism drone choir[1] may be correct that it will take my current job and after that maybe there will nothing fruitful in that department left. But I can’t imagine a life situation where I’m both surviving and using thinking-with-my-brain as some retirement home pastime + “brainrot”-preventer.> Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.Here’s how the rat race looks in the age of AI and how you can stay ahead.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487774
beeflet: If it's a crime to jog on railroad tracks, and the avalibility of rail makes it so that everything you need is only accessible by rail, I conclude that rail prevents you from jogging.
ceplabs: This might be the coolest personal website theme I've ever seen.
bombcar: You have to write for yourself. People have said this for years, decades, millennia even - but nobody really believes that writing to an audience of zero (or one, if Mom is still around) is worth it.Everyone wants to be a famous author, or at least a published/somewhat acknowledged one; few are willing to write their novel and be satisfied with zero or near-zero sales/readings.But that is exactly what you need to do, especially in the age of AI. Everyone who was "in it to win it" (think linkedinslop which existed before AI) is going to certainly use AI - because they do not give a shit about the quality of themselves - they just want the result.And you can only become a writer (unpublished, unread, or no) by doing the writing - it takes time (10,000 hours?) that cannot be replaced by AI, just like you can't have the body of a marathon runner without running (yes, yes, the joke). You may be able to get 26 miles and change away, even very fast, but unless you personally do the running of that distance without cheating, you will not get the inherent benefits.And if you instruct an AI, or another human even, to write for you, you may get some of the results you want, but you won't have changed to become a writer.We shouldn't celebrate the successful blogs; they're already rewarded enough. It's celebrating the unsuccessful blogs that is needed - even if, frankly, the vast majority of them are sub-AI levels of crap it is still a human changing and progressing behind them.Babies fall over a lot but unless you take them out of the stroller and let them do so, they'll never progress to crawling, walking, running.
zzzeek: rants about AI from people who have already decided up front to never actually attempt to use the tools (which seems to be the case here from the post and the other one it links) are not really providing any value to the discourse.There is nothing new about using machinery to automate boring / repetitive tasks, including the wall of resistance that comes up. But it should be clear that genuinely useful tooling and automation tends to become a normal part of life, from the plow, to the printing press, to the dishwasher, to digital video editing, to autocorrect, and now to large language models.There's a lot that has to be worked out with LLMs in particular as they are now encroaching heavily upon human creativity and thought. This is an extremely important topic. But rants like these with terms like "the plagarism machine" and "the solution is that we all must vow to never use AI in any shape or form" (really? does the hosting provider for your blog not use any AI? oops?) are not really contributing.
titzer: The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on.There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is built on. But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us.God I hope it doesn't all crash at once.
simonw: > Improving developer skills is not valuable to your companyEvery company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.
Waterluvian: That’s been my experience, too. But now I get a sort of, “I dunno. Maybe don’t use AI on Fridays?”There doesn’t seem to be a plan for maintaining that culture.
rtpg: Old web stuff is still around. RSS feeds are out there. Some parts of masto are generally chill and filled with people having interesting convos.You don't have to give up on everything to participate, but it can be a space to go to if you're tired of every social interaction being mediated by (I'm being glib) hustlers
jpfromlondon: hoped for something useful in your link, found drivel.
01284a7e: Yeah. You. One person. The opposite is true in my case.
CoastalCoder: For the first time in quite a while, I've started reading a challenging, non-computer book ("The New Testament in its World").I'm trying to decide if my attention span has atrophied, or if I'm just more aware now of my ADD.Either way, I'm hopeful that my attention span for this kind of reading will grow with practice.
AnimalMuppet: I too have noticed my attention span having atrophied. It was pre-AI, at least for me. Post-internet, though.
rkomorn: I think browser tabs and screen (the terminal multiplexer) did it for me.
Lerc: Blog posts are an interesting case, they are a very good example of something where abundance of supply outstrips any demand so much that it cannot be realistic to expect a median level contribution to receive any significant attention.Setting aside the self delusion that makes a considerable number to erroneously rate themselves above average, the reason you create blog posts should not be for the attention you might gain, there simply are not the eyeballs. You create as a form of self expression, to organise your thoughts, to create a record of them.AI can never challenge in those areas because it is, as it has always been, the act of creation is the goal.
