"There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs"
This is the exact sentiment when said about some other profession or craft, countless people elsewhere and on HN have noted that it's neither productive not wise to be so precious about a task that evolved as a necessity into the ritualized, reified, pedestal-putting that prevents progress. It conflates process with every single other thing about whatever is being spoken about.
Also: Complaining that a new technology bottlenecked by lack of infrastructure, pushback from people with your mindset, poorly understood in its best use because the people who aren't of your mindset are still figuring out and creating the basic tooling we currently lack?
That is a failure of basic observation. A failure to see the thing you don't like because you don't like and decide not to look. Will you like it if you look? I don't know, sounds like your mind is made up, or you might find good reasons why you should maintain your stance. In the later case, you'd be able to make a solid contribution to the discussion.
I'm firmly in the “don't want to use it; if you want to, feel free, but stop nagging me to” camp.
Oh, and the “I'm not accepting 'the AI did it' as an excuse for failures” camp. Just like outsourcing to other humans: you chose the tool(s), you are responsible for verifying the output.
I got into programming and kicking infrastructure because I'm the sort of sad git who likes the details, and I'm not about to let some automaton steal my fun and turn me into its glorified QA service!
I'd rather go serve tables or stack shelves, heck I've been saying I need a good long sabbatical from tech for a few years now… And before people chime in with “but that would mean dropping back to minimum wage”: if LLMs mean almost everybody can program, then programming will pretty soon be a minimum wage job anyway, and I'll just be choosing how I earn that minimum (and perhaps reclaiming tinkering with tech as the hobby it was when I was far younger).
Now this, putting aside my thoughts above, i find a compelling argument. You just don’t want to. I think that should go along with a reasonable understanding of what a person is choosing to not use, but I’ll presume you have that.
Then? Sure, the frustrating part is to see someone making that choice tell other people that theirs is invalid, especially when we don’t know what the scene will look like when the dust settles.
There’s no reason to think there wouldn’t be room for “pure code” folks. I use the camera comparison— I fully recognize it doesn’t map in all respect to this. But the idea that painters should have given up paint?
There were in fact people at the time who said, “Painting is dead!”. Gustav Flaubert, famous author, said painting was obsolete. Paul Delaroche Actually said it was dead. Idiots. Amazingly talented and accomplished, but short sighted, idiots. Well like be laughing at some amazing and talented people making such statement about code today in the same light.
Code as art? Well, two things: 1) LLM’s have tremendous difficulty parsing very dense syntax, and then addressing the different pieces and branching ideas. Even now. I’m guessing this transfers to code that must be compact, embedded, and optimized to a precision such that sufficient training data, generalizable to the task with all the different architectures of microcontrollers and embedded systems… not yet. My recommendation to coders who want to look for areas where AI will be unsuitable? There’s plenty of room at the bottom. Career has never taken me there, but the most fun I’ve had coding has been homebrew microcontrollers.
2) code as art. Not code to produce art, or not something separable from the code that created it. Think Thing minor things from the past like the obfuscated C challenges. Much of that older hacker ethos is fundamentally an artistic mindset. Art has a business model, some enterprising person aught to crack the code of coding code into a recognized art form where aesthetic is the utility.
I don’t even mean the visual code, but that is viable: Don’t many coders enjoy the visual aesthetic of source code, neatly formatted, colored to perfect contrasts between types etc? I doubt that’s the limit of what could be visually interesting, something that still runs. Small audience for it sure— same with most art.
Doesn’t matter, I doubt that will be something masses of coders turn to, but my point is simply that there are options there are options that involve continuing the “craft” aspects you enjoy, whether my napkin doodle of an idea above holds or not. The option, for many, may simply not include keeping the current trajectory of their career. Things change: not many professional coders that began at 20 in 1990 have been able— or willing— to stay in the narrow area they began in. I knew some as a kid that I still know, some that managed to stay on that same path. He’s a true craftsman at COBOL. When I was a bit older in one of my first jobs he helped me learn my way around a legacy VMS cluster. Such things persist, reduced in proportion to the rest is all. But that is an aspect of what’s happening today.
misrepresents my position a bit. Those were quite separate thoughts.