tonyedgecombe: [delayed]
Thanemate: Funnily enough I saw this post as I was placing my HN account on hiatus, because I'm tired pretending that the quality of discourse is on par with what I've been used to read and participate in.We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone who cares how readable and easy to extend the code is.I can only assume this is done on hopeful purpose, with the hope that the LLM's will "only keep improving linearly" to the point where readability and extendability is not my problem by it's "tomorrow's LLM" problem.
kstenerud: > The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms.Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere.You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfangled automobiles.
mmustapic: No, the free software movement wants that the source code of the software you use be available to you to modify it if you wish. AI does not necessarily do that.
kstenerud: AI makes the entirety of the software engineering profession available to you. All you have to do is ask the right way, and you can build in days what once took months or years.Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied.Closed source is no longer the moat it was, and so keeping the source code to yourself is only going to hurt you as people pass you over for companies who realize this, and strive to make it easier for your LLM to figure their systems out.
lmm: > Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?Available to all yes. Not available to the giant corpos while the lone hobbyist still fears getting sued to oblivion. In fact that's pretty much the opposite of what the free software movement wanted.Also the other thing the free software movement wanted was to be able to fix bugs in the code they had to use, which AI is pulling us further and further away from.
stingraycharles: > Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company.Yet every company does it, except the worst sweatshops.
kasey_junk: It’s worse than that, in the linked “I’ve done my research” they make the tired claim that ai hallucinates api calls. Which while true has not been a practical problem since tool calling was added.I think the position that ai is morally troubling enough that the downsides out way the positives is perfectly defensible. But the entire argument becomes a joke when you can’t accurately catalog the positives.
thepasch: At this point, I’m pretty sure saying “I’ve done my research” is more of an indicator that someone hasn’t done their research but would like to be taken seriously anyway by pretending they did. The kind of person who’s both smart enough to realize that an issue might be more nuanced than they present it, as well as intellectually dishonest enough to… not care.
chaps: It's funny -- when LLMs do this, it's usually a sign that their confidence is also misplaced.
Arkhaine_kupo: > Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied.Jesus christ."The people who wanted everyone to have a home should be happy with the invention of the lockpick. You can just find a nice house and open the lock and move in. Ignore the lockpick company charging essentially whatver they want for lockpicks or how they got accesss to everyones keyfob, or the danger of someone breaking into your house"That is basically your argument. Like AI is a copyright theft machine, with companies owning the entire stack and being able to take away at will, and comitting crimes like decompiling source code instead of clean room is not a selling point either...The open source community wants people to upskill, people become tech literate, free solutions that grow organically out of people who care, features the community needs and wants and people having the freedom to modify that code to solve their own circumstances.
Supermancho: > That is basically your argument. Like AI is a copyright theft machine, with companies owning the entire stack and being able to take away at will, and comitting crimes like decompiling source code instead of clean room is not a selling point either...Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument. It's not an argument anymore. It's already happened.How one might choose to characterize the reality, is irrelevant. A vast (and growing) amount of source code is more open, for better or worse. Granted, this is to the chagrin of subgroups that had been pushing different strategies.
qsera: Your friend use google maps, while google maps uses you.
DiscourseFan: There are many things the AI can't do.
hnthrow0287345: >But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us.That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. People will tinker with those things as hobbies and they'll broadcast that out too. Worst case we hobble along until we get better at it. And if we have to hobble along and it's important, someone's going to be paying well for learning all of that stuff from zero, so the motivation will be there.Why do people worry about a potential, temporary loss of skill?
FpUser: >"That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. "Yes we can but there is a big problem here. We will "learn it again" after something breaks. And the way the world currently functions there might not be a time to react. It is like growing food on industrial scale. We have slowly learned it over the time. If it breaks now with the knowledge gone and we have to learn it again it will end the civilization as we know it.
tuvang: There is a deadly game of chicken going on. Junior recruiting already stopped for the most part. Only way this doesn’t end in a catastrophe is if AI becomes genuinely as good as the most skilled developers before we run out of them. Which I doubt very much but don’t find completely impossible.
theshrike79: [delayed]
esafak: People have been having this debate with popular art forever. Some people do not even believe in taste, and that everyone's artistic opinions have equal merit.
Waterluvian: I imagine it being a "does anybody know COBOL?!" but much sooner than sixty years rom now.
inanutshellus: Ok but if you're a person that likes HN discourse but thinks "eternal september" has happened ... what's your plan?You'll still come here, read the comments, see something engaging and want to reply and... feel sad because shakes fist at [datacenter] clouds it's all just bots talking to each other anyway.Seems lame. Keep talking anyway.