While I don't want to, I accept that others do, and will, and will be productive doing so.
What I won't accept is an attitude to bugs along the lines of “ah, that was the AI, what can you do?”, which implies either the tool is trusted far too much or people are simply being lazy. This already seems to be creeping in in places, and causes concerns about both security and stability if it is allowed to proliferate.
>there are options there are options that involve continuing the “craft” aspects you enjoy
My endgame is not to be beholden to any given corporations' sense of value (because it is rarely in the engineering), so I don't personally care what happens at large. I'll still enjoy the "craft" on my own and figure out the lines where I need to take a disciplined stance and grind it out myself, where I take on a dependency, or where I leave the work to a black box.
But if time comes for collaboration, then we'll work as a team. AKA we'll decide those lines and likely compromise on values to create something larger than the all of us. I doubt my line will ever be "let's just vibecode everything". But it's likely not going to be "use zero AI" unless I have a very disciplined team at hand and no financial stress between any of us.
>That is a failure of basic observation. A failure to see the thing you don't like because you don't like and decide not to look. Will you like it if you look?
A deca-billion dollar franchise now owned by a trillion dollar tech company... using it to make art that wouldn't pass a junior interview. It's no surprise there's such a strong rejection by the community who's paying attention. Cheaping out on a product a consumer pays $70 + a bunch of microtransactions for clearly shows the company's priorities.
Maybe there are spaces where you find success, but it's very clear that the water is muddying at large. You don't argue against a swamp by saying "but my corner here is clean!".
most people don't care and don't even know, and Activision correctly believed that it won't matter (doesn't matter)
... of course the whole company from Satya down to the idiot whatever art director who asked for this are impervious to shame, so yes, how it could matter? it's not like people bought the last ~10 years of CoD for its artistic value, people bought it because they wanted to switch off their brain and get shot and shouted at by teenagers
>and Activision correctly believed that it won't matter
The titanic had 3 days off warning. It took 3 hours to sink.
It "won't matter" until it does. And then it will collapse all at once. WWE 2K20 shows that even yearly franchises have breaking points where the backlash is too much to ignore.
But i guess Activision executives are thinking thwy will have jumped ship if and when that time hits.
"progress" is doing a lot of work here. Progress in what sense, and for whom? The jury is still out on whether LLMs even increase productivity (which is not the same as progress), and I say this as a user of LLMs.
Man, there is something true in what he is saying though. Can't you see it? I like the idea of some of this technology. I think its cool you can use natural language to create things. I think there is real potential in using these tools in certain context, but the way in which these tools got introduced, no transparency, how its being used to shape thought, the over-reliance on it and how its use to take away our humanity is a real concern.
If this tech was designed in an open way and not put under paywalls and used to develop models that are being used to take away peoples power, maybe I'd think differently. But right now its being promoted by the worst of the worst, and nobody is talking about that.
Responding to and enumerating, in this case, the viewpoint of someone. It's the general process by which discussions take place and progress.
If the thread were about 1) the current problems and approaches AI alignment, 2) the poorly understood mechanisms of hallucination, 3a) the mindset the doesn't see the conflict whey they say "don't anthropomorphize" but runs off to create a pavlovian playground in post-training, 3b) the mindsets that do much the reverse and how both these are dangerous and harmful, 4) the poorly understood trade off of sparse inference optimizations. But it's not, so I hold those in reserve.
This is the exact sentiment when said about some other profession or craft, countless people elsewhere and on HN have noted that it's neither productive not wise to be so precious about a task that evolved as a necessity into the ritualized, reified, pedestal-putting that prevents progress. It conflates process with every single other thing about whatever is being spoken about.
Also: Complaining that a new technology bottlenecked by lack of infrastructure, pushback from people with your mindset, poorly understood in its best use because the people who aren't of your mindset are still figuring out and creating the basic tooling we currently lack?
That is a failure of basic observation. A failure to see the thing you don't like because you don't like and decide not to look. Will you like it if you look? I don't know, sounds like your mind is made up, or you might find good reasons why you should maintain your stance. In the later case, you'd be able to make a solid contribution to the discussion.