Supermancho: I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.
ndriscoll: What exactly do you have in mind? The large companies I've worked at had book subscriptions, internal training courses, and would pay school. Personally I don't see the point of any of it (well, school might be fun if I did physics or something, but I don't know that that would get approved). For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. You can go download e.g. graduate level CS courses on youtube. IME no one's going to stop you from spending a couple hours a week of work time watching lectures. I also don't really see how attending conferences relates to skill improvement. Meanwhile, I've been explicitly told by managers that spending half my time mentoring people sounds reasonable.
tasuki: > I've worked for 35ish companiesIt seems they were correct not to invest in your skills.I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!
alfanick: I quit. The clankers won.I don't see any proof that software development is not dead. Software engineering is not, and it's much more than writing code, and it can be fun. But writing code is dead, there is no point of doing it if an LLM can output the same code 100x faster. Of course, architecture and operations stays in our hands (for now?).Initially I was very sceptic, first versions of ChatGPT or Claude were rather bad. I kept holding to a thought that it cannot get good. Then I've spend a few months evaluating them, if you know how to code, there is no point of coding anymore, just instruct an LLM to do something, verify, merge, repeat. It's an editor of some sorts, an editor when you enter a thought and get code as an output. Changes the whole scene.
draxil: Useful tool, and if you're just scratching a small itch it's great.For any serious system you still need to understand and guide the code, and unless you do some of the coding.. You won't. It's just novelty right now is skewing our reasoning.
deadbabe: I’ve decided the only way I’ll adopt a full automated agentic AI workflow the way companies want, is if I am allowed to hold multiple jobs at multiple companies.Imagine having 6 software engineering jobs, each paying maybe $150k a year, all being done by agents.Hell, I might even do this secretly without their consent. If I can hold just 10 jobs for about 3 or 4 years, I can retire and leave the industry before it all comes crumbling down in 2030.The problem of course, is securing that many jobs. But maybe agents can help with applying for jobs.
pfisherman: This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents?I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won” and using them effectively required development and acquisition of some new domain knowledge and best practices. And the kids are ok. The people who scoffed at neural nets and never got up to speed not so much.Edit: as an aside, I have learned plenty from reviewing LLM generated implementations.
draxil: This is a good parallel. In the 90s when I learned to drive I was quite good at navigating. Now google maps is on a screen in my car telling me where to go whenever I drive beyond my most common routes.Really all the research telling us about AI skills atrophy.. We should have guessed from previous experience.
guzfip: Old people my entire life have made fun of younger people for “not being able to read maps” or something.But I’ve never seen anyone follow a GPS so religiously into so many obvious dead ends than elderly Uber drivers.
flir: Or if code quality stops mattering, in a kind of "ok, the old codebase is irretrievably sphagettified. Lets have the chatbot extract all the requirements from it, and build a clean room implementation" kind of way. It's also not impossible we go that route.
qsera: > I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending.Frankly I don't think so. The AI using LLMs is the perpetual motion mechanism scam of our time. But it is cloaked in unimaginable complexity, and thus it is the perfect scam. But even the most elaborately hidden power source in a perpetual motion machine cannot fool nature and should come to a complete stop as it runs out.
colechristensen: This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself. I am still necessary 1% of the time for debug, design, and direction and those of not at all a shallow skill. I have some graduate algebra texts on the way my math friend is guiding me through because I have found a publishable result and need to shore up my background before writing the paper...It's not perpetual motion, it's very real capability, you just have to be able to learn how to use it.
askafriend: You can see their ego trying to protect itself.
catlifeonmars: [delayed]
mmustapic: But I can't have the weights of the LLM model I'm using for this.
bdangubic: This percentage is probably right on the money!
doctorwho42: Because they may have studied history... There are countless examples of eras of lost technology due to a stumble in society. Where those societies were never able to recover the lost "secrets" of the past. Ultimately, yes, humans can rediscover/reinvent how to do things we know are possible. But it is a very real and understandable concern that we could build a society that slowly crumbles without the ability to relearn the way to maintain the systems it relies upon, fast enough to stop it from continued degradation.Like, yeah, you have the resources right now to boot strap your knowledge of most coding languages. But that is predicated on so many previous skills learn through out your life, adulthood and childhood. Many of which we take for granted. And ultimately AI/LLM's aren't just affecting developers, they are infecting all strata of education. So it is quite possible that we build a society that is entirely dependent on these LLM's to function, because we have offloaded the knowledge from societies collective mind... And getting it back is not as simple as sitting down with a book.
